Undoing Disproportionate Discipline

School districts begin to model restorative measures to rectify out-of-balance suspensions to students of color

Junior high principal Cicely Curtis doesn’t skirt from the challenges confronting Selma, Ala., her hometown and a city with a large number of single-parent families, rising crime, declining school enrollment and below-average test scores.

The community’s perception of the school she leads, R.B. Hudson STEAM Academy, doesn’t match the school’s harsh reality, Curtis says. The public generally considers the 400-student campus for 7th and 8th graders to be doing fine. It was not when she came on board about two years ago.

The school had spent seven years on Alabama’s list of failing schools and enrollment was declining, which pushed Curtis to take a hard look at her campus. She decided to dig up the root of the school’s problems, and that meant tossing out existing practices for disciplining students — including corporal punishment.

Kicking students off campus wasn’t improving student performance on state achievement measures, Curtis says. It didn’t change behavior. So Curtis and her staff, with a state grant and an outside trainer, took a careful look at restorative disciplinary practices such as peace circles. In a peace circle, a pair of individuals — be it two students or a student and a teacher — walk through a conflict, hear each other out and talk through skills to deal with future interactions.

“It’s really about the structures you put in place and your expectations,” says Curtis, who was a national board-certified teacher, of the academic and disciplinary changes she brought to campus. “It’s about that relationship you have, and that relationship you have is what helps you to shift the culture.”

In the space of a single year, discipline referrals to the school office dropped by two-thirds, Curtis says. Discipline pathways became clearer. And when a student doesn’t respond after a couple of attempts at restorative intervention, Curtis knows it’s time to shift to more intensive support, such as arranging sessions for the student with a professional counselor.

And expulsions? They’re not entirely gone, says Curtis, but they’re rare.