Schools across US find alternatives to suspending students

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

It earned Ahmed Mohamed an invitation to the White House, where the Irving, Texas, teen will attend astronomy night Monday. But it also got him a three-day suspension, which he said 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Ahmed's suspension -- his parents have since withdrawn him from the school -- reflects the rigid disciplinary policies many U.S. schools adopted in the 1990s.

But many districts, including some of the nation's largest, have been softening their approach, forgoing 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 non-serious 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 also have 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 grassroots group Padres & Jovenes Unidos pointed out were being used disproportionately to punish minority students.

One such student, Margarita Atencio, said her Denver school suspended her in seventh grade -- before the new policies were fully in place -- after other girls beat her up and blamed her for it.

When she returned, she couldn't concentrate on her studies because she was afraid it would happen again. It did, and this time, she was expelled, she said.

"I was just done. I thought since nobody was on my side that nobody cared about me, really," said Atencio, who had to repeat the seventh grade.

Now 19 and a recent high-school graduate, she has volunteered as a youth leader for Padres & Jovenes Unidos for three years.

Eldridge Greer, who runs the Denver district's Whole Child Supports program, said the school year before the policy changes began taking effect, there were about 11,500 out-of-school suspensions and 167 expulsions. He said last school year, those figures were down significantly, to about 5,400 suspensions and 55 expulsions.