SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.

In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.

In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.

‘Trying to get him out of school’

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

Educators stretched thin

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.

But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.

Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.

In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example. 

“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”

When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

ER trips increased after settlement

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”

Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”

Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services

Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.

But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Black parents point to culture problem

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior. 

Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post The school district where kids are sent to psychiatric emergency rooms more than three times a week — some as young as 5 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

School libraries should be places where students can learn independently and think creatively outside the traditional classroom. But that won’t happen under a new plan proposed for Houston, the largest school district in Texas. Instead, spaces once reserved for quiet contemplation of books will now be transformed into disciplinary spaces for troubled students.

This summer, the Houston Independent School District decided to close school libraries and replace them with discipline centers. Parents and educators are concerned that this might harm struggling students in a state with the country’s fourth-lowest literacy rate, and fear that the new policy will do nothing to address some of the root causes of student misbehavior, which often include difficulties with literacy.

Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to lead the district after it was taken over by the state, is pushing the policy. In an NPR interview, Miles explained that disruptive students will be sent to these discipline centers and then rejoin their classmates virtually.

Schools have attempted to address misbehavior with stricter discipline practices for years, but resorting to virtual participation — and virtual problem solving — is not the answer.

Districts should examine why a student chooses to communicate an unmet need by disrupting the classroom. All behaviors are a form of communication; misbehavior specifically is sometimes the only form of expression available to a student at the time.

More times than not, misbehavior is a response to a perceived stressor in the child’s environment hindering them from making more “appropriate” choices in the moment. Learning how to read, write, speak and listen — communication — requires more than understanding phonemic awareness, spelling or vocabulary. It requires the activation of the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reading fluency, speech, grammatical usage and comprehension.

Related: The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning

In their book “The Whole-Brain Child,” Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson refer to this area as the “upstairs brain.” They explain that the lower and mid parts of the brain (the “downstairs,” or survival, brain), must feel cool, calm and collected before access is granted upstairs. Many things can contribute to the downstairs brain hijacking everything and revoking access to the part our students need to control their impulses, problem solve and excel in communication.

Traumatic experiences are the main culprit. They include not only the difficult childhood events we often hear about but also detrimental community and environmental experiences, such as structural racism, low pay, a global pandemic and climate crises. All can have negative effects on growing and learning. If Houston’s plan is truly a systemic reform, as its proponents claim, why aren’t we also holding these larger systems responsible for the impact they have on student behavior?

Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors.

Feelings of anger, frustration or stress, which can be caused by struggles with reading or other comprehension, can also lead to the downstairs brain hijacking the upstairs brain. When this hijacking happens, it can look like students are highly anxious or behaving aggressively toward themselves or others. Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors, many of which could get a student sent to the proposed “team centers.” A library and supportive librarian would benefit them more.

Not every misbehavior is the result of an issue with literacy, but every misbehavior communicates a need. While discipline is necessary, it should not end there.

Districts and school administrators need to recognize that a student’s behavior might be a trauma or stress response, and they need to learn how to respond constructively. This is known as a trauma-informed approach. Concurrently, restorative discipline practices focus on repairing any harm caused, while sparing the dignity of the student without excluding them from their community.

Not only does student behavior deserve to be fully understood and supported, but our educators, including our librarians, deserve to be allowed to work in their areas of expertise. When students are feeling unmotivated or defeated and communicate this through disruption, they should be met by individuals who not only understand the function of that behavior but also use their unique skills to quiet the downstairs brain to better attend to the upstairs brain, putting students in the best place to learn and grow. This is true system reform.

Related: OPINION: Teachers and students are not okay right now. More mental health training would help

Educators cannot do this alone. Caregivers can also integrate trauma-informed and restorative practices at home. Parents know their children better than anyone and have a responsibility to advocate and assist schools in understanding the child behind the behavior.

Infusing trauma-Informed and restorative practices into schoolwide policies and procedures will help schools attend to the root causes of misbehaviors without the risk of re-traumatization.

Protecting learning, literacy and libraries and addressing discipline issues are not mutually exclusive. Our school systems can and should do both.

Stephanie F. McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor, registered play therapist and a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project. She is the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of the Dallas Region.

This story about school discipline centers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Why turning school libraries into discipline centers will backfire appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When I was in elementary school, students who exhibited anxiety were given a smattering of separation as teachers prompted them down the school hallway to the nurse’s office, where they were isolated from their peers. There wasn’t a lot the nurse could do — offer a phone call home, a sticker, a reminder to breathe.

I related to this experience as a high school student after losing my father to breast cancer. Grappling with grief, I too was pulled aside for whispered conversations in the hallway, the kind of heartfelt but harried condolences made by teachers who didn’t know what to say.

In those moments, I felt different. And acutely aware of the adults’ discomfort.

It’s no secret that youth mental health is in crisis. Teachers aren’t okay either. Educators experience substantially higher rates of depression than the overall population. Nearly 50 percent leave the classroom within five years. Teaching is considered as stressful as working as an emergency room doctor.

Related: Mental health: Is that a job for schools?

The stakes are high: two-thirds of children in the U.S. are impacted by trauma, which can alter brain connectivity, function and structure — and physical and mental health into adulthood. In 2020, almost eight million children had diagnoses of anxiety and depression, and in 2021, three in five female-identifying high school students in the United States reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”

Yet, too often, educators don’t receive any training regarding mental health — young people’s or their own — during college. To truly buoy well-being in the learning space, it’s time to fill this gap.

Of course, mental health support should involve trained interventionists; we shouldn’t position teachers as such. Yet access to mental health staff is scarce; school counselors balance an average caseload of 408 students and are often overloaded with administrative responsibilities that leave little room for mental health support. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. districts lack a school psychologist altogether.

Educators experience substantially higher rates of depression than the overall population.

This leaves teachers on the frontlines, which may be even more of a problem than we thought: Researchers have uncovered a reciprocal relationship between student and teacher well-being: A contributing factor to teacher stress can be exposure to student hardships, which can lead to secondary trauma, or “compassion fatigue,” which mirrors PTSD.

Similarly, the phenomenon of “stress contagion” shows that students in classrooms where teachers self-report high levels of burnout wake up with elevated cortisol, a key stress hormone that can impact development. Studies also show that teachers serve as attachment figures in the lives of young people, meaning that the ways teachers respond to and connect with students, especially in times of stress, can impact both how students relate to others as well as how they expect to be treated by others across time. This means that teachers’ stressors may impair their ability to build supportive relationships with students, complicating students’ own experiences of, and expectations for, attachment.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

There is, then, an urgent need for teachers to know how best to respond to their own and others’ challenges and to model productive coping strategies that can serve students in the long term.

President Biden proposed $1 billion in federal funding to hire mental health professionals and institute suicide prevention programs in schools, but teacher training has yet to be addressed.

The Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Preparation requires that teacher education programs cover diversity, equity and inclusion — but not mental health, despite the topics’ interconnectedness. Youth from marginalized backgrounds are at increased risk for mental health challenges, for example, and marginalized communities have less access to, and are less likely to elect to access, mental health care due to systemic inequity and stigma.

To address this, teachers need training in mental health as well as in diversity, equity and inclusion issues. Incorporating basic awareness into teacher training of anxiety, depression and trauma is important, as is instruction on ways of talking about mental health with young people and strategies like cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for the classroom. This will equip teachers with tools to identify and respond to students when they most need help and connect them with additional support.

Better understanding about vicarious trauma and its warning signs, along with guidance on intervention, will also prepare teachers to enter their careers with increased self-awareness and the ability to name and destigmatize a part of the profession that is dominant, yet rarely identified.

Pilot programs addressing the mental health of teachers have shown promising results. For example, districts that paid for teachers to receive therapy reported that “none of [the teachers] quit until they felt emotionally well. Of the teachers that provided feedback, 100 percent reported an improvement in personal well-being . . . [and] that the experience positively impacted their students’ well-being, mental health, and academic performance.”

This idea of therapist-teacher support echoes the supervision model in psychological training in which novice therapists meet regularly with experienced therapists to process the emotional toll of their work and discuss professional strategies and approaches.

While some schools have instituted mentoring programs for first-year teachers, the model is not used everywhere, typically doesn’t address emotions and its one-year duration is often insufficient.

We need a new ethic of training in education that gives teachers tools for sustaining themselves and their students in times of stress. That includes making sure they understand the tenets of trauma-informed care — safety, connection and emotional regulation — and how to center those tenets to help care for themselves and their students.

Adult well-being matters both before and during professional practice, as does recognizing the direct relationship between the emotional states of teachers and their students. If we mandate mental health training, we can make school a safer place for students and teachers — a place where grief, anxiety and stress are not relegated to whispers in the hallway but instead leveraged as powerful moments for learning, connection and support.

Brittany R. Collins is the author of “Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students,” as well as over 50 articles on mental health and education. Learn more about her work at www.brittanyrcollins.com or @griefresponsiveteaching on Instagram.

This story about teachers and mental health was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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A 6-year-old in Leila Lubin’s classroom wouldn’t budge from his seat. The rest of his peers had filed off to their enrichment classes but he refused to move. He wasn’t done with his work and he didn’t want to go.

Lubin, a champion of behavior management and crisis prevention training for teachers, knew what to do. She turned to a script that has become such a routine part of her classroom that it seems to elicit an almost Pavlovian response – steering misbehaving students back on track at the sound of the words: “Aw man, you’re having a really rough time right now. We’re going to do some learning later.” 

This time, it didn’t work. “Boom. Explosion,” Lubin said recently, recounting the episode. “‘I don’t want to learn later! I don’t want to practice with you!’ ”

Teachers at all grade levels see some version of this in their classrooms. The catalyst or the nature of the disobedience may change, but the core issue remains. What are they to do?

In some parts of the country, teachers in Lubin’s position pull out a paddle.

5 percent of teachers are responsible for more than one-third of all office discipline referrals, according to a study of one large California district.

Punitive school discipline is rampant in the United States, whether it’s corporal punishment or, much more commonly, suspensions. Students lost more than 11 million days to out-of-school suspensions during the 2017-18 school year, the last federal count, and they spent many times that number in in-school suspension rooms, kept from the classrooms where their teachers were teaching. Black students face more than their fair share of this punishment, as do boys.

Teacher burnout is at record highs, and surveys continue to show that educators believe student behavior is worse than it was before the pandemic. With everyone in school buildings stretched to their emotional limits, some districts across the country have been suspending students even more. 

“This is not only a big problem, but a pivotal one,” said Jason Okonofua, a psychologist at University of California Berkeley who studies school discipline. “It changes children’s entire lives – and also teachers’ in leaving the profession.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Critics point out that punitive discipline doesn’t teach students the skills they need to behave differently – like how to manage their frustration when the bell rings and they’re still working. And it creates new problems: Students who get suspended generally do worse in school, graduate at lower rates and are more likely to have run-ins with the police. Reducing suspensions has become a national goal, but some schools have cut corners, simply removing the option without changing much else, and thereby leaving teachers overwhelmed.

What schools should do instead, experts argue, is help educators learn how to pre-empt the behavior that gets students punished. Ultimately, students are wild cards. But the adults leading schools can both control themselves and enough of the student experience to prevent misbehavior. When that isn’t enough, as in Lubin’s classroom so recently, educators can assign consequences that offer empathy and aim to teach, rather than punish.

“Even really difficult kids are actually using positive behaviors 90 percent of the time.”

Scott Ervin, creator, Behavioral Leadership model

That’s ultimately the path Lubin chose.

First, she gave the boy a couple minutes to calm down while she busied herself in the classroom. When he was ready to hear it, she got to the point: He couldn’t refuse to put his work away. She understood his frustration, but he needed to control it.

Lubin sent the boy to his next class so he wouldn’t miss any more instruction, but later in the day, when the rest of his peers were choosing their own activities, Lubin had him sit down and simulate being interrupted in the middle of his work. The boy’s consequence for his morning misbehavior was four run-throughs of a frustration-free transition.

The Greater Dayton School, where Lubin is a founding teacher, doesn’t assign suspensions. Educators at the private, tuition-free school for students from low-income families are trained and coached to avoid doing so. “What we want to do is create that love of learning,” Lubin said. “If a student is sent home every time they do something wrong, they’re going to grow up not really liking school.”

The more Lubin has studied behavior management techniques during her five years of teaching, the more second-nature her responses have become – and the more effective. Sticking to her scripts, armed with information about child development and the nature of behavior, she has seen real change.

“If I’m calm, if I’m mindful, empathetic, if I’m showing verbal and nonverbal signs of calm, I can actually calm you down, too.”

Susan Driscoll, president, Crisis Prevention Institute

“It transforms the classroom,” she said.

The model the Greater Dayton School used this past year is called “Behavioral Leadership.” Its creator, educational consultant Scott Ervin, began developing the approach as a teacher. After, that is, he spent his first two years yelling himself hoarse trying to keep his students in line.

Like other successful approaches, Behavioral Leadership emphasizes the power adults have over children’s behavior. And as Ervin so painfully learned in his early years of teaching, that power is most effectively wielded quietly.

Related: ‘State-sanctioned violence’: Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddle students

While Lubin found most of Ervin’s strategies easy to implement, she struggled with his advice to quickly move past misbehaviors. Ervin recommends teachers spend more time pointing out good behaviors than bad ones, creating incentives for students seeking attention to behave properly.

“Even really difficult kids are actually using positive behaviors 90 percent of the time,” Ervin said.

He advises teachers to take only the briefest pause from instruction to acknowledge bad behavior and to always do it with empathy – “Aw man, you’re having a really rough time right now.” True to her training, Lubin followed those statements up with a comment about “doing learning later,” something that would take up Lubin’s time, but be more of an investment than a cost. As the school year went on, for example, the student who refused to stop working got better at transitions and learned something about managing his emotions. And that, overall, saved Lubin time.

“What kids are rebelling over is compliance and boring instruction.”

Michael Toth, founder and CEO, Instructional Empowerment

Along with Ervin’s techniques, Lubin had other training to draw on – a model designed by the Crisis Prevention Institute. The institute trains teachers on de-escalation techniques grounded in brain science. Student outbursts and defiance are often unthinking responses, not calculated ones. Kids are emotional and acting emotionally. While teachers can’t control students’ behavior, Susan Driscoll, president of the institute, insists they can affect it.

“If I’m calm, if I’m mindful, empathetic, if I’m showing verbal and nonverbal signs of calm, I can actually calm you down, too,” she said.

Perhaps counterintuitively, being mindful and empathetic can come down to maintaining a level of emotional detachment. Student misbehavior can feel like a personal attack to teachers.

School District U-46, a 36,000-student district west of Chicago, has used CPI training for almost 15 years to help teachers retain their calm and remain empathetic. Mark Gonnella, an assistant principal who has trained his colleagues on CPI strategies at an elementary, middle and high school in U-46, finds that “rational detachment” element to be crucial.

“We as adults, we have to separate ourselves from that situation and not take things personally in order to help these students,” he said.

Such separation can help teachers develop and preserve supportive student relationships, which, in themselves, can lead to calmer classrooms. Okonofua, the UC Berkeley psychologist, has drawn clear connections between a lack of empathy for certain types of students and more frequent discipline of those groups. Okonofua tested what he now calls “Empathic Instruction” through real-life experiments and said he saw repeated success. The approach not only resulted in a reduction of total school suspensions, but also reduced disparities in school discipline for Black students, boys, and those with disabilities.

“It seems to work surgically well specifically for the groups that are at heightened risks of getting in trouble,” Okonofua said. “It’s especially beneficial for them and it’s because they were the ones least likely to receive that empathy or that benefit of the doubt.”

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions

Okonofua’s model asks teachers to spend less than an hour online at the beginning of the school year, reflecting on the power teachers have to help students, especially when they misbehave.

“Most educators join the profession because they want to help children learn and grow and become their best possible selves,” Okonofua said. “It’s about tapping into what’s already in their hearts and minds.”

And just as adults have control over themselves, they also control much of the student’s school experience. Experts say clear and reasonable behavior expectations are critical to well-functioning schools. These expectations should be consistent across all parts of the school so students don’t have to manage major shifts over the course of their day.

Last year, teacher Tony DeRose worked as a behavioral coach at Glenwood Middle School in Findlay, Ohio. He crisscrossed the school, consulting with teachers on issues in their classrooms, monitoring the school entrances and hallways, and, perhaps most dramatically, transforming the lunchroom.

“When I first walked in there, I was like, ‘This is craziness. It’s not safe. It’s not enjoyable,’” DeRose remembered. Students were being bullied, they were yelling and cursing, and the standard response was to send troublemakers to the office for discipline.

DeRose created new structure to the lunch period, setting new rules for when students could leave their tables, requiring clean language and quieter speech, and projecting optional conversation prompts onto a screen including “would you rather” questions and brain teasers. DeRose also handed power back to students, creating a student volunteer corps – another element of Ervin’s behavioral leadership program. Well-behaved students were deputized to dismiss tables at the end of the period and plan activities for recess.

Very soon, no students needed to be sent out of lunch for discipline, DeRose said; the total number of office referrals schoolwide dropped by 26 percent.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Of course, educators exert the greatest influence over students through teaching. Planning engaging learning experiences, then, is arguably the most powerful way to keep students from misbehaving. Students who are focused on class activities don’t have time to misbehave. In Illinois’ U-46, a post-pandemic focus on improving classroom instruction is expected to improve student behavior, too. The underlying model, developed by an organization called Instructional Empowerment, emphasizes making students more active participants in classroom instruction, working in groups, talking and thinking through lessons rather than simply sitting and listening to lectures.

“What kids are rebelling over is compliance and boring instruction,” said Michael Toth, founder and CEO of Instructional Empowerment. His organization works primarily with high-poverty, low-performing districts and trains teachers to offer kids more rigorous, engaging learning opportunities. As he has guided schools through the transformation, he has seen behavior problems drop precipitously.

“If a student is sent home every time they do something wrong, they’re going to grow up not really liking school.”

Leila Lubin, founding teacher, The Greater Dayton School

But the fact is, kids will continue to act out. Just as they are learning about science and math and history, they are learning how to control their emotions, how to interact with their peers and how to respond to unexpected challenges. Every now and then, they won’t do it right. And if every child, every now and then, erupts, that means a lot of potential outbursts in any given school over the course of the year to which educators must respond.

As evidence of the negative consequences of punitive discipline continues to pile up, there is greater urgency to find alternatives. Schools, however, face a cultural challenge in making this shift. Despite the negative effects of suspensions and the studies that say they don’t work to change behavior, teachers, parents and even students want to see kids face consequences for misbehaving.

Changing school culture can be painstaking work. Even Illinois’ U-46 saw its suspension rate climb from 6 per 100 students before the pandemic to 8 per 100 last year. Lela Majstorovic, the district’s assistant superintendent, said expanding CPI training and helping teachers and other staff members manage student behavior is a priority going into the 2023-24 school year.

“This is not only a big problem, but a pivotal one. It changes children’s entire lives – and also teachers’ in leaving the profession.”

Jason Okonofua, professor, University of California Berkeley

Studies show schools can also offer targeted support to teachers who most frequently send students to the office and have an outsized impact on overall discipline rates. Researchers from the University of Maryland College Park and the University of California Irvine recently found 5 percent of teachers in a California district were responsible for more than one-third of all office discipline referrals – and their overreliance more than doubled the Black-white gap in such discipline. Helping just those few teachers better manage and respond to student behavior can not only drive down total school discipline but the pernicious disparities researchers have been tracking for decades.

Lubin has been a voracious consumer of new approaches to maintaining order and calm in her classroom. This summer, she is strategizing how to teach students specific techniques for regulating their emotions and how to help them choose the right methods in the moment. She finds all of the models she has studied flow together well and just wishes more schools incorporated them.

“We don’t need in-school suspension, we don’t need to send kids home, because they’re missing out on instructional time,” Lubin said. “There is no point of that.”

This story about misbehavior in classrooms was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The skirmish last fall began on a Montgomery County, Maryland, school bus.

Someone—no one is exactly sure who—tossed a water bottle from the back of the bus, smacking a sixth grader sitting near the front. The next day, the water victim retaliated by throwing a container of milk to the back, dousing a seventh grader.

The two girls, who live near each other in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., were headed for a fight — and possibly suspension. But their parents called the school for help, and one of Montgomery County Public School’s newly appointed instructional specialists in restorative justice got to work.

With permission from the families, Floyd Branch III, the specialist, brought the girls together for lunch and a “restorative circle” to defuse the tension. Neither of the girls really wanted to target the other, but they were embarrassed by the incident and by kids laughing at them on the bus.

“They were able to talk it out and say they were sorry,” Branch said. “Children can’t learn if they don’t understand what the mistake was, or when there’s no conversation.” The process did not turn the two into friends, he said, but they have been able to ride the bus together without any more fighting.

This situation, and its resolution, is a good example of restorative justice at work, say supporters of this approach to discipline and community building. Instead of focusing on punishment, restorative practices invite those in conflict to talk through the issue so they can understand the harm caused, take responsibility and find ways to move forward.

Elements of restorative justice have long been used in indigenous cultures, and, since the 1970s, as part of alternative sentencing programs in the criminal justice system. The practice spread to schools in the 1990s and accelerated after 2014 as an alternative to “zero-tolerance” suspension and expulsion policies for misbehavior. Those consequences, experts say, are fraught with problems. Exclusionary discipline doesn’t serve as a deterrent and often derails a student’s educational path: Black students, boys, and students with disabilities are more likely to be suspended and expelled than other students, and school administrators often discipline Black students more severely and frequently than white students who engage in the same behaviors.

“If people don’t understand what you’re trying to do, it’s not on them … We have to be open to constructive criticism.”

Damon Monteleone, associate superintendent, Montgomery County schools

In 2019, Maryland legislators passed a law requiring districts to incorporate restorative approaches in their discipline policies. Montgomery County, which at over 160,000 students is the largest school district in Maryland, has leaned into the practice, adding staff whose job is to help to build and repair relationships among all members of a school community — students, teachers, parents and administrators. There are still suspensions for serious offenses, according to the system’s code of conduct, but restorative justice is among the discipline options that schools can use.

Shauna-Kay Jorandby, who oversees school engagement, behavioral health and academics for the district, said that based on the results of a recent survey, students themselves are looking for the supports that restorative justice promises.

“We know that our kids need help communicating, talking and understanding each other. We know that they need help with conflict, whether it’s at school or at home. We know they need help with the stressors in their life,” Jorandby said. “I think that [restorative justice] is one avenue. We have to be able to address that in our schools.”

Related: The promise of restorative justice starts to falter under rigorous research

But the school system’s efforts are coming at a time when there’s been a call among some for stronger penalties for acting out in schools, in response to higher misbehavior rates after kids returned from pandemic shut-downs. In some districts, police, who were banned from campuses in 2020, have been asked to return.

Alternative forms of discipline have often met skepticism. In Montgomery County, some parents, teachers and students have pushed back against restorative justice, saying harsher discipline is sometimes necessary to hold students accountable. Others question the way restorative circles are conducted, noting that the circles are often led by staff from the district’s central office, who the students don’t know or trust. They want to see more training, consistency, and transparency about the process.

The new approach to student behavior is leading to a “free for all” in the schools; kids are getting away with hurting one another, said Ricky Ribeiro, a parent and PTA vice president at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. He wants the district to explain why the restorative approach is better than what’s been used in the past and provide evidence.

“Implementing this system is not going to be easy. It’s unclear if it will be successful, if we even know what success looks like, and if we have enough resources to make it successful,” Ribeiro said. “And yet, MCPS is going all in with the kitchen sink on it and I don’t know that’s a good idea.”

The district’s restorative justice work was put to the test earlier this year after an antisemitic incident roiled a high school.

The school system is coping with a spate of hate, bias and racist incidents — an average of one per day, which is three times higher than previous years, Superintendent Monifa McKnight told the community in an address April 27.  Last December, two students on the school debate team at Walt Whitman High School allegedly made antisemitic comments about their Jewish teammates on an off-campus trip.

 The offenders were disciplined by the school and the district brought in restorative justice specialists to hold sessions with students. Rachel Barold, who was a ninth grader at the time of the incident, said she felt the process didn’t work in that situation and let the offenders off too easily.

“Restorative justice circles are great for maybe bullying or other offenses at MCPS, but acts of hate against a group of people based on the ethnicity or religion — that is not the place,” said Rachel, who is Jewish. “Restorative justice is a lot about forgiving who did it. And having to sit in the same room with them. It’s really re-traumatizing victims.”

“Children can’t learn if they don’t understand what the mistake was, or when there’s no conversation.”

Floyd Branch III, restorative justice specialist

Restorative justice sessions are voluntary, though Rachel said she and other members of the debate team felt pressures to participate. Going into the restorative circles, students didn’t know the district specialists leading the conversation or what to expect, she said. For example, some students had prepared remarks saved on their cellphones, but were told cellphones weren’t allowed. Afterwards, school administrators acknowledged they had made mistakes. She hopes the district will use the feedback to modify a process that she felt favored the offenders over the victims. The principal of the school did not respond to interview requests, and in other articles has declined to share the results of an investigation or what actions were taken, citing student privacy laws. 

But in an interview with the Washington Post, principal Robert Dodd said the incidents were taken “deeply seriously.” Whitman’s school paper, The Black and White, reported the students received a month-long suspension from the debate team.

Jorandby said restorative conversations don’t take away the hurt, but they can be a first step to healing, even with hate and bias. The district has developed a consent and feedback form for formal restorative conferences that emphasizes the process is voluntary and gives parents the opportunity to decline consent for their child to participate.

Related: Restorative justice isn’t a panacea, but it can promote better relationships among students

The official consent form is among the ways district officials say they are trying to make the restorative justice program more robust. Last school year, the district hired six more restorative justice specialists in the district’s central office, bringing the total to nine. Each specialist is assigned to serve a cluster of schools. The district is also paying a stipend to a staff member in each school to act as a restorative justice coach. All staff are required to take a short restorative justice training session and administrators have been asked to consider restorative approaches when crafting new goals for school climate, culture and student well-being in school improvement plans.

“It’s a work in progress,” said Damon Monteleone, an associate superintendent in the office of school support and well-being for Montgomery County schools. The district’s own data shows this: Nearly three quarters of school leaders who participated in a self-evaluation released in May said they were either early in their development of restorative justice processes or had no processes in place at all. Only 3 percent believed they had a “mature” process in place.

This is not surprising. With the pandemic and its ensuing disruption of in-person learning, 2022-23 was the first “normal school year” for restorative justice in the schools since the 2019 state policy change, Monteleone said. The district itself is still learning what works, but it’s not ignoring criticism, he said.

“You have to involve your loudest opponents in the process,” Monteleone said. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. If people don’t understand what you’re trying to do, it’s not on them … We have to be open to constructive criticism. We have to hear their concerns.”

The district is reaching out to engage the community through school-based information sessions, at which specialists and administrators discuss just what restorative justice is and listen to input from students and their families.

It can take time for restorative justice to take hold in the culture of a school — as much as three to five years, say experts — and, as with any major shift, the process can be controversial. But research consistently shows the approach has a positive impact on students. A recent report indicates restorative practices improve middle school students’ academic achievement, while reducing suspension rates and disparities, misbehavior, substance abuse and student mental health challenges. It’s most successful when all members of the school community are invested in the restorative culture.

“These practices can be powerful, but the devil is in the details,” said the report’s author, Sean Darling-Hammond, assistant professor of health and education at UCLA. Strong implementation means having high-quality and ongoing training for teachers and staff, getting principals on board, equipping students with conflict resolution skills and reaching out to families early, he said.

“It’s about how you create a shift in the way everybody in a school is doing things,” he said. “Every teacher has a new approach mentally and behaviorally when a student misbehaves. Every student has a tool to manage conflict when it occurs. There are new policies in place that are supportive of this shift … Parents are communicated with about this and understand the value of it.

“It’s a full immersive shift and tracking implementation is very important,” he said.

Related: Ready to drop out of school, until restorative justice offered a path back in

Such work also needs money. The Maryland law, while well-intentioned, isn’t adequately funded, said David Hornbeck, a former Maryland state school superintendent. In March, he launched Restorative Schools Maryland, a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for restorative justice policies and funding.

Rather than a few people from a district’s central office being called to put out fires, the work of restorative practices requires full-time staff in the schools, Hornbeck said.

“We face a challenge in people thinking that restorative practice is a kind of touchy, feely, namby-pamby, let-the-kids-off-the-hook thing — and that couldn’t be further from truth,” he said. Hornbeck said he also wants schools to track suspensions, teacher turnover, and student absenteeism to make sure their restorative justice practices actually work.

Despite the funding challenges, UCLA’s Darling-Hammond said it’s worth staying the course. “We don’t know the exact perfect recipe for implementation of restorative practices. But what we do know is that, generally speaking, when students experience these practices, they’re much better for it,” he said.

That’s the hope of supporters who embrace the philosophy of fostering positive relationships to improve school climate before conflict happens. In Montgomery County schools, officials say about 80 percent of the restorative justice work is preventative (holding “community circles,” promoting self-care, teaching conflict resolution strategies) and 20 percent is responsive (repair practices and restorative conferences).

Vicki Rotker, a sixth grade teacher at Kingsview Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, said she sees the value in community circles — which encourage kids to share ideas and experiences in a safe environment — at her school, especially since the pandemic. “Experiencing Covid and being isolated, I feel this year there is an extra need and longing to connect,” Rotker said.

As Rotker’s students prepared to participate in a discussion last spring, rearranging their chairs into a circle, she reminded them to set aside any distractions, including notebooks and phones.

“In school, a lot of time we are sitting and getting,” she told them. “This gives us an opportunity to speak and be heard.”

Students passed a blue-and-green squishy ball of the Earth around the circle: They could talk when holding the ball, or pass if they didn’t have anything to say. The conversation focused on motivation and homework. Afterwards, some students said they liked getting a chance to know one another.

Daphne McKay, who retired at the end of the year as a restorative justice coach at Kingsview, said the circles give students space to process experiences and create a sense of belonging.

“The more people we have in our lives supporting us, the better,” she said. “Restorative justice is all about sitting down and hearing one another’s perspectives and trying to find a way to come together and understand one another.”

Marcia Cole, a parent in nearby Rockville, said more families need to hear how restorative practices can benefit their children. The process helped her third grade son, who wasn’t getting along on the playground with a new boy at school, she said. The tension was becoming disruptive until the restorative justice specialist stepped in and invited the two to talk it out. They have since bonded over a shared love of Pokémon cards.

The restorative specialist “was able to hear both sides of the story and ask kids questions in a way they could truly process the situation,” Cole said.

As the district prepares for a new school year, it plans to continue sharing data with school leaders to help embed the approach in everyday interactions throughout the school.

“I’m really proud of where we’ve come in getting the work started for a district of this scope and size,” said Jorandby, the district restorative justice administrator. She also noted that early data shows that students who go through a restorative justice program are less likely to engage in misbehavior at school, such as fighting.

She said it’s difficult to quantify the conflicts that were avoided thanks to the 1,900 calls that restorative justice specialists have responded to in the district.

“Often, we see horrible things that are reported that have happened to our children or happened within our district — and we don’t know all of the ones that didn’t,” Jorandby said.

This story about restorative justice in the classroom was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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A bill that would have stopped Arizona schools from issuing out-of-school suspensions to students who miss class failed to make it out of the Legislature this year, despite bipartisan support.

Rep. Laura Terech, a Democrat, crafted House Bill 2748 in response to a nearly yearlong investigation by AZCIR and The Hechinger Report, which revealed for the first time the scope of the controversial disciplinary practice of suspending Arizona students for tardiness and truancy.

The Hechinger/AZCIR analysis — which relied on data from 150-plus districts and charter networks that enroll about 61 percent of the state’s public school students — identified more than 47,000 suspensions for attendance violations over a five-year period. Students reported feeling even more disengaged and academically lost after serving these suspensions. Black, Latino and Native American students received a disproportionate share of the punishments.

“Being an educator in the field, you often see that students are not coming to school for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have to watch younger siblings at home, or there’s something happening at school — there’s a bullying issue or they’re particularly stressed out about one of their classes,” Terech, a former elementary school teacher, told lawmakers at a House Education Committee hearing this year.

Rather than suspending students, Terech said she believes such problems “are better addressed through working with the student, supporting the student, learning what they need so we can keep them in school.”

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Terech found a handful of allies across the aisle: Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, for instance, told AZCIR he signed on as a bill cosponsor because he found blocking students from class for missing class “ridiculous on its face.” But Republican leadership never brought the measure to the House floor for a vote, after other members of the party expressed concern that lawmakers would be removing a tool schools rely on to give parents a “wake-up call.” Terech has vowed to revive it next year.

The debate comes as the larger issue of keeping students in school is receiving renewed attention statewide. Read On Arizona convened a task force this spring to address a spike in chronic absenteeism, which state law defines as students missing more than 10 percent, or about 18 days, of school in an academic year.

Chronic absence has long been an issue in Arizona, but the pandemic led to dramatic increases across the state. According to data from the Arizona Department of Education, 14 percent of K-12 students were chronically absent in 2019. By 2022, that portion had jumped to 34 percent, and some schools responded to the rising absenteeism with even more attendance-related suspensions, the AZCIR/Hechinger investigation found.

The Read On Arizona task force brings together members of the governor’s office, school districts, state agencies, community organizations and the legislature. Together, they will parse state and local data about attendance, chronic absenteeism and student performance, gather advice from national experts and develop recommendations and resources to help school districts prevent continued absenteeism.

Members of the task force say the AZCIR/Hechinger investigation illuminated the connection between suspensions and absenteeism in Arizona, something that had never before been made public. A key idea discussed at the group’s first meeting was the need to move away from punitive responses to absenteeism and instead focus on supports.

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions

“We have the right players at the right table at the right time to begin to have that conversation,” said Read On Arizona’s Lori Masseur, who is overseeing the task force.

The shift away from punishing absenteeism has already begun at the local level. The Valley of the Sun United Way has helped districts in Maricopa County address chronic absenteeism for several years, focusing on supportive approaches that address the reasons students miss school as part of a wider effort to meet students’ social-emotional needs.

The organization will expand this work in the coming years and Read On Arizona will launch its own professional development for schools, in collaboration with the national nonprofit Attendance Works. Both efforts aim to help teachers and school leaders move away from punitive responses to absenteeism.

“Sometimes, the suspension will actually get their attention, bring them to the table. And that, I think, would be a justification or at least the reason for some of these suspensions in those cases.”

Eric Patten, Yuma Union High School District spokesman

Dawn Gerundo, community development and engagement director for education at the Valley of the Sun United Way, said avoiding suspensions as a response to absenteeism is a central recommendation. A growing body of research has tied missing just two days of school per month to concrete consequences, including lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school.

“Suspensions are absenteeism,” Gerundo said. “If a student is suspended, they are absent.”

Among districts in the AZCIR/Hechinger sample that suspended for attendance, missing class led to 10 percent of all suspensions, resulting in tens of thousands of additional missed days of school. Students served about 1 in 5 of those suspensions out of school, which the U.S. departments of Justice and Education highlighted as particularly concerning.

Presented with the findings last fall, then-Arizona Department of Education spokesman Richie Taylor suggested the state should reexamine its policies around discipline for attendance-related issues.

But that was before the state superintendent’s office changed hands, coming under the direction of Republican Tom Horne in January. Though Horne’s opinion on the prospective legislation is unclear — his administration declined to comment to “respect the legislative process” — he historically has supported schools taking a hard-line approach to discipline.

If Arizona lawmakers move to ban suspensions for absenteeism next year, the state would join at least 17 others that have already limited or removed school districts’ ability to punish attendance issues with suspensions.

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Though school districts across the state largely declined to take a position on the proposed ban, some educators told AZCIR they felt attendance-related suspensions had a place as a “last resort.”

In Yuma Union High School District, spokesman and former teacher Eric Patten said that in cases where “the communication is there about what’s going on” — such as when barriers to attendance or punctuality include students working to support their families or being responsible for younger siblings — staff “can work on a solution rather than a suspension.”

But when parents haven’t been responsive to phone calls, emails or home visits, officials may turn to out-of-school suspensions to jolt them into action. Yuma Union was among the five districts that issued out-of-school suspensions for attendance problems most frequently over the five years reviewed by AZCIR and The Hechinger Report.

“Sometimes, the suspension will actually get their attention, bring them to the table,” Patten said. “And that, I think, would be a justification or at least the reason for some of these suspensions in those cases.”

School officials elsewhere in the state disagreed. Interviews with those administrators pointed to an appetite for state leaders to intervene to limit attendance-related suspensions, something Lupita Hightower, Arizona’s Superintendent of the Year and head of the Tolleson Elementary School District, acknowledged as unusual.

“Being an educator in the field, you often see that students are not coming to school for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have to watch younger siblings at home, or there’s something happening at school — there’s a bullying issue or they’re particularly stressed out about one of their classes.” 

Rep. Laura Terech, an Arizona Democrat

Hightower, whose district issued just three out-of-school suspensions for attendance from 2017-22, is among those willing to give up some local control of student discipline to support a statewide ban on suspensions for tardiness and truancy, which can push students over the chronic absenteeism threshold.

“If we’re contributing to that problem as administrators, that’s not good for kids,” she said. “If it has to be legislated, I would agree with that.”

For Ernest Rose, superintendent of the Phoenix-based Wilson Elementary District, the issue is similarly cut and dry. During suspensions, students don’t get support to change bad habits, and they don’t get help with barriers that might keep them from school, such as family and work commitments or school-based bullying.

“I don’t want to say it’s common sense, because if it was common sense, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Rose said. But “when we’re looking at overall academic attainment of our students, if they’re not in school, then they’re not able to partake in the instruction.”

Early last year, after noticing what he described as an overreliance on suspensions in general, Rose introduced a new code of conduct that discourages attendance-related suspensions. The Wilson district had issued eight out-of-school suspensions and 26 in-school suspensions to its youngest students for missing school between September and December of 2021, according to AZCIR/Hechinger data.

Rose noted the district continues to employ in-school suspensions in certain cases when ongoing attendance issues “escalate.” But he supports Arizona eliminating out-of-school suspensions for attendance problems.

Even when students are habitually truant, he believes educators’ focus should be on bringing those students back into the fold rather than issuing blanket punishments. “To suspend them defeats the purpose,” he said.

Terech cited the same logic in discussing her plans to revive her bill next session.

“Yes, it’s a tool,” she said of attendance-related suspensions. “But it’s not a good one.”

This story about House Bill 2148 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

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Dos veces por semana, Ricky Carmona, de 16 años, sale de su casa en La Verne para asistir a la escuela que se encuentra a pocos pasos del Boot Barn en un centro comercial cercano.

Terminó en la escuela chárter Options for Youth en Upland después de que fuera suspendido de Bonita High al comienzo del año escolar 2022-23 por fumar en el baño. Menos de una semana después de la suspensión, Stephanie Carmona, su tía y tutora, recibió una carta: El director había recomendado a Ricky para un “traslado involuntario” fuera de Bonita High.

Técnicamente, Ricky no había sido expulsado. Pero todo indicaba que sí.

“Un traslado es algo que se hace voluntariamente”, dijo.

Los traslados como el de Ricky representan una parte importante pero oculta de la disciplina excluyente de California, que impide a los estudiantes asistir a sus escuelas y los empuja a nuevos campus o a escuelas alternativas más pequeñas, según una investigación del Hechinger Report.

Mientras que algunos educadores defienden los traslados como una alternativa más suave a la expulsión, los críticos dicen que estos movimientos tienen protecciones limitadas o nulas del debido proceso y pueden acarrear los mismos problemas asociados con la expulsión al interrumpir la educación de un estudiante.

A pesar de las políticas que requieren que los distritos escolares de California informen sobre el número de estudiantes transferidos, los requisitos de información del Departamento de Educación del estado, superpuestos y vagos, significan que frecuentemente no está claro por qué un estudiante fue cambiado de escuela.

Los funcionarios de California se negaron a proporcionar datos a nivel estatal sobre las transferencias, diciendo que la base de datos en la que mantienen la información está exenta de divulgación, ya que contiene información que identifica a los estudiantes.

Un análisis de Hechinger de los informes a nivel de distrito — obtenidos a través de solicitudes de registros públicos a 23 de los distritos más grandes del estado — reveló una visión más profunda de las prácticas locales de transferencia que existen con poca responsabilidad pública o políticas claras de divulgación.

Durante cinco años académicos, de 2016-17 a 2020-21, estos distritos registraron 5.800 transferencias por “razones disciplinarias específicas”. Hasta 3.700 de estas transferencias podrían haber sido expulsiones. Los distritos escolares están obligados a informar de las expulsiones al estado y al público. Pero la categoría de “razones disciplinarias específicas” también incluye traslados involuntarios como el de Ricky y traslados por orden judicial a escuelas de centros de justicia juvenil.

Los distritos — que atienden a casi 1 millón, o alrededor del 17 por ciento, de los 5,9 millones de alumnos del estado — también registraron más de 16.300 traslados a escuelas alternativas. Los defensores de los alumnos y los educadores afirman que estos traslados se producen con frecuencia tras problemas de conducta. Pero el estado no exige a los distritos que especifiquen la razón por la que un estudiante es trasladado a una escuela alternativa.

Los estudiantes pueden inscribirse en escuelas alternativas para satisfacer sus necesidades: campus más pequeños, apoyo conductual o académico o una jornada escolar más flexible. Los educadores y otras personas afirman que puede ser beneficioso para algunos alumnos cambiar de escuela y empezar de cero.

Pero los defensores dicen que la transparencia es necesaria en los datos del estado para garantizar que los distritos no están ocultando las transferencias por motivos disciplinarios a las escuelas alternativas, especialmente cuando eso campus pueden tener menor rigor académico, bajas tasas de graduación y el absentismo crónico más alto.

“Los traslados se están utilizando como una forma encubierta de sacar a los niños de las escuelas”, dijo Chelsea Helena, abogada de educación de Neighborhood Legal Services del condado de Los Ángeles. “Y está afectando más a los niños afroamericanos y latinos”.

En la mayoría de los distritos, incluyendo San Bernardino City Unified, Long Beach Unified y Oakland Unified, los estudiantes afroamericanos estaban desproporcionadamente representados entre los estudiantes transferidos por razones disciplinarias, según los datos de los distritos. Aunque los estudiantes latinos no estaban sobrerrepresentados en la mayoría de los distritos, su considerable proporción de matriculación significa que fueron transferidos con mayor frecuencia.

Relacionado: Derechos civiles en riesgo: Estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos son suspendidos más por faltar a clase

Es probable que se produzcan aún más traslados disciplinarios cuando se aconseja a los alumnos que cambien voluntariamente de una escuela tradicional a otra.

Victor Leung, director de equidad educativa de la ACLU del Sur de California, afirma que este tipo de traslados son “uno de los problemas más comunes e insidiosos” que ve su equipo. A menudo se presiona a los padres para que acepten un traslado voluntario a fin de evitar una expulsión formal, a pesar de que la expulsión conlleva garantías procesales y derechos de apelación, afirma Leung. Una capa adicional de supervisión requiere la aprobación de las expulsiones por parte del consejo escolar.

A diferencia de las expulsiones, generalmente asignadas por causar lesiones físicas graves o poseer drogas o armas, los traslados carecen en gran medida de regulación. Los distritos elaboran sus propias políticas sobre traslados, con normas variables — si las hay — para realizar apelaciones.

“Los traslados se están utilizando como una forma encubierta de sacar a los niños de las escuelas. Y está afectando más a los niños afroamericanos y latinos”.

Chelsea Helena, abogada, Neighborhood Legal Services del Condado de Los Ángeles.

En 2014, una ley estatal prohibió a los distritos obligar a los estudiantes a trasladarse si se recomendaba su expulsión, pero ganaron su audiencia de expulsión. Sin embargo, sigue existiendo un vacío legal que permite a los distritos trasladar a los estudiantes en lugar de expulsarlos y enfrentar un escrutinio mínimo.

A raíz de las preguntas de una periodista al Departamento de Educación sobre sus normas de supervisión e información del proceso de traslado, el superintendente estatal Tony Thurmond reconoció en un comunicado de prensa “que algunos distritos han empujado a las familias hacia el traslado voluntario o involuntario para evitar informar de las expulsiones”.

El mes pasado anunció la creación de una línea de denuncia pública para identificar los distritos que hacen exactamente esto.

“No se tolerará que los distritos escolares intenten ocultar los índices reales de disciplina mediante prácticas de enmascarar las expulsiones como traslados”, dijo Thurmond.

Una de las razones por las que las expulsiones han sido objeto de controversia en California y en todo el país, es por el trastorno que causan en las vidas y trayectorias académicas de los estudiantes. California tiene una de las tasas de expulsión más bajas del país.

Cambiar de escuela, sea cual sea el motivo, suele ser malo para los niños, ya que perjudica su desarrollo, altera sus relaciones y, lo que es más grave y constante, reduce sus resultados en los exámenes y sus probabilidades de graduarse.

En el caso de Ricky, va más retrasado en Options for Youth y apenas acumula créditos. Pasó más de la mitad del año escolar completando paquetes en su mayoría de forma independiente — y la familia está explorando un diploma de GED como un objetivo alternativo.

Ni el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Bonita ni Options for Youth comentaron su situación.

“Cualquier interrupción en el programa educativo de un niño es un problema”, dijo Helena, de Neighborhood Legal Services. “Especialmente siguiendo dos años de interrupción catastrófica en la educación de los niños”.

Relacionado: ​​Por qué los estudiantes blancos tienen 250% más probabilidad de graduación en universidades públicas en comparación a los estudiantes afroamericanos   

En los 23 distritos que proporcionaron datos, las cifras de traslados variaron mucho.

Por ejemplo, el distrito unificado de San Diego, con 114.500 alumnos, el segundo más grande del estado, expulsó a 335 estudiantes, trasladó a 288 por razones disciplinarias específicas y envió a 94 a escuelas alternativas.

Pero Sacramento City Unified, que atiende a casi 44.000 alumnos, expulsó a 52, trasladó a 511 por razones disciplinarias específicas y registró 3.281 traslados a escuelas alternativas.

Stephan Brown, director de audiencias y colocación de alumnos en Sacramento City Unified, dijo que las familias suelen apoyar los traslados.

La mayoría de las transferencias a escuelas alternativas en Sacramento City Unified son por razones distintas de la disciplina, como estar atrasado en las clases, dijo. El distrito se ha asociado con organizaciones comunitarias que ayudan a mediar en los conflictos y a minimizar la necesidad de aplicar medidas como la exclusión. Brown considera que los traslados son una alternativa positiva a la expulsión.

Los administradores de Riverside Unified y San Bernardino City Unified también describieron sus escuelas alternativas como opciones educativas complementarias y de apoyo para los estudiantes que han tenido dificultades en las escuelas tradicionales.

Los datos de transferencia no son claros para el Unificado de Los Ángeles, que ha pasado años trabajando para reducir el número de expulsiones. El distrito superó al estado por casi una década en la prohibición de las suspensiones por rebeldía intencionada, incluidas acciones como mascar chicle, jugar con el teléfono, dar golpecitos con los pies y quedarse dormido en clase.

A pesar de sus iniciativas de reforma disciplinaria, el mayor distrito no parece seguir las instrucciones del estado para registrar sus traslados.

En los datos que L.A. Unified presentó al estado, obtenidos a través de una solicitud de registros públicos, el distrito registró cero transferencias por razones disciplinarias y cero transferencias a escuelas alternativas en los años académicos de 2016-17 a 2020-21.

El distrito opera un programa que llama “transferencias de oportunidad” para estudiantes que son trasladados a una nueva escuela “para abordar la mala conducta de los estudiantes después de que las intervenciones anteriores han fallado”. El distrito registra dichas transferencias internamente.

“Cualquier interrupción en el programa educativo de un niño es un problema. Especialmente siguiendo dos años de interrupción catastrófica en la educación de los niños”.

Chelsea Helena, abogada, Neighborhood Legal Services del Condado de Los Ángeles.

Un portavoz del distrito describió por escrito los traslados de oportunidad como una respuesta menos rígida a un problema de mala conducta que no llega a justificar la expulsión. Estos traslados suelen ser voluntarios, es decir, propuestos por la escuela o el distrito pero aceptados por la familia del alumno. Los padres pueden apelar el traslado, y la decisión del comité de apelaciones es definitiva.

Los registros internos de L.A. Unified muestran que realizó 138 transferencias de oportunidad desde el año escolar 2017-18 hasta 2021-22.

El distrito registra las transferencias de oportunidad con el estado como “transferencias regulares, no disciplinarias” porque son voluntarias, dijo el portavoz. Pero tal clasificación entra en conflicto con la propia definición del distrito relacionada con la disciplina y con la política estatal.

L.A. Unified sirvió a casi 35,000 estudiantes a través de 53 de sus escuelas alternativas en 2021-22, según los datos de inscripción del estado. Los funcionarios no contestaron preguntas sobre cómo se registran las transferencias a las escuelas alternativas.

Relacionado: Cuando el castigo es el mismo que el delito: Suspendido por faltar a clase

Los esfuerzos disciplinarios se han centrado en ampliar los programas que fomentan el comportamiento positivo de los estudiantes y mejoran la cultura escolar, incluido un enfoque diario en la atención plena y las prácticas informadas sobre traumas.

“Realmente tenemos una serie de prácticas que están trabajando para abordar el clima escolar y la cultura positiva en todas las escuelas”, dijo Pia Escudero, director ejecutivo del distrito de salud estudiantil y servicios humanos.

Megan Stanton-Trehan, directora de la Clínica de Educación sobre Justicia Juvenil de la Facultad de Derecho de Loyola, reconoce que el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles ha tomado medidas para reducir la disciplina excluyente, pero cuestiona la exactitud de los datos sobre traslados comunicados por el distrito.

Sin una distinción clara entre los traslados que están relacionados con la disciplina y los que no lo están, “se hace difícil para la comunidad entender cuáles son los verdaderos problemas”, dijo Stanton-Trehan. “¿Se trata realmente de disciplina? ¿Se trata de asistencia? ¿Necesita el alumno educación especial u otro tipo de apoyo que no está recibiendo?”.

En octubre de 2021, Neighborhood Legal Services del condado de Los Ángeles demandó al Departamento de Educación de California, alegando que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos se ven desproporcionadamente perjudicados por las políticas disciplinarias de algunos distritos y que el estado no ha supervisado ni tomado medidas contra los traslados que funcionan como disciplina excluyente.

El estado está violando el derecho a la igualdad de protección de los estudiantes al no salvaguardar su derecho a una educación igualitaria, alega la demanda. Los abogados se preparan para ir a juicio.

Ha habido otros llamados a la acción legislativa, incluida la exigencia de información pública clara de las transferencias relacionadas con la disciplina y de las categorías que identifican por qué un estudiante es transferido. La senadora estatal Nancy Skinner (demócrata de Berkeley), que ha presentado una serie de medidas sobre disciplina escolar, dijo que está estudiando cómo podría actuar la legislatura tras conocer las conclusiones del Hechinger Report.

El Departamento de Educación de California está trabajando en una guía para asesorar a los distritos sobre el uso de los traslados disciplinarios, dijo un portavoz.

El reciente impulso para abordar las transferencias se produce cuando las escuelas han informado de problemas más graves con el comportamiento de los estudiantes desde la pandemia.

Los expertos afirman que los distritos deben ser proactivos, lo que exige capacitar a los profesores en desarrollo infantil y adolescente, establecimiento de relaciones y gestión del comportamiento, así como dotar a los centros de un número adecuado de orientadores y trabajadores sociales.

Aun así, los responsables de los centros escolares se enfrentan a lo que pueden parecer prioridades contrapuestas: atender a todos los alumnos, incluidos los que se portan mal y requieren disciplina, y mantener un entorno ordenado. Los defensores dicen que entender los traslados es clave para comprender cómo se está imponiendo la disciplina a los estudiantes de California.

Cuando Ricky habla de su situación, se le escapa decir que fue expulsado.

“Podría ser [una expulsión]”, dice. “No puedo regresar”.

Este artículo acerca de expulsión escolar fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

The post ¿Expulsiones disfrazadas? Las escuelas expulsan a los alumnos, pero dicen que son ‘traslados’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Twice a week Ricky Carmona, 16, leaves his La Verne home to attend school in makeshift classrooms a few doors down from the Boot Barn at a nearby strip mall.

He ended up at Options for Youth charter school in Upland after he was suspended at the start of the 2022-23 school year from Bonita High for vaping in the bathroom. Less than a week after the suspension, Stephanie Carmona, Ricky’s aunt and guardian, received a letter: The principal had recommended Ricky for an “involuntary transfer” out of Bonita.

He wasn’t technically being expelled. But to Ricky, it sure felt like it.

“A transfer is, like, something you do voluntarily,” Ricky said.

Transfers like Ricky’s represent a large yet hidden share of California’s exclusionary discipline, blocking students from attending their own schools and pushing them onto new campuses or into smaller, alternative schools, according to an investigation by The Hechinger Report.

While some educators defend transfers as a gentler alternative to expulsion, critics say these moves have limited or no due process protections and can carry the same problems associated with expulsion by disrupting a child’s education.

Despite policies that require California school districts to report the number of students transferred, the Department of Education’s overlapping and vague data reporting requirements mean it’s often unclear why a student changed schools.

State officials declined to provide any statewide data about transfers, saying a database in which they maintain the information is exempt from disclosure because it contains identifying information about students.

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

A Hechinger Report analysis of district-level reports — obtained through public records requests to 23 of the state’s largest districts — revealed deeper insights into local transfer practices that take place with little public accountability or clear disclosure.

Over five academic years spanning 2016-17 to 2020-21, these districts recorded 5,800 transfers in a category for “specific discipline reasons.” As many as 3,700 of these could be expulsions. School districts are required to report expulsions to the state and to the public. But the category also includes involuntary transfers such as Ricky’s and court-mandated transfers to juvenile justice facilities’ schools.

The districts – which serve more than 1 million, or 17 percent, of the state’s 5.9 million students – also recorded more than 16,300 additional transfers to alternative schools, another transfer category. Student advocates and educators say these moves frequently follow behavior problems. But the state does not require districts to specify the reason a student is transferred to an alternative school.

Students can enroll in alternative schools to better meet their needs — smaller campuses, behavioral or academic supports, a more flexible school day. Educators and others say it can be beneficial for some students to change schools and get a fresh start.

But advocates say transparency is needed in state data to ensure that districts are not hiding disciplinary transfers to alternative schools, especially when those campuses can also have lower academic rigor and graduation rates, and higher chronic absenteeism.

“Transfers are being used as a back-door way of removing kids from school,” said Chelsea Helena, an education attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. “And it’s impacting Black and brown kids more.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

In the majority of districts, including San Bernardino City Unified, Long Beach Unified and Oakland Unified, Black students were disproportionately represented among students transferred for discipline reasons or to alternative schools, according to the district data. While Latino students were not overrepresented in most districts, their sizable share of enrollment means they were most frequently transferred.

Even more disciplinary transfers likely occur when students are counseled to voluntarily switch from one traditional school to another. Victor Leung, director of education equity for the ACLU of Southern California, says that these types of transfers are “one of the most common and insidious problems” his education team sees. Parents are often pressured to agree to the voluntary transfer to avoid a formal expulsion, even though the expulsion carries due process and appeals rights, Leung said. An additional layer of oversight requires school board approval of expulsions.

Unlike expulsions – generally assigned for serious physical injury or possession of drugs or weapons – transfers are largely unregulated. Districts develop their own policies with varying rules – if any – to appeal moves.

In 2014, a state law prohibited districts from forcing students to transfer if they were recommended for expulsion but won their expulsion hearing. Yet a loophole remains that allows districts to transfer a student instead of expelling them and face minimal scrutiny.

Following a reporter’s inquiries to the Department of Education about its transfer process oversight and reporting rules, state Supt. Tony Thurmond in a press release acknowledged “that some districts have pushed families toward voluntary or involuntary transfer to avoid reporting expulsions.”

Last month he announced the creation of a public tip line to identify districts doing exactly this. “School districts trying to hide actual discipline rates through practices such as masking expulsions as transfers will not be tolerated,” Thurmond said.

Ricky has a history of behavior problems in school, leading to detentions, Saturday school and occasional suspensions. But he said the forced transfer came as a shock, especially as it was handed down just days into the new school year.

“I was not on my last chance at all, or nothing like that,” Ricky said. “When I got the letter, I cannot lie, I didn’t believe it was happening at all.”

In a letter shared by Carmona, Ricky’s aunt, the district described the involuntary transfer as a generous alternative to expulsion. Ricky’s family doesn’t see it that way.

Attorneys from the Children’s Rights Clinic at Southwestern Law School offered to help him fight the transfer, but district officials at Bonita Unified held firm.

Jenny Rodriguez-Fee, director of the clinic, said the district's response to their appeal cited internal policy.

"But they don’t cite any laws," Rodriguez-Fee said, "because there is no law."

Over a five-year time period, Sacramento City Unified expelled 42 students, but it transferred 511 for specific discipline reasons and logged 3,281 transfers to alternative schools.

One reason expulsions have come under attack in California and nationwide is because of the disruption they cause in students’ lives and their academic trajectories. California has one of the lowest expulsion rates in the country.

But discipline-related transfers can bring the same consequences. Switching schools, whatever the reason, tends to be bad for kids, harming their development, disrupting their relationships and, most severely and consistently, suppressing their test scores and likelihood of graduation.

In Ricky’s case, he is further behind at Options for Youth and is barely accumulating credits. He spent more than half the school year completing packets mostly independently — and the family is exploring a GED diploma as an alternative goal.

Neither the Bonita Unified School District nor Options for Youth commented on his situation.

“Any disruption to a child’s education program is a problem,” said Helena, of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. “Especially coming off of two years of catastrophic disruption to kids’ education.”

In the 23 districts that provided data, transfer numbers varied widely.

For example, the 114,500-student San Diego Unified, the second-largest in the state, expelled 335 students, transferred 288 for specific discipline reasons and sent 94 to alternative schools.

But Sacramento City Unified, which serves nearly 44,000 students, expelled 52, transferred 511 for specific discipline reasons and logged 3,281 transfers to alternative schools.

One of the hundreds of Sacramento City Unified students transferred so far this school year is a 15-year-old named Kyla, who asked that her last name be withheld due to privacy concerns. She was forced to change schools as a punishment for bringing to school knives and pepper spray that she considered protection against off-campus threats.

According to the district, Capital City School — her destination — is “a voluntary K-12 independent study school characterized by its friendly, nurturing and safe environment.” At first, Kyla would go in on Tuesdays to interact with teachers in person, but those meetings have been moved to Zoom; Kyla said they last no more than 20 minutes. The rest of the week, she’s on her own, working from her bedroom. Kyla said she can go entire days with nothing to do while she waits for teachers to send assignments.

“It’s really lonely,” she said.

Kyla only has three courses right now — English, writing and journaling, her elective. No math or science, subjects in which she is behind.

Related: ‘State-sanctioned violence:’ Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddle students

Stephan Brown, director of student hearing and placement in Sacramento City Unified, said families often support transfers as a fresh start for their children.

Brown said the majority of transfers to alternative schools in Sacramento City Unified are for reasons other than discipline, such as being behind on coursework. The district has partnered with community organizations that help mediate conflicts and minimize the need for exclusionary discipline. Brown considers transfers to be a positive alternative to expulsion, rather than a shadow of the same process.

Administrators in Riverside Unified and San Bernardino City Unified school districts also described their alternative schools as supportive, complementary educational options for students who struggled in traditional schools.

Transfer data is unclear in Los Angeles Unified, which has spent years working to reduce exclusionary discipline. The district, which serves more than 400,000 students, beat the state by almost a decade in banning suspensions for willful defiance, including for actions such as chewing gum, playing with a phone, tapping feet and napping.

Despite its discipline reform initiatives, California’s largest district does not appear to follow the state’s instructions for logging its transfers.

In data LAUSD submitted to the state, obtained from the district through a public records request, the district reported zero transfers for discipline reasons and zero transfers to alternative schools from the 2016-17 through 2020-21 school years.

The district operates a program it calls “opportunity transfers” for students who are moved to a new school “to address student misconduct after prior interventions have failed.”

A district spokesperson, in writing, described opportunity transfers as a response to less egregious student misbehavior that falls short of an expulsion. They tend to be voluntary, proposed by the school or district, but agreed upon by a student’s family. Parents can appeal the transfer and the decision of the appeal committee is final.

“Transfers are being used as a back-door way of removing kids from school. And it’s impacting Black and brown kids more.”

Chelsea Helena, education attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County

LAUSD's internal records show the district made 138 opportunity transfers districtwide from the 2017-18 school year through the 2021-22 school year.

The district logs opportunity transfers with the state as “regular, nondisciplinary transfers” because they are voluntary, the spokesperson said. But such a classification conflicts with its own discipline-related definition and state guidance.

LAUSD served almost 35,000 students across 53 of its alternative schools during the 2021-22 school year, according to state enrollment data. Officials did not answer questions about how students come to be enrolled in alternative schools or how their transfers to alternative schools are recorded.

The district’s discipline efforts have focused on expanding programs nurturing positive student behavior and improving school culture, including with a daily focus on mindfulness and trauma-informed practices.

“We truly have an array of practices that are working to address school climate and positive culture in all schools,” said Pia Escudero, the district’s executive director of student health and human services.

Megan Stanton-Trehan, director of the Youth Justice Education Clinic at Los Angeles’ Loyola Law School, credits LAUSD for taking steps to reduce exclusionary discipline, but she said she and others question the accuracy of the district’s reported transfer data.

“If it’s not clear the different categories of transfers that are happening, it becomes difficult for the community to understand what the real problems are,” she said. “Is it really discipline? Is it attendance? Does the student need special education or other supports that they’re not receiving?”

In October 2021, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County filed suit against the California Department of Education, alleging Black and Latino students are disproportionately harmed by some districts’ disciplinary policies and the state’s failure to monitor and take action againsttransfers that function as exclusionary discipline.

The state is violating the right of equal protection for students by failing to safeguard their right to an equal education, the suit alleges. Attorneys are currently preparing to go to trial.

The 38,000-student Sweetwater Union High School District expelled just 23 students over the five-year time period it transferred 626 for specific discipline reasons and logged another 4,583 transfers to alternative schools.

There have been other calls for legislative action, including requiring clear public reporting of discipline-related transfers with categories that identify why a student transferred.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, who has introduced a series of measures on school discipline, said she is considering how the legislature might take action after learning of the Hechinger Report’s findings.

The California Department of Education is working on guidance that would advise districts on their use of disciplinary transfers, a spokesperson said.

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Recent momentum to address transfers comes as schools have reported more severe problems with student behavior since the pandemic.

Experts say school districts must be proactive, which requires training teachers in child and adolescent development, relationship building and behavior management as well as staffing schools with adequate numbers of counselors and social workers.

Santa Ana Unified maintains its low expulsion and transfer numbers with the help of an increasingly popular disciplinary approach called restorative practices. Under the model, teachers and school leaders prioritize building positive relationships with all students, laying the foundation for fewer behavior problems. They also intervene proactively when students start having trouble, attempting to solve behavior problems before they get serious.

“Any disruption to a child’s education program is a problem. Especially coming off of two years of catastrophic disruption to kids’ education.”

Chelsea Helena, education attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County

When students act out in ways that demand more traditional discipline, "restorative" practices like "re-entry circles" aim to smooth the path back to class, repairing relationships damaged by misbehavior in hopes of breaking vicious cycles. “We repeat what we don't repair,” a quote on the district's Restorative Practices website, offers a guiding mantra for educators.

Still, school leaders face what can seem like competing priorities: serving all students, including those who misbehave and require discipline, and maintaining an orderly school environment. Advocates say understanding transfers is key to understanding how discipline is being meted out to California students.

When Ricky talks about his situation, he slips into saying he was expelled.

“It might as well be [an expulsion],” he said. “I can’t go back.”

This story about exclusionary discipline practices was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Editor’s note: This story led off the Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning. Subscribe today!

I spent the last year trying to find out how often students are transferred to a new school as a form of discipline, a practice that allows districts to effectively hide expulsions under a gentler name. Most people I spoke with described the process as an issue affecting adolescents. But toward the end of my reporting, I spoke with a researcher who said the practice is rampant in preschool.

J. Luke Wood, a professor at San Diego State University, and a team of his fellow researchers interviewed parents of young Black children for a project unrelated to transfers, but the issue kept coming up. Parents of preschoolers kept telling the team they had been counseled to switch their child’s school to avoid a disciplinary record, but were assured this was not an expulsion

“It seemed like they were using voluntary strategies to make families think [the schools] were doing them a favor, when really they were doing the exact opposite,” Wood said.

Experts and early childhood advocates have long argued that discipline for the littlest learners is opaque. What information is available suggests that small children are routinely punished in school: A 2005 study by Yale researchers found preschoolers are more likely to be expelled than students of any other age group. And Black preschoolers are disproportionately represented among those kicked out.

Wood now calls transfers a significant issue. “We talk a lot about suspensions, expulsions,” he said, “but the dark part of this conversation is voluntary and involuntary transfers.”

In 2021, the team published “Suspending Our Future: How inequitable disciplinary practices disenfranchise Black kids in California’s public schools,” calling for transfers to be treated like other forms of exclusionary discipline and require clear public reporting.

In California, the state department of education asks schools to log every student transfer, but the categories for transfers overlap and none of the data is published online.

Public reporting, like that recommended by Wood’s team, would help clarify disciplinary transfers for many students. But more would be needed to document what happens in largely private childcare settings to the millions of children under the age of 4.

The Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., published a report last week advocating for more and better data in that area.

The CLASP report calls for federal and state programs, including Head Start, to collect discipline data on publicly funded centers and track disparities by race and ethnicity. The report also suggests the creation of a federal office tasked with protecting the civil rights of the youngest children to respond when protected groups are disproportionately punished by teachers. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights already does this for older students.

This push for more discipline data comes after years of nationwide pressure to reduce suspensions and expulsions. Now, as overstretched schools struggle to respond to challenging student behavior in the wake of the COVID pandemic, experts across California say they are resorting to transferring more students. 

That may soon change. Following a lawsuit brought by Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County as well as questions posed by The Hechinger Report, the California Department of Education announced a new tip line for reporting districts that are effectively masking expulsions as transfers. The department is also preparing official guidance to manage district use of disciplinary transfers.

If your child or someone you know has been transferred as a disciplinary response, email me at tara@hechingerreport.org. I’d love to hear your story.

This story about preschool expulsion was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post Backdoor expulsion: Some preschools pressure or force children to transfer as punishment appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A recent troubling report from the University of Georgia confirms fears of school district leaders nationwide: Nearly one-third of educators are unlikely to remain in education for another five years.

There’s a good reason: With an anemic post-pandemic pipeline for teacher talent, educators are being asked to take on more or larger classes alongside the Herculean challenges of lost instructional time and a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

Even prior to the pandemic, the CDC reported that one in five children was experiencing “a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder, such as anxiety or depression.”

And that has only since been exacerbated — affecting all students and teachers.

During the pandemic, students missed out not only on key instruction, but also on a year-plus of learning how to behave in school, a fourth grade teacher from Tampa, Florida, recently told our colleagues as they worked alongside her to implement applied behavior analysis (ABA) strategies. She said that she was witnessing gaps between student behavior and teacher expectations for such things as the ability to form a line and get along with others, and that addressing such issues was making it harder to teach and diverting time from instruction.  

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions

To develop solutions for schools, we can look to cities. Cities hire planners to look at the larger picture of each community — carefully designing roads, neighborhoods and commercial development patterns with health and safety in mind. This foundation of careful planning helps first responders protect citizens and restore order when there’s a crisis.

Board-certified behavior analysts can play a similar role. They, too, are in the business of looking at the larger picture and developing a plan. BCBAs are trained professionals who address behavioral challenges, assess the learning needs of individuals and fulfill them from the ground up.

As veteran professionals and researchers in applied behavior analysis, we’ve spent our careers conducting ABA assessments and interventions to understand behaviors, from how they are affected by environments to how they impact academic progress and development. We collaborate with teachers to interpret results, then design interventions and incorporate behavioral goals into individualized plans for students.

One in five children were experiencing “a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder, such as anxiety or depression.”

Yet, too often, the role of BCBAs in schools has been confined to supporting only learners with developmental delays or autism spectrum disorder. Post pandemic, district leaders are increasingly recognizing the potential of BCBAs to support a wider range of students, particularly as educator morale and support remain a top concern.

By inviting BCBAs into more classrooms, schools can help overburdened educators address behavioral and mental health issues proactively.

Districts leaders can leverage the potential of these professionals in their schools in three ways:

1.To design instructional strategies to meet students’ academic needs. BCBAs can work with teachers to identify the behavioral skills students have acquired and their skill deficits, then design instructional strategies that match students’ learning needs. This tactic also frees teachers and counselors to work with other students whose challenges don’t require such targeted interventions.

2. To preempt behavioral problems. Great teachers know when a child is on a downward spiral, even if their behavior has yet to manifest in ways that disrupt the learning environment. As partners to teachers, BCBAs can translate educator instincts into actionable strategies, using behavioral assessment to identify the root causes of undesirable behaviors. They can then create interventions to address them before they manifest in crisis situations.

3. To help serve all students: ABA programs can be highly effective in treating students not just with pervasive behavioral issues but with emotional challenges, attention deficits, neurotypical behavior and even general compliance issues and emotional trauma.

We’re encouraged to see early signs of school districts across the nation already embracing this mindset shift. An urban district in Pennsylvania, for example, has incorporated ABA coaches to support teachers and classroom staff. They’ve told us that they’re observing a reduction of behavioral disruptions as they see young children building executive function skills, which we know are critical to productive classroom participation.

In Florida, Polk County Public Schools’ BCBAs are working collaboratively with licensed mental health clinicians to deliver targeted behavior interventions for students who have experienced childhood trauma. Our data shows that, as a result of this support, the district has seen an 89 percent reduction in suspensions and an 96 percent decrease in the number of school office referrals among students working with the behavioral specialists.

Now more than ever, district leaders must take action and look to these examples as a blueprint for success. Our cities thrive when thoughtful planning on the front end paves the way for a thoughtful response when there’s a crisis.

Our schools can do the same by tapping the right people to develop and plan interventions. And in most cases, that requires taking a second look at the skills of those already on staff, particularly BCBAs.

Brooke Walker has worked in laboratory, clinic, research-based and applied settings and today serves as the vice-president of School-Based ABA services for Invo Healthcare.

Juan Rojas, a former U.S. Army combat medic, is the lead behavior analyst for Invo Healthcare’s IMPACT, a multidisciplinary program that provides mental health counseling and behavioral support to at-risk youth in school and community settings across the country.

This story about student behavior problems was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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