A National Call to Stop Using Out-of-School Suspensions

Students, educators, parents, and community leaders have launched a national call for a moratorium on out-of-school suspensions and for schools to adopt more constructive disciplinary policies that benefit students, classrooms and communities.

The Solutions Not Suspensions initiative, announced last Tuesday at an event led by theDignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) and theOpportunity to Learn Campaign in Los Angeles, comes on the heels of a series of reports exposing the dramatic racial disparities in school suspensions. Earlier this year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ survey found that Black students are more than three-and-a-half times as likely as white students to be suspended or expelled, In addition, more than 70 percent of students arrested in school were Black or Hispanic. Civil rights advocates have long argued that these punitive actions only exacerbate the achievement gap, contribute to high dropout rates and increase the likelihood of student arrests and referrals to the juvenile justice system.

“At a time when we should be expanding learning opportunities for all young people we are cutting classroom time for those who need it most,” said Jermaine Banks, a student organizer with Power U Center for Social Change, a Miami, FL-based education and social justice organization. “The harsh discipline policies now in place around the country do not make schools safer nor improve academic achievement, but instead feed the school to prison pipeline.”