Seattle School Board to vote on elementary school suspension ban
Plan would halt out-of-school suspensions in Seattle public schools, which disproportionately affect students of color
The Seattle School Board will vote Wednesday evening whether schools should stop suspending elementary school children for breaking rules, a move prompted by a growing body of research showing that students of color are disproportionately punished.
Seattle’s seven-member school board is considering a resolution that would eliminate out-of-school suspensions at public elementary schools (PDF) starting in the 2015-16 school year. If approved, the resolution calls on the superintendent of Seattle Public Schools to instead create plans for staff training and alternative disciplinary programs and to begin scaling back the use of suspensions in all grades.
The resolution is based on growing evidence that African-American, Latino, Pacific Islander and Native American children are suspended two or three times as often as their white and Asian-American peers. The same is true for children who are enrolled in special education or English-as-second-language programs, according to data crunched by UCLA and the University of Washington.
For example, Native American children were given 8.57 percent of all suspensions among Seattle students in kindergarten through the fifth grades in 2011-2012, even though they only made up 0.8 percent of the population. Black children, who comprised 16.5 percent of the population, were given 7.6 percent of the suspensions among K-5 students during that same school year. White children, on the other hand, made up 45.8 percent of the population but were issued just 1.09 percent of the suspensions, according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
Harium Martin-Morris, president of the Seattle School Board, told Al Jazeera that he introduced the resolution to the board in July. Students who are suspended at a young age, he notes, are more likely to keep getting suspended as they get older, and are at risk of ending up behind bars in what’s known as the school-to-prison pipeline. “Part of that is the criminalization of behavior that starts very, very early on,” Martin-Morris said. "This is a way to kind of Seattle School Board To Vote on Suspension Ban | Al Jazeera America: