A report released today finds that while the Local Control Funding Formula was intended to help ensure that the unique needs of foster youth were addressed, in the first year of implementation few school districts developed goals or strategies specifically to help abused and neglected children improve attendance and avoid suspension, expulsion, and encounters with ... Read More
California released data today showing school suspensions and expulsions continue to fall as a result of new state laws and a wave of actions by communities and educators to keep students in school. School suspensions are down 25% over the past two years, and 15% last year alone. Expulsions fell by 20% last year. That ... Read More
Some people say that if you remove classroom distractions by suspending misbehaving students, other students benefit. A just-published research study says the opposite is true. The study found that high rates of school suspensions harmed math and reading scores for non-suspended students. Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Kentucky followed more than 17,000 Kentucky students ... Read More
As California students go back to school this month, there’s good news for everyone who wants to make sure they stay there. Starting January 1, California became the first state in the nation to eliminate in and out-of-school suspensions for its youngest children – K-3, and all expulsions for what is known as “willful defiance.” ... Read More
In Long Beach, students, parents and community members in the Every Student Matters coalition are asking the Superintendent and SchoolBoard to make their LCAP reflect what the research shows and students and parents there want, more money on prevention and intervention over police and criminalization. Every Student Matters members will testify in force at the ... Read More
The Fresno Building Healthy Communities (BHC) Health Happens in Schools Team – a collaborative of youth and parent organizations -has been organizing to ensure that restorative practices and alternatives to suspension are prioritized so that schools have the tools to work with students who are struggling, provide them with support, and help reintegrate them into ... Read More
We’ve made it easy for you! We filled in the spaces in the state-required Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) with the best practices that we have seen from educators and communities around the State. Click here to download our LCAP school climate template in MS Word format: [download id=”3217″] The Districts that are doing it ... Read More
Administrators at some of the nation’s largest school districts are getting extra help to keep students in school. The national organization Children’s Defense Fund has joined with school leaders to support discipline alternatives to suspension and expulsion. Oakland Unified School District and nine other school districts from Pennsylvania to Texas have agreed to pursue or ... Read More
Research Shows Zero Tolerance Doesn’t Work Study after study has shown that zero-tolerance discipline policies are harmful to all students and disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students. Recently, the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit center that studies justice policy recently released a report, “A Generation Later: What We’ve ... Read More
There’s positive news from San Francisco about the role of police on campus. Community groups have come together to promote a new agreement between San Francisco police and schools that will reduce arrests on campus and the troubling racial gap that happens as a result. UPDATE: The San Francisco Unified School District approved the final ... Read More
