out-of-school suspension

"In considering different strategies for promoting productive and safe school environments, it can be difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. In particular, longstanding debates about zero tolerance policies leave many people confused about the bas ...

All children and youth have a human right to quality public education in safe and supportive learning environments. Such an education provides a foundation for access to higher education, meaningful employment and full participation in society. Although a ...

A well implemented early warning system can help educators and others identify students at risk of dropping out and assign and monitor interventions to keep them on track for graduation. This guide describes and provides examples of early warning system ...

Excerpt: This resource is intended to help educators understand how they might address the interplay of race and trauma and its effects on students in the classroom. After defining key terms, the guide outlines recommendations for educators and offers ...

New data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) estimates that over 3 million students are suspended or expelled every year, with minorities and special needs students often facing harsher discipline than their peers for the same offenses. Such excl ...

On October 23, 2007, a 14-year-old boy at the Kennedy Middle School in Springfield, Massachusetts, was arrested after he refused to walk with a teacher to her office and instead returned to his classroom. According to the police report, he yelled at the t ...

The Council of State Governments (CSG) released a groundbreaking report, Breaking Schools’ Rules, in 2011, which documented the negative impacts that suspension or expulsion from Texas public schools have on students. The CSG report revealed a large “huma ...

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn law enforcement officers in schools as School Resource Officers (SROs) as a means of improving school safety and improving relations between police officers and youth. However, when this project began in ...

Juvenile courts nationwide handle cases referred by schools for truancy or behavioral incidents. Since 2012, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) have trained jurisdictions on strategies and policies to reduce the number of re ...

"This report aims to make transparent the rates at which school discipline practices and policies impact Black students in every K-12 public school district in 13 Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nor ...

Throughout the 1990s, the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies resulted in the widespread adoption of strict and mandatory responses for a large range of misbehavior in school. An unintended consequence of these policies and practices were yo ...

In 2005-2006, juvenile justice professionals in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties were assessed to determine their current aftercare practices. As a result of this assessment, this Toolkit was written in 2006 to address one of their main areas of concern: helpin ...

Discipline in schools, when appropriately used, can help to create structure and establish rules for a well-functioning classroom and school. All students should feel safe, and have a positive environment in which to learn. The underlying empirical data s ...

AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) believe that all schools should be warm, welcoming and productive places for children to learn and for teachers to teach. We believe that exclusionary discipline – suspend ...

The federal guidance released in January by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education on school discipline policies was necessary to advise school districts of their responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act to protect children from discrimination. ...

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first ever national guidelines for school discipline in public schools, in an effort to keep more students in class and reduce racial disparities in punishment. The fed ...

As the education of our children – our nation’s future – and the school-justice connection has increasingly captured public attention, the sunshine of increased graduation rates has brought into sharp focus the shadow of the so-called school-to-prison pip ...

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in the criminalization of American schools and students. What officially began in 1994 with the signing of the federal Gun Free School Zone’s Act (GFSA), has escalated from a series of reforms intende ...

Our children attend Chicago Public Schools, and in 2003 we came together —African-American and Latino parents and grandparents—around shared experiences and concerns. Our schools have one of the highest rates of suspension in the nation, and African-Ameri ...

The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center has released a new report "Realizing the Full Vision of School Discipline Reform: A Framework for Statewide Change," which documents how five states have reduced their reliance on suspensions while mov ...

This chapter will address the excessive use of suspensions and other disciplinary actions against Black males who are disengaged from school. Academically disengaged students often come to school late, miss assignments, have difficulty understanding schoo ...

Many schools across the United States have enacted zero tolerance philosophy in response to perceived increases in violence and drugs in schools. It is believed that aggressive and unwavering punishment of many school infractions, including relatively min ...

Humans are born to learn, but we don’t learn in isolation. We learn based on positive relationships and interactions with peers and in environments like schools that foster opportunities for students and staff to learn and grow together. Educators recogni ...

The NCJFCJ has published a Technical Assistance Bulletin on the School Pathways to the Juvenile Justice System: A Context for a Practice Guide for Courts and Schools as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justic ...

Farmington, CT – Four Connecticut schools were selected as partners in the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative (SBDI) for the 2013-2014 school year. SBDI is an interagency state and local partnership supported by the Connecticut Judicial Branch, ...

The Children’s Defense Fund’s report, Suspensions: Are They Helping Children? first brought the issue of racial disparities in discipline to national attention. African American over-representation in out-of-school suspensions has increased steadily from ...

Ironically, zero tolerance policies once promoted as a solution to youth violence have created a school to prison pipeline. Widespread discipline practices of suspension, expulsion, and arrest for school behavior problems are turning kids in conflict int ...

Prior to the passage of the Gun Free Zone Act of 1994 (GFZA), school administrators and educators were largely responsible for addressing students' misbehavior in school. However, since the implementation of GFZA, there has been an increasing number of sc ...

This toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for implementing some of the core principles and activities of the full SBDI initiative. A simple-to-use checklist is included to guide you through implementation of key SBDI elements. There are self-assessment q ...

Across Colorado and the country, there is more attention on school discipline issues and the "school-to-prison pipeline" than ever before. The overuse of out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, police tickets, and school-based arrests – particularly for St ...

The impact of students’ life experiences on their behavior has garnered increasing attention as schools strive to develop more supportive academic environments that address the needs of at-risk youth and facilitate continued academic engagement. Few event ...

Excerpt: "Suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are used too often in our schools and disproportionately impact students of color. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, during the 2013-2014 school year, Black K-12 studen ...

Throughout the United States violent crime has seen a marked reduction—reports of violent crime have decreased from 1.4 million in 2007 to 1.2 million in 2011. In the past few years, a growing awareness in high percentage rates of the detention of mentall ...

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado. Heath High School, West Paducah, Kentucky.3 Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Zero tolerance policies5 were adopted in these schools and around the country in response to tragic school shooting eve ...