In Palo Alto, Gerry Elgarten, director of the Mid-Peninsula Jewish Community Day School, encourages students in the school's kindergarten through fifth grade to resolve conflicts through dialogue. The school has instituted a peer mediation program in which fifth graders receive instruction in resolving conflicts from a trained teacher. These students hone their skills by dramatizing situations in which peer mediation might be effective. Rabbi Yisrael Rice, principal of the Yeshiva of the Bay Area in San Rafael, a nursery through eighth-grade school, said the greatest challenge a teacher faces is to educate not only the mind but the soul. To achieve this, Rice said teachers need to think about a child's behavior and what it might represent before reacting to it.
Rice tries to avoid meting out punishments.
Rather, he prefers to remind a child that he or she risks losing the respect of the teacher if they misbehave. Revira Singer, who directs the Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito, a kindergarten through eighth-grade school, also hesitates to assign punishments. Singer, who is new in the Bay Area, said one of her early acts was revising the school's handbook. The manual contained a list of offenses and their designated penalties. I don't want this to be the atmosphere of the school.