January 6, 2020
By Jonathan Butcher
Last year, police arrested a sixth grade student at DeGrazia
Elementary School in southern Arizona’s Marana Unified School District. Another
student accused the first child of threatening to “shoot up” the school. School
officials wrote a letter to families and said “there is no threat against our school” (emphasis in the original), but the
incident reveals the complex contours of the student discipline debate in public
schools around the country.
Questions abound: If there was
“no threat” against the school, why was such a young student arrested instead
of sanctioned a different way—say, suspension? Law enforcement officers
released the student to his parents after the arrest, but should the student be
allowed back to the same school?
This two-part blog series will explain the mistakes from failed school safety policies promulgated from Washington and how administrative requirements that limit educators’ ability to suspend or expel students put other children in danger.
Student safety is vital to every
parent, and state and federal officials are providing more money to schools for
safety-related programs such as security personnel and counseling services. Recently,
the Arizona Board of Education awarded 400 Arizona schools with school safety
grant funding, a program that saw a $20 million increase this year. In October, the
U.S. Department of Justice gave Arizona $2.5 million in federal grants “to help
prevent school violence,” part of $85 million in grants to states.
With so much attention on school
safety and greater spending on security measures and student mental health
programs, the research findings and lessons from school safety policies in
states and school districts are extremely relevant to policymakers today.
Statistically, shootings on K-12
campuses are rare. As my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation have noted, “an average of 10
students are killed every year by gunfire at school,” and while any number
above 0 is too many, some 800 students “die every year during regular travel to
and from school.”
Yet the tragic incidents at
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Fla., in February 2018—followed
in relatively quick succession by a similar shooting at a high school in Santa
Fe, Texas—reminded families of other disasters at K-12 schools, such as the
lives lost nearly a decade ago in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut, and at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Last year, Axios reported that a survey of 14- to 29-year olds in five cities,
including Parkland, Fla., in Broward County, found that 68 percent of
respondents said school shootings “are the most important issue facing the
U.S,” with one headline reading “School Shootings are This Generation’s 9/11.”
However, Washington should not be
designing and then mandating school safety and student discipline rules for
local schools. At the end of 2018, a federal task force rescinded a Dear
Colleague Letter (DCL) issued under the Obama administration that coerced
schools to limit student suspension and expulsion (also known as “exclusionary
discipline”). The DCL included directives from the federal Office of Civil
Rights that incentivized schools to focus on school discipline data, arguably
at the expense of student safety. Andrew Pollack, father of one of the victims
of the Stoneman Douglas shooting, and the Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden examined
this connection in Why
Meadow Died,
a detailed account of the fatal incident.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post found examples of K-12 schools in the District of Columbia
that expelled students “without calling it a suspension and in some cases even
marked them present.” Local media have reported similar data manipulation in Newark,
New Jersey, and Miami,
Florida.
Despite the rescission of the
federal letter, many school districts still limit exclusionary discipline,
including some of the largest districts in the country such as Los Angeles Unified
School District and Oklahoma City and the entire state of Washington. These policies attempt to lower the high rates of
suspension and expulsion among minority students, but as the second installment
of this blog post will demonstrate, the policies can result in administrators
leaving disruptive and sometimes dangerous students in the classroom.
And according to Politico, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said recently that she
wants to reinstate federal policies that limit exclusionary discipline, so policies
that limit school discipline have powerful advocates in Washington.
Every child should have a safe
place to learn. In the second part of this post, research will demonstrate why
policymakers should give parents, teachers, and educators who interact with
students regularly the authority to protect children. Manipulating discipline
rates without regard to student behavior is nothing short of dangerous.
Jonathan
Butcher is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute. A portion of this
analysis can be found in Jonathan’s testimony before the Pennsylvania Advisory
Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on November 19, 2019.
