zero tolerance

"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 ...

Each year, nearly 380,000 minors experience “unaccompanied” homelessness — meaning they are homeless and without a parent or guardian — for a period of longer than one week. (1) These young people, much like their adult counterparts, are often cited, arre ...

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 August 25th, 2015 at the SFUSD Board of Education (BOE) meeting, Kevin Truitt, Chief of Student, Family & Community Support, along with Thomas Graven, Executive Director, and a number of other staff from the department, walked BOE commissioners and par ...

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 ...

Discipline and Policing in Pennsylvania Public Schools “Zero tolerance” describes a policy that “assigns explicit, predetermined punishments to specific violations of school rules, regardless of the situation or context of the behavior.” The original r ...

Girls of color face much harsher school discipline than their white peers but are excluded from current efforts to address the school-to-prison pipeline, according to a new report issued today by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s ...

Excerpt from website Restorative justice is an effective, evidence-based practice, focused on understanding the roles of victim, offender and community in the restorative process. In this OJJDP-sponsored Webinar, presenters share restorative practices ...

The “school to prison pipeline” is a phenomenon that has occurred over the last few decades as school systems have increasingly relied upon zero tolerance policies and law enforcement to manage discipline in schools, resulting in rising incidents of suspe ...

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 ...

Excerpt: Communities of color have a long-standing history of inequitable treatment by the police in the U.S. In recent years, activists with the Black Lives Matter movement have helped to raise the profile of the destructive treatment of the black comm ...

High rates of suspensions and expulsions are daunting problems affecting many California schools. In part, these rates are the result of Zero Tolerance policies enacted in the early 1990s to improve school safety. Although Zero Tolerance policies original ...

In the past decade, there has been a growing convergence between schools and legal systems. The school to prison pipeline refers to this growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via “zero tolerance” policies, and , d ...

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) is a critical document in establishing coordinated efforts in a school-justice partnership. An MOU is a multilateral agreement among multiple parties intended to express a common vision and line of action. MOUs in schoo ...

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges joined by the Honorable Steven Teske, Chief Judge, Clayton County, Georgia, introduces and discussed the steps to develop a MOU during this interactive online training. A memorandum of understand ...

This report examines how the involvement of the criminal justice system in school discipline policies and practices causes deprivations of human rights for children in four key areas: the right to be free from discrimination, the right to education, the r ...

Disparities in the use of school discipline by race, gender, and sexual orientation have been well-documented and continue to place large numbers of students at risk for short- and long-term negative outcomes. In order to improve the state of our knowledg ...

"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 ...

In the past decade, there has been a growing convergence between schools and legal systems. The school to prison pipeline refers to this growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via ―zero tolerance‖ policies, and , d ...

Fueled by increasingly punitive approaches to student behavior such as “zero tolerance policies,” the past 20 years have seen an expansion in the presence of law enforcement, including school resource officers (SROs), in schools. According to the U.S. Dep ...

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 Disparities: A Research-to-Practice Collaborative All schools must be safe places for all members of the learning community. Schools have the right and indeed the responsibility to develop safe school climates to protect the safety of studen ...

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 ...

The Engaging Youth in Schools: Tips for Law Enforcement webinar will provide tips and helpful recommendations for law enforcement agencies to engage and build trust among youth in schools by focusing discussion around the principles 21st century policing. ...

Every young person has the human right to a high quality education and to learn in a safe, respectful school environment that protects human dignity. Research has shown that punitive, zero-tolerance approaches to discipline do not prevent or reduce misbe ...

Disciplining students, particularly those with chronic or serious behavior problems, is a longstanding challenge for educators. They must balance the needs of the school community and those of the individual student. At the heart of this challenge is the ...

In the nine years since Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), startling growth has occurred in what is often described as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”1 – the use of educational p ...

During the 2013-2014 academic year, California schools issued more suspensions than diplomas. Among suspended and expelled students, glaring racial disparities are apparent. Overwhelming numbers of students who have been suspended or expelled from school ...

"Bridgeport School Arrests, Suspensions Down” declared a July 2015 headline in the Connecticut Post.1 Communities across the United States are seeing similar results as they try to decrease “school exclusion” discipline methods such as school-based arrest ...

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 ...

In the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, communities, advocates, and policymakers across the country are proposing and already implementing different ways to address gun violence in our society—such as passing new gun control me ...

Steve Teske doesn’t hold back. He’s a Southern judge, with the boom and flair of a preacher, who has risen to national prominence arguing that too many students get arrested or kicked out of school for minor trouble. “Zero tolerance is zero intelligen ...

The zero tolerance policies that were adopted by many local and state education agencies in the 1990s had the unintended effect of unnecessarily introducing low-risk youth to the juvenile justice system for disruptive behaviors that are very typical of ad ...

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 ...

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn police officers in schools as SROs to improve school safety. However, when this project began in May 2000, little was known about SRO programs (appendix A identifies the principal published and selected u ...

Since first identified by the Children's Defense Fund nearly 40 years ago, researchers have consistently documented African American disproportionality in a range of exclusionary discipline practices including office disciplinary referrals, suspensions, e ...

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 ...

Exert: "As state policymakers strive to provide students with equal educational opportunities, they must look beyond test scores and graduation rates to assess the school environment more broadly, and particularly the role of discipline policies and p ...

The Office of Special Education (OSEP) Technical Assistance Center for PBIS, was established by the OSEP, U.S. Department of Education to give schools capacity-building information and technical assistance for identifying, adapting, and sustaining effecti ...

Historically, most educators have recognized two primary aims of school discipline: (a) managing student behavior, relying primarily on the use of teacher‐centered techniques for preventing and correcting misbehavior and (b) developing self‐discipline, co ...

Criminalizing kids for minor misbehavior in our schools unnecessarily exposes them to our justice system and increases the likelihood they will drop out of school and face later incarceration. Involvement of all stakeholders, including judicial leaders, i ...

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 ...

Severe trauma in children causes toxic stress in kids, which can damage the brain and lead to the child being put in a flight, fight, or fright mode that is physiologically impossible to learn in. Being a trauma-informed school means shifting the discipli ...

Severe trauma in children causes toxic stress in kids, which can damage the brain and lead to the child being put in a flight, fight, or fright mode that is physiologically impossible to learn in. Being a trauma-informed school means shifting the discipli ...

"Oakland unified is no different than many urban districts struggling with the repercussions of zero-tolerance policies and related teacher and staff practices that for decades have failed our students of color. The complex web of policies, practices and ...

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 this guide as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justice system. The project aims to reduce the number of referrals to the juvenile justice system for school based behaviors through the ...

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 ...

Yesterday's first-of-its-kind federal guidance on school discipline included warnings to school district leaders that school resource officers are too frequently pulled into routine disciplinary matters, an action that can spark unnecessary interactions b ...

Some policymakers have expressed renewed interest in school resource officers (SROs) as a result of the December 2012 mass shooting that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. SROs are sworn law enforcement officers who are assigned to w ...

In 2008, the new Mental Health/Juvenile Justice Action Network selected “early diversion” as its first area of focus. Its goal was to create opportunities for youth with mental health needs to be diverted as early as possible from involvement with the juv ...

The Let Her Learn Survey revealed that more than 1 in 5 girls have been sexually assaulted, while 1 in 3 girls reported either sexual assault or other violence. As a result of educational barriers, girls are being pushed out of school. There was an increa ...

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 ...

In the early 1990s, many schools adopted zero tolerance policies, which mandate the use of specific disciplinary consequences—often severe and punitive—in an effort to increase school safety. Originally designed to reduce weapon-carrying in schools, these ...

The juvenile justice system in America is a paradox when it comes to promoting the welfare of our nation’s young people. We have come a long way from old English common law which treated children as adults under the "vicious will” doctrine,1 to creating j ...

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 ...

RESEARCH AND DATA ON SCHOOL DISCIPLINE practices are clear: millions of students are being removed from their classrooms each year, mostly in middle and high schools, and overwhelmingly for minor misconduct. When suspended, these students are at a signif ...

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 ...