From the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
Keeping Schools Safe While Reducing Suspensions and Expulsions
There’s good news and bad news in the report “Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2015,” the most recent in an annual series produced jointly by the U.S. departments of education (ED) and justice (DOJ). Just as important, there’s help available to sustain the good news and tackle the bad.
The good news is that schools are safer than they have ever been, and that crime in the nation’s schools has declined during the past two decades. Two examples illustrate this recent trend.
In 2014, students ages 12 to 18 experienced 33 victimizations per 1,000 students at school, a decline of 82 percent from 181 per 1,000 in 1992.
Between the 1999-2000 and 2013-14 school years, the percentage of public schools who reported bullying occurred at school at least once per week decreased from 29 to 16 percent.
The bad news is that large numbers of students are losing precious instructional time because they are suspended or expelled, especially African- American and Hispanic students. Two examples illustrate these conditions.
Among students who were ninth-graders in fall 2009, about 19 percent had been suspended or expelled by the spring of their 11th-grade year. Not surprisingly, the percentage of these students who had been suspended or expelled was higher for those who did not complete high school than for those who did complete high school by 2013 (54 vs. 17 percent.
African-American and Hispanic students are suspended more often than their peers. In school year 2011-12, 6 percent of all public school students received an out-of-school suspension. The rate for African-American (15 percent) and Hispanic (6 percent) students was higher than it was for other racial or ethnic subgroups, such as white (4 percent) and Asian (1 percent) students. Continue reading
|
|
|
|
