For the second year in a row, the California Department of Education released figures that show a significant drop in the number of students suspended or expelled.
On Jan. 14, Tom Torlakson—the state superintendent of public instruction—announced that the number of students expelled in 2013-2014 decreased by 20 percent over the previous year, and there was a 15.2 percent decline in the number of students suspended.
“These numbers show that the work of the department, districts, teachers, parents, and students around the state is paying off by keeping more students in school,” he said in a press release.
To reduce the number of expulsions and suspensions, the Department of Education has played host to workshops and posted Behavioral Intervention Strategies and Supports on its website, as well as worked with various education groups to develop restorative justice programs.
The Santa Maria Joint Union High School District said it oversaw a 33 percent drop in student expulsions and an 11 percent drop in out-of-school suspensions for 2013-2014.
“The drop can be attributed to an aggressive alternative focus for students, where simply ‘sending them home’ is not the first option as it was for many years in secondary education,” John Davis, the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said in a statement.
In 2013-2014, 279,383 students in the state were suspended and 6,611 were expelled. In 2012-2013, the numbers showed 329,370 students suspended and 8,266 expelled. According to the Department of Education, the highest declines were in a category known as “willful defiance.”
In 2013, the California Department of Education reported that about half of all suspensions and a quarter of expulsions in the state were for “willful defiance,” and a high number of those students were minority students.
After the report came out, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California wrote an article on its website that called suspensions for “willful defiance” a “statewide epidemic” that “has a disproportionate impact on students of color.”
A bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in Sept. 2014—AB 420, of which the ACLU was a sponsor—eliminated the ability to suspend students in kindergarten through third grade, as well as the ability to recommend expulsion of any student in kindergarten through 12th grade, for disrupting school activities or otherwise willfully defying school personnel.
The Department of Education’s recently released numbers show that expulsions for defiance-related offences in 2013-2014 were down 47.7 percent from the year before, and defiance-related suspensions were down by 28.9 percent.
“You can have the best facilities, the best teachers, and the best curriculum in the world, but none of that matters if students are not in school. That’s why we have put so much effort into increasing school attendance and reducing expulsions and suspensions and will continue to do so,” Torlakson said in the release.
This article appears in Jan 22-29, 2015.
