Could a new California bill make it harder to suspend kids?

A proposed state bill could end suspensions for students who defy teachers’ orders, disrupt school activities, or engage in other types of behavioral misconduct – requiring teachers to de-escalate such incidents instead of forcing a child from the classroom.

The bill, which was introduced by State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) earlier this year and will be heard by the appropriations committee next month, would extend an existing ban on so-called “willful defiance” suspensions.

Today, such a ban only applies to students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Senate Bill 274 would add middle and high schoolers to the mix, and dissolve the existing ban’s expiration date of 2025.

“SB 274 is based on a simple premise: Students belong in school,” said Skinner. “Suspending youth from school for low-level behavior issues leads to significant harm, including learning loss and a higher likelihood that affected students will drop out of school completely.”

When – and how – to suspend California’s children has been debated at the school, district, and state levels for years. Across the country, suspensions and expulsions measure higher for minority students, and in California, black students were suspended at more than double the rate of the overall student population during the 2021-22 academic year.

Students with disabilities and those who are experiencing homelessness or part of the foster system were also disproportionately affected. Dan Losen, senior director of education for the National Center for Youth Law, said those are the children who need additional support the most.

“Kicking kids out of school is a non-intervention,” said Losen. “It might relieve some immediate tension for the teacher, but it’s not solving anything. And it can actually make things worse.”

Bans on willful defiance suspension already exist across California. In 2016, the Oakland Unified School District began prohibiting such suspensions for children of all ages, along with involuntary transfers – moving students from one school to another – due to minor behavioral infractions. The district’s restorative justice department began to take center stage, training teachers on how to not only de-escalate disruptive students but utilize “community-building activities” to try and deter future incidents.

“When things go wrong in the classroom, we have a process for talking about what happened, and what was going on at the time and beforehand, to cause a trigger,” said David Yusem, the coordinator of the restorative justice program at Oakland Unified. “For adults, that’s also about understanding what triggers them, and figuring out how to respond in a way that does not escalate or re-escalate the student.”

The district’s suspension rate began to go down before its officlal policy was implemented, as schools made efforts to keep kids in class, dropping from 5.6% in 2012-13 to 4.6% in 2013-14, then leveling off at a fairly constant 3.9% through this last year.

Some teachers feel that Skinner’s ban on willful defiance suspensions will leave educators with little ability to control students that act out during lessons, and that it might make the classroom unsafe for teachers and the other students. Last week, Skinner amended the bill to specify that teachers could still remove students from the classroom and place them in a separate room with other students. But despite that change, neither of the state’s leading teachers’ unions – the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers – have endorsed the bill.