US schools find alternatives to giving student suspensions

Associated Press

DALLAS

The recent arrest of a 14-year-old Muslim boy whose teacher mistook his homemade clock for a possible bomb led to widespread ridicule of school officials and accusations that Islamophobia may have played a part.

It earned Ahmed Mohamed an invitation to the White House, where the Irving teen will attend astronomy night Monday. But it also got him a three-day suspension, which he says the district insisted he serve even after it was clear it was just a clock.

Ahmed’s suspension – his parents have since withdrawn him from the school – reflects the rigid disciplinary policies that many U.S. schools adopted in the 1990s. But many districts, including some of the nation’s largest, have been softening their approach, foregoing automatic suspensions, expulsions and calls to the police for one-on-one counseling and less severe forms of punishment.

“When we can’t tell the difference between a serious problem and a nonserious problem with a kid in school, the problem is not the kid: It is us,” said Michael Gilbert, who heads the San Antonio-based National Association of Community and Restorative Justice, which advocates a focus on dialogue instead of punishments.

The school districts in New York, Los Angeles and Denver are just some of those that have moved away from discipline policies that relied heavily on suspensions. State governments have also been taking action: This year, Connecticut limited out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for students up through the second grade, Texas decriminalized truancy and Oregon limited when suspensions and expulsions can be applied to students up through the fifth grade.

Last year, the Obama administration asked schools to abandon policies that send kids to court, issuing guidelines encouraging training school personnel in conflict resolution.

“We’re seeing a lot of change at the federal, state and local level that I think is moving us in a new direction,” said Russell Skiba, director of The Equity Project at Indiana University. But, he added, “There are still a lot of schools that don’t have the resources or are afraid to move to something else.”

Denver Public Schools started implementing a so-called restorative discipline program in 2008. District leaders were concerned about the high number of suspensions and expulsions, which the grass-roots group Padres & Jovenes Unidos pointed out were being disproportionately used to punish minority students.