Dive Brief:
- On Thursday, the Seattle School Board voted to put an end to suspensions for elementary school students who committed certain nonviolent offenses.
- The vote, which made the policy official for one year, also included a review of the district's discipline policies and significantly reduced suspension and expulsion rates.
- The district is also in the midst of an Office of Civil Rights investigation of schools' treatment of black students that launched in 2013.
Dive Insight:
Last year, 111 elementary school students in Seattle were suspended for disruptive behavior, 25 were suspended for disobedience and 10 were for rule-breaking. Those aren't uncommon figures. In fact, many districts have relatively harsh policies for how to discipline students for relatively mild infractions and critics say those policies encourage an overuse of suspensions and expulsions.
Those policies also disproportionately impact black, Hispanic, disabled, and other vulnerable student populations. The U.S. Department of Education has chronicled systemic disparities nationwide, which has fed into a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline. The term refers to the fact that early, harsh discipline can push students out of class and out of school and into the courts and prison system. As a result, some cities have begun to backpedal and seek out alternatives to zero-tolerance school discipline.
But reform is difficult. Seattle likely faces a hard road finding a workable alternative and building consensus.