DURHAM -- School's out for the summer" was the happy refrain for most K-12 students across North Carolina last June. But for students suspended for disciplinary infractions, school ended days, weeks, even months earlier.
Research shows that suspended students are more likely to drop out of school, to exhibit behavioral problems and to be involved with crime. Social deviance, isolation, poor academic achievement and unemployment are also more likely, making this everyone's problem - taxpayers, employers and the public at large.
Recent data show North Carolina with the third-highest rate and fourth-highest number of suspensions in the nation. In 2008-09, more than 150,000 students in our state received short-term (up to 10 days) suspensions. Nearly 2,500 received suspensions of over 10 days. That's a minimum of two weeks of school. In many cases, the same student received multiple suspensions.
With a new school year about to begin, the suspension problem deserves attention.
Consider these two hypothetical but realistic scenarios:
Scenario 1: Three students are each suspended for 25 days. As part of the suspension, one is required to spend 2 hours per day at a tutoring center. The second student must attend a full-time alternative school. And the third student is not required to do any educational activity while suspended.
This scenario highlights two challenges with the current suspension landscape. First, while school districts in North Carolina must have alternatives for suspended students, they are not required to offer those alternatives to every suspended student. Second, following current reporting practices, while all three students would be logged as long-term suspended students, the dramatic differences among their suspension requirements would not be reported.
Scenario 2: Two classrooms each have 10 girls. In classroom A, five girls were suspended one time during the school year. In classroom B, one girl was suspended five times. The problem this scenario illustrates is that in both cases, the suspension rate for girls is reported as 50 percent, even though one classroom had five out of 10 girls suspended, and the other had only one.
Policymakers and education leaders are grappling with what to do about the "suspension problem." But how can they develop sound policy when scenarios like these lose their differences when officially reported? Strategies might focus on an entire class when the problem involves only a few students. Conversely, one might assume from reports that a few students are responsible for most of the bad behavior, when in fact it involves many students. Policies and strategies for addressing high rates of suspension can be misguided because of misinterpreted data.
What should education and policy leaders do?
At the state policy level, revised reporting guidelines could include details of infractions and their consequences to differentiate among them more specifically, thereby painting a more realistic picture of the suspension problem from which policy can be developed.
At the school level, innovative alternatives to suspension are possible.
In Durham, Southwest Elementary is using a new strategy that had a huge impact in its first year. As an alternative to suspension, students continue to attend class but serve after-school detention for as many days as they would have been suspended. If parents decline this alternative, the student is suspended.
Parents have opted for suspension over detention only twice. Southwest has seen a 75 percent drop in suspensions and roughly a 50 percent decrease in the number of students committing offenses that would merit suspension. As principal Ari Cohen says, "The best thing for children is to stay in school, not to be at home missing days of instruction. The detention alternative is not only keeping students in school, but we think it is also preventing many behavioral infractions from occurring in the first place."
Ideally, schools, families and communities work together to prevent suspension through strong partnerships, effective positive behavior support programs and services for students and families. We endorse consequences that are appropriate and reformative for problem behaviors, but we believe alternatives exist that could decrease suspensions and the negative outcomes associated with them.
Cohen's approach is one alternative. Another is a sanction where students perform a needed service to the school or the community at-large. Business and nonprofit leaders - students' future employers - could be enlisted to offer other settings for productive and educational "punishments."
A district may not have enough alternative education opportunities for every suspended student. But with a new school year about to begin, one thing is clear: suspension to idleness - forced truancy - should not be an option. With innovative alternatives to suspension, more students will truly be able to say, "School's out for the summer."
