School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge

NEW YORK TIMES
By ERIK ECKHOLM
CHOCOWINITY, N.C. — As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart. The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester. As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home.

Their punishment was typical of the get-tough, “zero tolerance” discipline policies that swept the nation over the last two decades, resulting in an increase in suspensions that are disproportionate among black students. School officials here say they acted to preserve a “safe and orderly environment.”

But whether banishing children from schools really makes them safer or serves the community well is increasingly questioned by social scientists and educators. And now the punishment is before the courts in what has become a stark legal test of the approach. Lawyers for the girls — who are black — say that denying them a semester’s schooling was an unjustified violation of their constitutional right to an education.

A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out — and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

A rising number of districts are already reversing course and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders.

“These students were treated like criminals and abandoned by the school system for doing something that students have done forever — fighting in the schoolyard,” said Erwin Byrd, a lawyer with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which brought the suit with lawyers from the Duke University School of Law. The school district says it must retain discretion over punishments.

Some 15 percent of the nation’s black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.

Zero tolerance and the quick resort to suspensions have been politically popular, but education leaders are having second thoughts. “If our primary obligation is to educate kids, then to punish them by excluding them doesn’t make sense,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

Over the last several years, many cities including Denver, Baltimore and Cleveland have moved away from zero tolerance, said Jim Freeman, a lawyer with the Advancement Project, a civil rights group in Washington. Among the methods shown to help, Mr. Freeman said, are anti-bullying programs, positive-behavior feedback and training of students and teachers in conflict resolution.

Here in Beaufort County, officials will not explain exactly why the two suspended girls, Viktoria King and Jessica Hardy, both sophomores then, were denied access to the alternative school. Robert Belcher, chairman of the school board, said in an interview that the principal had placed them among the “most egregious” violators and that he would not second-guess that judgment.

The mother of Viktoria King, a cheerleader with good grades, eventually paid for a home tutor. “The suspension put me behind a lot,” Ms. King said. “I couldn’t take honors and A.P. classes, and had to repeat a math class.” She is the exception among those suspended and still expects to attend college next year. Jessica Hardy received no schooling that semester. She later entered a degree program at the alternative school and recently had a baby.

Another suspended boy dropped out and has been arrested on theft charges.

Mr. Belcher said that the district would be happy to offer more preventive services as alternatives to suspension if it could afford to, but that it faced severe budget cuts. “Are you going to take money from teaching in order to pay for home schooling and conflict resolution because of a child’s misbehavior?” he said. “That’s a philosophical debate.”