A quiet blank room where students are sitting still, doing absolutely nothing except homework or reading. They are completely and utterly bored out of their minds. That is what is expected during detention.

Depending on what one does, one may also find him or herself cleaning the halls or helping out a teacher.

Nonetheless, there is still a rising question. Does detention work? What about suspension? Or expulsion? These are questions that have remained at Milford High School for many years.

“Detention absolutely doesn’t work,” Senior Kurtis McElroy noted. “Detention doesn’t teach anything and doesn’t stop students from doing it again. Suspension is just a vacation from school; the only thing that works is expulsion.”

Senior Connor Heflin agreed with him saying, “I don’t think it works, because you never hear students say, I got detention, I’m never doing that again. And it’s the same kids that come back again, and again.”

Junior Ben Robbins agreed stating, “the real punishment is for the student to have to deal with their teachers, not just sit down quietly or get a break from seeing them during the day.”

However, the administration has to look at this differently.

“The rest of administration and I have to look at the school as a bigger picture,” Assistant principal Eric Dziobak stated.

“We can’t look at the individual student. We have to look at their act of misbehaving these ways: How is it impacting the student, and how is it impacting everyone else around them, as well as how would I feel as a parent if my child’s education was being disrupted by another student?”

When it comes to being punished, there are three basic guidelines to look at here at MHS.

First, if the student is just being obnoxious and disturbing the learning experience, and inappropriate behavior, that usually gives the student a detention.
Second, is if the student is skipping school or even bringing drugs to school, that gives a student a suspension. Third, if the student is selling drugs, bringing weapons to school or assaulting someone.

“In the past five years we’ve only had about three cases of expulsion,” Dziobak recalled. “One was when a student brought a weapon to school, another was selling drugs, and the other assaulted a teacher.”

He goes on to say that, “expulsion is not as common as suspension or detention.”

The general idea of punishment is obviously to prevent students from continuing misbehavior in the future.On another note, administration agrees that sometimes the punishment doesn’t work.

“Generally, it works for about 90 percent of the people who get in trouble,” Ed Collins, the Dean of Students, replied. “But we are limited to what we can do when it comes to punishing a student for misbehaving.”

Social studies teacher Matt Eggleston said that, “Suspension is supposed to have the parents enforce the consequences of their child’s actions at home, even though at times we do not get support from the parents.”

But Ed Collins looks at it another way.

“We haven’t really faltered at punishing a student as we have rewarding a student for good behavior or citizenship. We would like to have a student of the week thing going, but we do not know when we could organize something like that yet.”

Whether the policy for the student’s behavior is good enough or not, students and staff will have their disagreement.

“They should have to do more community service so that at least their punishment would be benefiting someone,” McElroy said 
The question if the policy on suspension, detention, and expulsion works made Senior Cody brown strongly state “Ha! No, it doesn’t stop you from doing anything wrong in the future, believe me!”

The administration said they have looked into past failings and plan on fixing any errors. When it comes to suspension, Dziobak has plans on doing follow ups after the student returns from suspension. Whether punishments have led to improved behavior or not, the school is fighting hard to improve its misbehaving students.