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Some Texas leaders have said they want to bolster school safety by cracking down on discipline issues.
Security is a top priority for many after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde last spring, prompting lawmakers to seek solutions.
But advocates for children worry about how severe punishments are dealt out, often disproportionately impacting students of color.
A Lewisville middle schooler’s recent experience highlights the complexities of balancing safety concerns and the detrimental impacts harsh discipline can have on students.
Why was a Texas teen kicked out of school for reporting concerns?
A 13-year-old girl overheard a boy say, “Don’t come to school tomorrow.” But she ended up threatened with suspension. The Dallas Morning News did not name the girl because she is a minor.
orrying about a potential shooting, she texted her friends about it just before informing her mom. School police determined there was no threat to the campus.
Determining that the 13-year-old girl, who is Black, had made a false accusation about school safety, school administrators punished her with three days of suspension and intended to place her in an alternative school for the rest of her eighth grade year.
School officials consider disciplinary consequences when students spread rumors instead of following “appropriate steps to notify a trusted adult” or using the district’s anonymous reporting options, Lewisville school officials said in a statement.
Eventually, her punishment was overturned.
Why a focus on discipline?
Last year, there were more than 50 school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week tracker.
Such attacks often prompt conversations about school discipline among policymakers as they consider cracking down as a way of identifying potential threats early.
Some Texas Republicans have floated a return to zero-tolerance discipline policies after the Uvalde school shooting.
During a legislative hearing on Uvalde last year, for example, Sen. Charles Perry noted that, “Not all kids belong in the classroom anymore.” His comments came as officials discussed whether the shooter’s truancy issues could have been a warning sign of other concerns.
But advocates worry this rhetoric could result in more children of color being suspended, expelled or assigned long stretches in alternative school.
Can discipline discourage students from speaking up?
Some also fear that situations similar to what happened at LISD could lead to students shying away from speaking up entirely when seeing or hearing suspicious or threatening behavior.
“Any report has to be non-punitive,” said David Riedman, a researcher who created the K-12 School Shooting Database. “What you never want is for someone to keep a concerning behavior to themselves.”
Security experts note that having buy-in from students on reporting potential concerns is key.
Which students receive harsher discipline?
Black students are more likely to receive harsher consequences for disciplinary incidents than their white peers, even when committing similar offenses, according to research published by the Institute of Education Sciences.
The disciplinary process, which often involves teachers and school administrators, can also be influenced by racial stereotyping, research repeatedly suggests.
In the 2021-22 school year, Texas reported 101,684 placements in alternative settings (known as Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs, or DAEP). Black children made up nearly 23% of those placements, though they represented just under 13% of Texas public students. Similarly, of the 400,431 out-of-school suspensions reported that year, nearly a third were of Black students.
Texas spent years moving away from zero-tolerance policies and disciplinary practices that disproportionately kick Black and Hispanic children out of school as well as those with disabilities.
In Dallas, Black middle school students were 11 times more likely to get suspended than an Asian classmate and 43 times more likely to be booked into juvenile detention in 2017, according to city data.
Later that year, DISD adopted a policy that bans suspending its youngest students from school except in the most severe cases to help address disparities. The Legislature then passed a law mirroring that move.
In 2020, Common App, whose application for admission is used by hundreds of colleges and universities, announced it would no longer require applicants to report whether they had been cited for a disciplinary violation at school.
The move came after officials found that “Black applicants reported disciplinary records at more than twice the rate of their white peers.”
What is the school-to-prison pipeline?
Discipline decisions can have potentially devastating effects as students navigate the beginning of their lives.
Research often suggests that once kids miss at least about two weeks of school, even in a single year, they’re seven times more likely to drop out of high school, according to American University.
Students who don’t graduate are then more likely to spend time in the criminal justice system, creating what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline — which disproportionately affects students of color.
Suspensions and expulsions, for example, can also result in learning loss, feeling isolated from peers, impact on students’ mental health, poorer academic performance and higher rates of school dropout, according to National PTA.