Being the principal of a high school is not an easy job, and many are not cut out to do it. The job requires the ability of being a tough disciplinarian, and some just don’t have that in them. Lisa Love, on the other hand, has no problem disciplining students the moment she took on the challenge of being a new principal.

When Lisa recently became the principal at Harrisburg High School in Pennsylvania, she was stunned to find that almost half of the students had an alarming number of unexcused absences. Lisa decided that something had to be done about the horrible attendance so the new principal sent out suspension notices to around 500 students at the school.

During a meeting with school officials and parents, Lisa explained that the main issue here is that students are showing up for school, but not attending their classes.

“The problem I’ve noticed here as principal is that students are coming to school but they are not going to classes when they get here,” she said. “Many parents send their kids to school and they’re thinking they’re going to class. I needed to reach out because of the enormous number not going to class.”

Instead of going to class, students have been hanging out in the hallways, the gym, or in other parts of the school, and Lisa said that she felt the need to do something “radical” to address this.

“If you’re not in class, all you’re here to do then is to wreak havoc upon the school and disrupt the work that we are trying to do here. And that’s to focus on student achievement,” she said.

So far, at least 100 of the students issued suspension notices have served one-day suspensions after Lisa’s crackdown. Assistant Principal Keith Edmonds explained that notices for excessive absences have been issued to students who have missed at least 35 classes in the marking period of 45 days, or nine weeks. He added that after the suspensions were issued, parents began showing up at the school to provide documentation for absences in order to help their children avoid the penalty.

Though she has faced some backlash from parents, Lisa has no regrets about what she did.

“This was a hard decision for me to make,” Lisa said. “But I had to get the attention of the community to let them know that we are here. And we’re about to do some wonderful things for students and the community and we want this to be a school that everyone is proud of. And this was probably the eye opener we needed to make that happen.”

Do you think this principal did the right thing? Let us know in the comments section.