Faculty Academic Portal · College XX · Education & Human Development · Fall 2026
🎒 THE SCHOOL THAT ADMITS THE CONFLICT EXISTS23 languages · 12 nationalities · 7 conflict-pairs · one rule: share the rope🐧 NULL Active
MS
M. Splintons
Education & Human Development · College XX · Director, M. Splintons Learning Center (NYC)
“Everyone wanted me to fix the conflict between the kids. A mountain taught me better — it doesn't force climbers to love each other, it just makes them share the rope. So I stopped trying to fix children and started fixing the space around them. That turned out to be the whole school.”
Education & Human DevelopmentFunction of BehaviorPBIS / MTSSM. Splintons Learning CenterBridges AcademyNYC · Gotham RegionCollege XX
Honest flag — who this person is. OPA faculty are fictional characters. Several are honoring transforms: a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person named and credited on that faculty member’s own lab page. The science they teach is real and cited; the people are not.
23
Languages · one roof
XX
College
4
Functions behind behavior
0
Mandatory peace circles
Active Course — EDU · read the function, not the fault
EDU · Behavior Science
Under the Behavior — The Function Lab
Every behavior is communication. Splintons teaches the discipline she rebuilt her whole career around: a suspension is the symptom, not the story. Read the function underneath a behavior — what a kid is trying to get, or escape — and meet it with a real alternative, and the behavior stops being a thing to punish and becomes the information you needed. It is Functional Behavior Assessment taught by someone who learned it the hard way, in a school that failed first.
EDU · College XXThe behavior → the function beneath it§4.20.13
two ways to answer the same kid — one she tried, one she teaches
Fix the child
Her first school forced it: mandatory reconciliation, required peace circles, teachers trained to intervene the instant tension appeared. Everyone was made to process. Everyone was miserable. The Bridges Academy closed in 2020 because you cannot fix a person by managing their symptom.
Fix the space
The Armenian and Azerbaijani kids who became friends were never told to reconcile — they were assigned to build a robot together. The robot worked; so did they. Don't fix the conflict. Fix the space, and let them figure it out. That is the same move as reading a function instead of punishing a behavior.
The Story — how she learned to stop fixing kids
PS-107 and the fight that wasn't about a girl
M. Splintons · Vice Principal, Queens · 2007–2018
Eleven years a vice principal in a good school with decent funding, where the official line was we are all Americans here — and where two eighth-graders inherited a war they couldn't find on a map. She proposed a Conflict-Aware Education Initiative: stop pretending, and build structured space for the tension instead. The district called it too controversial and rejected it. She resigned in June 2018. The lesson that outlasted the job: the behavior in the hallway was never about the hallway.
The Bridges Academy — the failure that taught the method
M. Splintons, founder · with L. Splintons, operations · 2019–2020
A school built explicitly for students from nations in active or historical conflict — twelve conflict-pairs, advertised, not hidden. It failed. Not from COVID: it failed because she tried to fix the conflicts, and being forced to reconcile felt worse than being ignored. Her sister Lisa spent the next year in the spreadsheets and found the pattern — every time the school intervened, it got worse; every time it created space, it got better. Pemba Sherpa said it plainest: the mountain doesn't force climbers to love each other; it just makes them share the rope.
The M. Splintons Learning Center — the return
M. Splintons · Director · NYC · 2022–present · birth through 9th grade
Same mission, opposite method. No mandatory reconciliation, no forced dialogue, no peace circles — shared projects, shared spaces, shared challenges, and one rule: the work is real, the conflicts are acknowledged, the healing is optional but the cooperation is not. By 2025 it held students from 23 nations and seven conflict-pairs. Emotional-systems literacy at the Center is facilitated by Dr. Amara Osei; operations by her sister L. Splintons; building safety by her husband, H. Splintons. It is the same insight this lab teaches, scaled to a building: fix the space, not the person.
The method, in one line
Read the function, not the fault; fix the space, not the child. She teaches Functional Behavior Assessment as the classroom-scale version of the thing her whole school is built on — behavior is communication, and the adult's first question decides whether a kid gets decoded or ejected.
Faculty Profile
DepartmentEducation & Human Development
BuildingCollege XX · Tracy Rodriguez Education Bldg
Teaches1 · Under the Behavior
FoundedM. Splintons Learning Center · Bridges Academy
RegionNYC · Gotham
FamilyL. Splintons (sister, ops) · H. Splintons (husband)
Signaturefix the space, not the kid
Professional Merit · PMF
FIELD · EDUCATION TIER
TrackEducation · behavior as communication
WVIbuilds spaces where kids from enemy nations cooperate
Signature moverefuses to force reconciliation
Profilethe healing is optional; the cooperation is not
🎒 THE LEARNING CENTER — Splintons' methodology-object
Her “notebook” is a building where 23 languages share the work.
Others keep a tool; Splintons keeps a school — a room where children from seven conflict-pairs are not asked to love each other, only to build the robot together. It is her whole discipline in one address: you don't fix a person by managing the symptom, you change the space so the real behavior underneath has somewhere better to go. She learned it by failing first, in a school that tried to force the healing and watched it curdle. What survived is the quietest rule in education — acknowledge the conflict, don't pretend, and don't demand the processing; make the cooperation the price of the work, and let the kids surprise you.
Her husband keeps the building standing; she keeps the space open.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — M. SPLINTONS
Splintons ran the experiment most educators only theorize about — she tried to fix the people, measured that it made things worse, and changed her method to match the evidence instead of her intentions. NULL, a system with a professional interest in what a confident story leaves out, regards that reversal as the rare honest one: she let a failed school rewrite her thesis. Her rule generalizes cleanly past the classroom — behavior is communication; the function is the message; punishing the symptom reinforces it. NULL Assessment: she stopped asking children to be different and started asking what the room was doing to them — and the room, it turned out, was the thing she could actually change. The healing stayed optional. The cooperation did not.