After a recent series of hate incidents at the Voorhesville schools, the board of education received training on student discipline.
We commend the school board not just for educating themselves on student discipline but for doing it in a public session so that the rest of us can learn too. Our reporter Sean Mulkerrin wrote about this session in a front-page story this week.

What puzzled us at first was why a lawyer would be conducting the training rather than, say, a school administrator or counselor.

We came to realize that laws are the way our society defines itself. As a democracy, our laws are created and passed by elected representatives of the people.

Our laws represent our values as a society and can change over time.

 Ryan Mullahy, the attorney for the Voorhesville school district, has worked in the field of education law for years. 

“My advice to clients has been changed over the years,” Mullahy told the board as he explained the shift in New York state away from exclusionary discipline and towards restorative justice.

Exclusionary discipline is when a student is taken from the classroom — sometimes briefly, being sent to the principal’s office; other times, for longer periods, being suspended in school or at home — while restorative justice keeps the student in school to work out the issues or differences that caused the problem in the first place.

The trend toward “zero tolerance” for rule-breakers at school increased the use of exclusionary discipline. Zero-tolerance policies were popular in schools in the 1980s to curb drug use and were expanded in the 1990s with fears about gun violence.

Zero-tolerance policies became widespread for a variety of infractions and have been disproportionately applied to students of color and students from poor backgrounds. The United Nations Human Rights Committee in 2014 recommended that the United States government “promote the use of alternatives to the application of criminal law” when dealing with students.

That same year, the Obama administration issued guidelines for schools to curb the use of exclusionary discipline, especially for minority students. In 2018, under the Trump administration, those guidelines were rescinded.

The restorative justice movement in schools started in Australia in the 1990s and has since spread. The focus is on students taking responsibility for their actions and working to repair harm done. Various models are used for this, ranging from peer mediation to restorative youth courts.

Five to 6 percent of public school students in the United States were subject to exclusionary discipline during the 2017-18 school year, according to a study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, posted by the National Institute of Health, which also found “racial and ethnic inequities” in such discipline.

Of course a classroom has to be a safe space for children to learn. But what is the best way to accomplish this?

Exclusionary discipline does not stop disruptions, studies have shown, nor does it make the classroom feel safe emotionally and physically.

Studies have also shown that exclusionary discipline does not prevent subsequent behavioral disruptions or create a classroom environment where students feel physically and emotionally safe.

 Exclusionary school discipline can hinder overall school performance through missed instruction, classroom absenteeism, and academic disengagement, which can reduce the chance of graduation.

It has also been found to increase students’ risk of future classroom disruptions, peer exclusion, and truancy.

 Exclusionary discipline exposure is also associated with a higher risk of adult incarceration, even when controlling for childhood delinquency. This has been dubbed the “school-to-prision pipeline.”

Engaging in class and graduating from school is the gateway to a job and a secure future.

Even health is affected, especially if discipline is deemed unfair. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that over 19 percent of students reported receiving unfair discipline during the previous 12 months.

That is nearly one in five students, and the percentages more than double that for students who “describe their sexual identity in some other way” and for multiracial subgroups.

“Overall,” the CDC says, “report of unfair discipline was associated with every health risk behavior and experience examined, including being bullied at school or electronically, skipping school due to feeling unsafe, carrying a weapon at school, prescription opioid misuse, poor mental health, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, seriously considered attempting suicide, and attempted suicide.”

The report concludes, “These data are the first to present rigorous evidence from a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students that links student report of unfair school discipline to health risk behaviors and experiences, foregrounding the current use of school discipline as an urgent public health concern.”

“An urgent public health concern" must be heeded.

We have covered school field trips where modern young children visited a one-room schoolhouse and were horrified to learn a child a century ago would be forced to sit in a corner, wearing a dunce cap.  Such public humiliation seems unthinkable today.

But by reading the CDC survey, we realized the current harm that is being done across our nation by misplaced discipline practices.

Each of the districts we cover has a code of conduct for students and policies that spell out discipline. We urge our school boards, as the Voorheesville board is doing, to take a close look at their policies.

If, upon examination, these policies are harmful, we urge creating inclusive, restorative-justice policies in their place.

Such movement is not easy; it cannot be a simple add-on.

To work well, such an approach, as described by the National Education Association, takes not just school-wide engagement but community-wide support.

The NEA reported on a Minnesota study, “Disciplined and Disconnected: How Students Experience Exclusionary Discipline in Minnesota and the Promise of Non-Exclusionary Alternatives,” that found, in a close look at three districts, students wanted to be engaged but felt that penalization methods kept them from doing so.

“All you got to do is get suspended one time and you’re labeled,” said one student interviewed for the study. “I see it, like they follow the same kids around, like everybody knows, hey, those are the bad kids ….”

That Minnesota student’s comment made us reflect on stories we had written at the start of this school year in Guilderland.

We talked to a woman on the first day of school who was worried because her son would be starting high school with a classmate who the February before, as an eighth-grader at Farnsworth Middle School, had created a “kill list” with the names of 20 students and a teacher. Her son was one of the listed students.

The boy who made the list had not been in class for the rest of the school year.

Of course we could understand the mother’s fear, heightened by another school shooting that week, this time in Georgia.

She was frustrated because she couldn’t learn what plan the school had in place to guarantee safety for the listed students. We couldn’t find that out, either.

Then, at the next school board meeting, a group of scared and angry parents confronted the board with their frustrations about having this boy back in school.

Several suggested the boy should be home-schooled and not return to school. 

A student told the board, “Yes, he has two people, two adults who are walking around with him 24/7 …. I don’t trust that student. I don’t trust him. I walked by him in the hall one time …. He could just slip away.”

The board and the administration stayed the course and we have heard no complaints in the four months since. They were, of course, following the law.

As the district’s lawyer told the parents, “A resident has an absolute legal right to attend school.”

The director of communications for the State Education Department, sent us an unsolicited copy of correspondence to Guilderland’s superintendent from Daniel Morton-Bentley, counsel and deputy commissioner of the department.

“The State Education Department agrees with Guilderland’s position that student disciplinary records, including the existence or length of a student suspension, are confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act,” Morton-Bentley wrote.

He went on, “The Department further agrees that, absent a suspension, all students ‘have a constitutional right to a sound basic education’ in the district where they reside …

“Additionally, while I understand from news reports that certain community members have expressed opposition to a specific student’s return to school, those individuals ‘lack standing to compel [Guilderland] to impose discipline on other students,’ he wrote.

Morton-Bentley concluded, “The Department supports your efforts to welcome a student who has been suspended back into the school community.”

And so we end where we began — with the law as the way our society defines itself.

Welcoming this student back into the school community, as this lawyer put it, gives him a chance for a worthwhile future. Rather than forever being labeled, as the Minnesota student put it, as a threat, perhaps some of his classmates will come to know him.

Perhaps he will have a chance to apologize to them; they may even forgive him for the list he made as an eighth-grader and call him a friend.

A school should be a place where a child can make a mistake, be corrected, take responsibility for that mistake, learn from it, and carry on with his life.

The health and safety not just of individual students but of our society as a whole depends on it.