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PHOTO BY GUSTAVO PERALES/ISTOCK
EdSource
How school discipline — and student misbehavior — has changed during the pandemic
Carolyn Jones
November 17, 2020
Student misbehavior hasn’t vanished during distance learning, but
schools are finding that imposing discipline in a virtual environment
is a complicated and often murky process, and that current laws don’t
neatly apply to online behavior.
The California Department of Education has not yet released suspension
and expulsion data from the 2019-20 school year, but teachers and
advocates interviewed by EdSource say school discipline, such as
suspensions and expulsions, is still happening during distance
learning, although less frequently than when students attended school
in person.
Cheating on online tests, disrupting online class, and drug and weapon
violations are among the more common offenses they’ve encountered. But
how those students are punished has varied widely.
“School districts have been so focused on setting up distance learning
— rightfully so — that proactive and transparent discipline policies
have taken a back seat,” said Mandy Leigh, a San Francisco attorney who
specializes in school discipline and special education law. “But it’s
something school districts need to take seriously because there’s a lot
at stake.”
Lack of data is perhaps the biggest problem, advocates said. Under
state law, schools are required to track and report suspensions and
expulsions and the subgroups of students who are disciplined — by
ethnicity, gender or whether they’re in special education. But data
about school discipline during the pandemic so far has been elusive.
Even when the state releases the data for 2019-20, it won’t distinguish
between suspensions and expulsions before schools closed in March due
to the pandemic, and discipline meted out when students were learning
at home.
Complicating matters, discipline strategies look different when
students aren’t in a brick-and-mortar classroom. Instead of teachers
sending students to the principal’s office or to an in-school
suspension room, they’re more likely to mute a student’s audio on Zoom
or turn off a student’s video.
Or, they might send the student to a temporary Zoom “break-out room,” apart from the rest of the class.
Those actions aren’t likely to be recorded as formal suspensions, but
in a way, they are still removals from the learning environment if they
last for significant amounts of time, such as an hour or more, said Dan
Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA.
“This is something we are very concerned about,” he said.
“Unfortunately, even if we had data from last year, which we don’t,
there is not a category or clear definition for an out-of-school or
in-school suspension from online instruction.”
Advocates also fear that if Black, Latino, Native American and special
education students are being disproportionately disciplined compared to
their peers, the trend will be masked by a lack of records of
incidents. Without such information, it will be more difficult for
schools to be held accountable for discrepancies in suspension and
expulsion rates, said Linnea Nelson, an attorney at the American Civil
Liberties Union of Northern California who specializes in education
equity issues.
Even before the pandemic, those subgroups of students, particularly
Black students, faced more suspensions and expulsions than their white
peers, according to data collected by the California Department of
Education. But the gap has likely widened because student misbehavior
is often the result of trauma or a crisis at home, and certain groups,
such as Black and Latino families, have been disproportionately
impacted by the pandemic and economic downturn, Nelson said. A survey
released in September by the Commonwealth Fund found that Black and
Latino adults were far more likely than whites to have experienced
economic hardship and mental health challenges related to the pandemic.
“Discipline data is one of the ways we get a snapshot of how civil
rights issues are playing out in schools,” Nelson said. “But if
incidents aren’t being properly recorded, then we have no objective way
to measure impacts on students. … We do know that the pandemic is
exacerbating disparities throughout society, including school
discipline.”
Student misbehavior itself has also changed with the shift to distance
learning. The ACLU and other groups are monitoring several high-profile
school discipline cases, in California and elsewhere, in which teachers
spotted BB guns or toy guns in students’ homes and took disciplinary
action — in some cases calling the police because they thought the guns
were real.
In the East Bay Area, a school district sent police to a student’s home
after a school staff member allegedly saw a gun on screen during a Zoom
session. The gun was an unloaded toy BB gun, and the family filed a
legal challenge over the district’s decision to discipline the student,
according to Damien Troutman, a San Francisco attorney who specializes
in school discipline who is working on the case. In Louisiana, a
fourth-grader was suspended in September when his teacher saw a BB gun
in his bedroom. In Colorado, school officials called the police on a
seventh-grader who had his hand on a “Zombie Hunter” toy gun. A similar
incident happened to a sixth-grader in New Jersey.
Parents in those cases believed the students had a right to have toy
guns in their homes. But if online class was in session, the rules
might not be so clear, said Leigh, the San Francisco special education
law attorney.
In California, possessing weapons at school is a violation of the state
education code and grounds for suspension or expulsion. The law applies
not just to school campuses, but any off-campus school activity, such
as field trips or club events, and likely includes a student’s home
during distance learning, Leigh said. Because most parents probably
don’t realize this, schools need to do a better job communicating the
rules and behavioral expectations during distance learning, she said.
Beyond weapons possession, a host of other offenses aren’t spelled out
in the education code as grounds for suspension or expulsion, but might
fall under an individual school’s discipline policy, such as
cyberbullying —when a student harasses another student online,
sometimes publicly on social media — cheating, harassment and dress
code violations. Troutman said some students have been disciplined for
political harassment — waving Trump flags during a Zoom session with
the intention of intimidating other students, for example.
In addition, high school teachers say sometimes students turn off their
cameras and shop, watch movies, scroll through social media or play
video games during class, all of which may be violations of school
policy. The infractions are not usually grounds for suspension, but
could be subject to other forms of classroom discipline.
But excluding a student from class, even by sending them to a Zoom
break-out room, almost never improves a student’s behavior, said Wendy
Tucker, senior director of policy at the National Center for Special
Education in Charter Schools. Tucker recently published a white paper
on how schools can improve their discipline protocols for students with
disabilities during school closures.
Talks with the family, referrals to a counselor or social worker and
creating long-term plans to address a student’s misbehavior are more
effective ways for schools to handle school discipline, she said. In
general, addressing the underlying reasons for the misbehavior nets
better results than suspending or expelling a student, she said.
“If you think about the loss of learning that’s happening anyway due to
Covid, seeing students removed from class is extra concerning,” Tucker
said. “I get it — If I’m a teacher and I have 26 third-graders, it’s
easier to stick them in a breakout room than reach out to the family. I
know that we’re asking a lot of teachers already. But for so many kids,
especially those who’ve experienced trauma, education is so important
right now. It really is a lifeline.”
For the past several years, schools have been under pressure to improve
the ways they respond to students who misbehave. Effective this school
year, the state has banned suspensions for “willful defiance” — defying
school staff or disrupting school activities — in grades K-8. For the
previous several years, this category of suspensions had been
prohibited only in kindergarten through third grade.
San Bernardino City Unified is among the districts in California that
had relatively high rates of suspensions before the ban on willful
defiance suspensions, but has since seen rates gradually decline over
the past seven years. Since 2011-12, the district has decreased its
overall suspension rate from 7.6% to 5.5%, in part by adopting
restorative justice, conflict resolution and anti-bullying programs
that have greatly improved campus climates — virtual and otherwise,
district officials said.
The anti-bullying program has been especially useful in curbing
cyberbullying, which has been increasing in many schools during the
pandemic because students are spending more time online, said Marlene
Bicondova, the district’s director of positive youth development. An
example of cyberbullying would be a student maliciously singling out
another student and urging classmates to shun him or her. Most schools
have policies against cyberbullying, whether it happens during school
hours or outside of school.
In San Bernardino’s anti-bullying program, adopted three years ago and
now happening on Zoom, school counselors enlist students’ help in
publicly supporting students who’ve been bullied, without the bully
being singled out. That sort of peer pressure has been more effective
in changing a bully’s behavior than suspension or other traditional
discipline practices, she said.
Of the 95 bullying cases school staff handled over the past three
years, nearly all were resolved successfully through this program, even
cases that occurred after campuses closed and the program shifted
online, she said.
“We learned that we can’t just keep suspending kids. When we suspend
them, they just come back angrier,” she said. “No strategy is going to
solve all kids’ bullying issues, but this definitely helps. We’ve seen
huge improvements and know it works. … Now we know it works in distance
learning, too.”
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