School Suspensions

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Although suspensions are a time true way to punish students for misconduct, many educators feel that this school discipline system has become ineffective and too costly. The price is your child’s education. Suspensions ruin student teacher-relationships. By disrupting this educational atmosphere, suspensions also harm the students behaviorally and academically. Because of all these downsides, the school discipline system needs a major change, and today I’m going to tell you what must be done.

Suspensions often change a student’s attitude towards the teacher that suspended them. Students become more hostile to that teacher and absorb less information. The student may also start being rude to the teacher, getting him or herself into more trouble. …show more content…

Many colleges see your record, and colleges are more inclined to accept a well-behaved, clean student rather than a student with a suspension or two. Evidence shows that a suspension doesn’t necessarily mean that the student’s behavior will improve. Data indicate that the frequent use of suspension has many undesirable and unintended outcomes, including a less healthy school environment, lower academic achievement, higher levels of disruptive or antisocial behavior, and higher school dropout rates. Not only that, when a student gets suspended, he or she misses classes, loses valuable information, and does worse on tests. By ruining the educational climate, suspension harms peers around the misbehaving student. In fact, in a December 2015 study that tracked 17,000 students for three years, and findings show that high rates of school suspensions harmed math and reading scores for non-suspended students (Perry and Morris). Likewise, the higher the suspension rates were in a school, the lower the math and reading evaluations were for suspended students (Perry and Morris). This just goes to show that suspension is bad for everyone. Is it really worth losing two millennia of education in order to reform one kid? That’s right, in a 2012-2013 school year, North Carolina students missed more than 750,000 school days (Wettach and Owen). That is basically 2055 years of education missed …show more content…

In fact, African American kids have a seventy-five percent greater chance of getting suspended than Caucasian kids, even if it’s for the same misconduct (Wettach and Owen). Just look at all the flaws the suspension system has. Changes need to be made to the discipline system, and I have a few suggestions. First, do away with the suspension system and replace it with a peaceful talking system. Second, bring other involved kids into the discussion, maybe if you hear it in many points of views, then you will understand the problem better. Third, have the kids involved apologize to each other. Often, after a student makes a mistake, he or she feels immediately guilty. Finally, the students undergo restorative justice. It basically means that the teachers get down the bottom of the problem and talk to the student. Even though there is no suspension, the student is still not off the hook. If they were being punished for vandalism, they should clean up whatever mess they made. If the punishment was for physical assault, then they should apologize to the teachers and school administrators and write a report on how violence cannot solve problems. If writing a five-page report is not severe enough a punishment, students should put in some time in school service by helping clean up the school. By using this restorative justice, students would better learn how to control their tempers or emotions. They would learn about the harm they caused and

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