Changes Coming to NYC School Discipline

One of our favorite quotes from a NYC public high school administrator is that "Kids do dumb stuff." To be fully honest, he didn't say "stuff", but we assume our readers can make the substitution.

He uses this statement to describe the kinds of things that students do that can get them into trouble: fighting, smoking, wearing disruptive clothing, cutting class or unexcused absences, setting off alarms, misusing school property, gambling, and even "engaging in verbally rude or disrespectful behavior", something that teens can do with regularity. These are behaviors that school personnel are trained to deal with and often do so very effectively. However, since 1998, overall responsibility for school safety has been in the hands of the NYPD, primarily through its School Safety Division. These officers are in charge of security, such as building access, and can also get involved in incidents of student misbehavior either because they witness them or because school administrators seek their involvement. It is important to note that School Safety Officers receive special training in dealing with students and generally are familiar with a particular school and its students.

A major issue with having the NYPD in charge of school discipline is that it perpetuates the “school-to-prison pipeline,” described by the American Civil Liberties Union as "a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems." In recent years, arrests by School Safety Officers have declined. As noted in a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) looking at the 20017-18 school year,  School Safety Officers"were responsible for less than 20% of arrests and just 5% of summonses." The report stressed, however, that regular NYPD officers "who are not members of the School Safety Division continue to arrest kids with near total discretion" and that "369 arrests in schools (32% of the total) were for alleged incidents that occurred off school grounds and had no relationship to the school, indicating that the NYPD is using schools as a place to locate and arrest young people."

There is also substantial racial disparity in the students who are arrested and in the use of handcuffs, even when an incident doesn't ultimately result in an arrest. These are laid out clearly in the charts in the NYCLU report. 

All of this serves as background to a new agreement which will go into effect when schools open in the fall. This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) among the NYC Department of Education, the NYPD, and the City of New York is designed for "keeping schools safe places of learning; ensuring that discipline is administered fairly; eliminating disparities and inconsistencies in the punishment of students, and eliminating the use of summons and arrests for minor school misbehavior while continuing to advance school safety."

Among the changes in policy and practice set forth in the MOU are:

• Police officers should not arrest or issue summons to students "whenever possible" for "low level" offenses such as disorderly conduct, graffiti, or possession of marijuana. 
• School staff are not to involve either the School Safety Officers or the NYPD when students commit infractions such as clothing violations, cutting class, lateness, smoking, lying, or gambling (unless they can't be handled safely).
• Both School Safety Officers and the NYPD, to the full extent practicable, in instances not requiring immediate arrest or other immediate action, shall consult with the principal of a school  prior to placing a student under arrest, or issuing to such student any form of criminal process on school grounds. Further, in the course of any such consultation, officers shall take into account any information provided by the principal.
• Limits will be placed on use of handcuffs.
• Both School Safety Officers and NYPD officers will receive additional training in areas relevant to dealing with students.

Although not included in the MOU, NYC will be hiring 85 new social workers for schools. In addition, schools will be using restorative justice practices that emphasize defusing conflict over suspensions in all middle and high schools starting in the next school year. Finally,  Mayor DiBlasio has also proposed that out of school suspensions be reduced to a maximum of 20 days from 180 days. 

Restorative Justice

New York City's students are no strangers to traditional discipline policies. In the 2015-2016 school year, there were 23,000 suspensions. This reflects a sharp decline from the previous year, which saw 29,000 suspensions, thanks in part to a city-wide effort to reduce the use of harsh discipline with the City's 1.1 million public school students. Rates of exclusionary discipline (discipline that removes a student from the classroom) have been high enough in recent years to prompt educators to seek alternative discipline strategies. 

One strategy that’s been sweeping the nation is restorative justice, a practice that originated as a community-based justice reform for criminal offenses, but has since trickled down into the educational system. Restorative justice is built upon the fundamental assumption that a school building is a community, and all members of that community should be expected to participate. It’s already been implemented with integrity in the Oakland, California public schools, and is potentially a great resource about which all teachers and families should be aware.

Restorative justice is an alternative to traditional discipline strategies because it replaces things like suspensions and being barred from team sports with an ongoing collaborative problem solving process that requires students to generate their own way of righting their wrongs. The transition to restorative justice starts by building a community. This difficult process depends on the availability of training for faculty as well as teacher and student buy-in. Changing the culture of a school takes time, but one of the most interesting and exciting parts of the process is the talking circle. This activity is an integral piece of restorative justice, but it shows promise as a tool for any educator to use to help bring a class of students closer together, and it also conjures up the types of activities used in family therapy sessions.

During a talking circle, students are able to speak without interruption, often through the use of a squish ball or other object that designates the present speaker. The time spent in circles is meant to help students get to know one another and understand why they do what they do. They are typically implemented as a form of mediation between students in conflict – to build empathy and allow students to find out the emotional matters underlying their peers’ behavior – but circles can be formed at any time, not just after a conflict has occurred. Stepping back from academics and opening the floor to student voices sets the community up for ongoing success. It’s a lot harder to enter a conflict with someone you’ve had the opportunity to get to know on a deep level. Talking circles, both as a prevention of and in response to behavioral issues or conflicts, help build reciprocal relationships wherein students feel protected and will, in return, work to protect the community they’re a part of.

Restorative justice was a direct response to issues like zero tolerance policies, school drop-out, and racial disparities in the use of harsh discipline. Research has shown promising results in high-need areas, but the principles of restorative justice and building a classroom community are important in all types of settings. By teaching kids early on how to interact with others they may not always want to get along with, maybe they’ll carry that empathy with them into adulthood and use it to feel connected to our beautifully diverse city, which is home to 8.5 million people from at least 190 countries.

For more information about restorative justice and discipline reform in NYC public schools, check out the following resources and articles:

• An article in The New York Times from September 2016
• A review of programs throughout the country, from the George Lucas Educational Foundation
• The announcement from the NYC Mayor's Office of initiatives to make schools fairer and safer
• Resources from the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation

• A book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood by Christopher Emdin, that lays out a step-by-step framework for building a classroom community.  His writing is directed at educators in high-need areas, but his philosophy and methods are far-reaching.
  

Suspension, Disability, and Race

A new report, Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School, provides a disturbing perspective on the impact of school suspensions on students with disabilities and on African-American students (and on those students who fit into both categories).

The report, written by Daniel J. Losen and Jonathan Gillespie, is from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and analyzes data released in March 2012 by the U.S. Department of Education. 

The report notes the enormous number of school days lost to suspension -- more than three million per year -- and the fact that districts that suspend more students do not show that removing so many disruptive students from their classrooms results in any benefit (in the form of increased test scores) to the other students in their system. 

Among the most compelling findings are:

• the higher rate of suspensions for students with disabilities: 13%, or twice the rate of their nondisabled classmates,
• higher rates of suspension for all African-American students: 17%, which is far higher than any other racial group, and
• very high suspension rates for students who are both African American and disabled: 25%.

As we have noted before in this blog, there are special procedures in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that require an examination of the reasons a student with an IEP is being suspended and the relationship of that student's actions to his or her disability. This would be expected to result in fewer, not more, suspensions of students who have or are suspected of having a disability, not the greatly increased numbers revealed in the data contained in the report.

  

This is a well written and accessible report, worth reading for its analysis and suggestions for finding alternative approaches to discipline that do not result in excluding from school those students who often most need to be there.

Photo: Kevin Krejci / Creative Commons

School Law Institute

Yesterday's annual School Law Institute, sponsored by the Practicing Law Institute, covered a number of topics of interest to the attorneys, advocates, and school employees in attendence -- and should be of interest to parents as well. Not covered by the program, but very much a feature of the day, was the new format in which the conference was conducted, with each participant having an iPad at their seat, set up to provide the course materials, PowerPoint presentations, and course evaluations at the touch of a button. This is the kind of experience some of our children have in their iPad powered classrooms, and it was fascinating to see how this group of professionals, who ranged from their twenties through grey-haired seniors, handled this technology.

One topic covered at length was manifestation determination, the process by which a school is required to look at a student facing long term suspension (10 days or more, or a combination of shorter suspensions which add up to ten days or more) to determine if the student's conduct is connected to a disability. For example, if a student who has been classified as having an emotional disturbance and has an IEP in place is facing a suspension for fighting, the school is required to convene a meeting to determine whether the student's behavior was a manifestation of his disabilty. If so, his IEP team needs to immediately put in place appropriate measures to address this problem behavior and set up a behavioral intervention plan (or modify the one he may already have), so that the issues that triggered the fighting are included. This does not mean that students with IEPs cannot get suspended from school. Just that before that happens, the school needs to take a look at the student's disability and determine whether his IEP is doing a sufficient job of helping the student to deal with his areas of difficulty. These rules apply to public, charter, and state approved non-public schools, but not to other private schools.

Another presentation, by former Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York, Elisa Hyman, Esq. focused on the disparities in how affluent families and those without means fare when dealing with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It is more difficult for families who do not speak English, who do not know how to go about finding legal representation, or who cannot lay out tuition for a private school to avail themselves of the benefits of the IDEA. Ms. Hyman and her colleagues are working to use the attorney fee provisions of the IDEA to obtain services and an appropriate education for students who might not otherwise receive the free, appropriate, publicly funded education contemplated by the law.

Photo: Steven Depolo/Flickr Creative Commons