15 Things to Try Instead of Suspension

The Long Game—Daily ”Universal Precautions”

1.) advocate to Maintain school stability!

As much as possible, maintaining stability of school placement is far better for children with chaotic behaviors, for several reasons. Studies show that each time a child misses school, they lose 6 months of academic progress—kids who are already being excluded from the classroom and missing instruction can’t afford to have further setbacks in their academic instruction. Plus, kids benefit from the relationships they’re able to build over time with school staff, especially when they may have difficulty opening up and trusting to begin with, or their behaviors make it difficult to build social connections. Also, over time, school personnel are often able to notice patterns in the student’s behaviors (perhaps they are more disorganized in behavior when they’ve spent the weekend at Mom’s house, or they lose focus in the afternoons, or are able to calm more quickly when they can see their sibling), and have built relationships and knowledge about and with the family, especially if they have worked with siblings of the child. All of that information is lost and has to be rebuilt when a child changes schools, and a child has to learn the routines and rules of a new and unknown place.

2.) Strong, proactive relationship-building.

Often a key driving factor behind suspensions—and a further side effect of them—is a sense of disconnectedness and lack of engagement to the school environment or people in it. It stands to reason, then, that the antidote is building the student’s sense of connectedness with school staff and setting. Look for simple but very intentional ways to communicate interest in your student as a person, not just their academic performance. One simple strategy is the 2X10 technique: identify a challenging student and dedicate 2 minutes per day to intentional conversation with the student, for 10 days in a row. The increased connection between teacher and student will yield valuable insight about the student, possible ways to engage their interest in the classroom, and very possibly improved behavior on the part of the student. Also, check this out: this school in North Carolina had its teachers look at the students who were the least relationally connected. If you did this in your classroom and/or your school, what are the odds that the students who have the poorest quality relationships, are also the most behaviorally and academically at risk?

3.) Assertively connect with family

Building connections with students also means proactively building connections to their home lives, and to their families. Doing so ahead of or in addition to any negative behaviors, to tell the guardian you enjoy having the child in your class, or you appreciate a quality about them, reminds the student their worth and value isn’t only based on their behavior. Grant families the dignity of knowing they are the experts on their children, and desire their long-term success, and engage them as equal team members to problem-solve to a solution. Further, it’s key for schools to also understand that parents may be dealing with their own trauma history as it relates to systems and educational institutions. Use positive phone calls home, and, even better, home visits, as a powerful tool to build connections with families. There’s a whole website dedicated to explaining the simple model of home visits, and practical strategies for implementing. Studies show that home visiting also reduces absenteeism. Plus, here’s this amazing idea that one teacher had, to collect notes written by parents for their child to read when they’re having a hard day. You can collect these at open house or parent-teacher conferences—or on a home visit.

4.) Coach teachers in skillful classroom & behavior management.

Children who have chaotic behaviors likely are mirroring the chaos they are seeing in their environment. Because they haven’t experienced organization and consistency, they don’t have internal regulation—a behavioral metronome, if you will—to help organize their behavior. This means that they will depend almost entirely on external structure and regulation to guide their behavior until they absorb the predictability and patterns internally, to be able to mirror them back. This is where maintaining structure and predictable rhythms in the classroom come in. Maintain as much consistency and predictability as possible. Narrate and cue for upcoming changes or transitions. Teach kids routines, and directly teach and practice correct behaviors multiple times. Social stories can be a great tool for this. Additionally, while it will be important to make it clear that a calm, well-regulated adult is in control of classroom, it will also be important for a child with trauma history to know the adult is willing to share power with them—the child’s voice and emotions are respected and have opportunity to matter. Also, the opportunity for choices should be offered as much as possible, even when doing mandated tasks (“Do you want to start with your Reading homework or Math homework first?” “We’re going to go to our Reading Center now—do you want to hop like a bunny or prowl like a lion?”). For more info on helping kids with trauma history, check out these podcast episodes by Dr. Barbara Sorrels, author of the book Reaching and Teaching Children Exposed to Trauma (amazing resource that we highly recommend!).

5.) Create a cross-discipline team at your school that teachers can access for creative problem-solving.

Ideally, this will include school personnel who have a strong understanding of trauma and possible interventions to respond to it. This team should meet regularly to brainstorm around student challenges teachers are experiencing, to more informally access peer and cross-discipline suggestions prior to triggering a full Child Study process specific to just one student. Ideally, this team will include veteran teachers, mental health personnel, a behavior specialist, and social workers and/or guidance, as well as administration. Also, the team will ideally have multiple in-house members, who can be accessed by a teacher for in-classroom observations and guidance on strategies in real-time.

Toolkit of Discipline Interventions

6.) Be good detectives

Watch for patterns to understanding triggers & meaning behind behaviors. This will be key in knowing what tool in your kit to use when creating a solution. What we mean by this: you may notice that the blow-ups tend to happen in the afternoon the further a student gets from lunch. It could be due to a dive in blood sugar as energy gets burned off with brain work, or due to meds wearing off. Does the student consistently melt down when it’s time to go home, or when transitioning between classes, or most consistently in math class? If you’re not able to piece together the pattern just in informal observations, it’s time to use a formal tool at your disposal, and request a Functional Behavior Analysis. Here’s an excellent short overview of what FBAs are, how data can be obtained, and what solutions can be generated with the data. Remember, this is an assessment tool for children with or without an IEP or 504. Here are all the tools for school staff from Virginia DOE to conduct FBAs.

7.) Connect before you correct.

A local principal recently talked with us about how he sat down with a student to find out what was going on when the student was nonresponsive in the hallway to directions to take off his hoodie, which isn’t allowed at school. Instead of automatically issuing the kid a consequence, potentially including suspension, he took the kid aside to ask what was going on. The student ended up disclosing that his grandmother and long-time caregiver had just died. Similarly, principal Jim Sporleder, now a front-lines advocate for trauma-informed school practices, talks here about the first time he tried a “What’s wrong?” approach with a student rather than going directly to discipline. He now uses language like, “Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?” Often, for kids experiencing toxic doses of ongoing stress and complex trauma, a blow-up is the last remaining stress response option, to blow off critically building steam. Getting at what’s going on underneath will yield critical information to getting at the root of the underlying problem.

8.) Restorative Justice.

Restorative justice, the practice of facilitating repair of wrongs directly between perpetrator and those harmed, is a superb learning opportunity for kids with a history of trauma. Remember, kids with trauma may be coming to school with blunted social skills, and/or with a tendency to perceive benign social interactions as threatening, leading them to respond in unnecessarily or unintentionally aggressive ways. Walking them through the steps of listening to another’s perspective of a situation, understanding impact from their actions, and repairing relationships, is invaluable and desperately needed instruction. Kids of trauma are well used to broken relationships and alienation and exclusion—what they DON’T get practice in, and desperately need help with, is navigating restoration. Facilitated help in repairing wrongs again emphasizes to kids that it was their action that was wrong, but they themselves are not irretrievably bad—on the contrary, using restorative justice as discipline succeeds in binding kids more tightly with their school community. Check out this guide that gives tons of resources for schools wanting to practice restorative justice on a large scale, or teachers wanting to apply it in their own classroom.

9.) reverse suspensions

This article explains the concept behind reverse suspensions, as well as one school’s success with it—having a parent come sit with a child at school, either for the day, or during a specific class, when the child is consistently struggling with misbehavior. We know of a local middle school teacher who does this, who reports this typically curbs the student’s behavior, and parents are very willing to engage with him and participate in sitting with their child for a class. This strategy communicates to the student that his family and the school are a united team, creates stronger connections between home and school, and enlists the parent as part of the solution!

10.) seek ways to keep kids connected even during discipline

Phone calls home during suspension, and purposefully seeking reconnection on the first day back at school with intentional eye contact and connecting conversation, assures the child they are still in relationship and wanted within the school community. Rethink codes of conduct that unilaterally bar kids from school property during suspensions or expulsions. For kids with trauma histories, often complex students struggling in so many areas—academically and behaviorally, with both peers and authority figures—it’s critical they have at least one place they can experience success and have positive relationships. It may be the only thing that keeps them showing up to school, and keep them sewn into the school community. When that gets taken away, many of our kids will give up altogether. Additionally, extracurriculars can provide extra eyes on at-risk kids in especially precarious periods. For example, a teenage girl was placed in foster care, and though due to distance, her school placement changed, her previous school let her continue on the soccer team during her time out of the district. Shortly after transitioning back home, she was found smoking marijuana on school property with another student. She was expelled for the duration of the semester, and barred from all school property, including from participating in or attending soccer games. This was highly unfortunate, as it cut off relationships with school staff that had the longest knowledge of her, that could’ve spotted issues cropping up that could’ve signaled issues inside the home, and that she would’ve been mostly likely to talk to. Plus, the teen was cut off from an activity that could have been a protective factor against any further substance use. Another youth was expelled from school prior to coming into foster care, and did very well stabilizing his behavior and catching up and completing his studies at the alternative school after coming into care and receiving closer supervision. Even so, he was not allowed to walk with his class for graduation due to being barred from school property, and was never able to reintegrate or re-identify with his school community. For kids in foster care, participating in extracurriculars can be such a rarity anyway due to changes in placements and schools, and having one area of consistency across multiple changes could literally be life-changing for them, creating positive outlets, connections that could support their permanency, or pathways that could lead to scholarship opportunities or future education.

11.) Use in-school suspensions rather than out-of-school ones

Jim Sporleder, former principal of the alternative school Lincoln High, of the documentary Paper Tigers fame, talked about some of the pivotal changes he made that created a profound culture change at their school, including changing their practice of out-of-school suspensions to in-school suspensions (ISS). He notes that having a designated teacher in the ISS room allows kids to build a relationship with a consistent, caring adult, while offering them someone to process and reflect with, which is the true point of the ISS room. Sporleder also discusses the fact that keeping kids in the school environment actually creates more accountability for them, by not letting them zone out at home or numb with TV, video games, or drugs. He also mentions how the ISS room can be used as a temporary cool-down space for kids who need to collect themselves before returning to class, or before a more in-depth conversation processing what went wrong or teaching better options can be had. Remember: a kid who is actively dysregulated can’t learn or participate in complex thinking, so she needs to physically return to equilibrium first, and this can’t happen till she feels safe. Kids who are in active crisis or melting down shouldn’t be left in isolation, but given space with a caring adult in proximity to offer support or de-escalate as appopriate.

Targeted Interventions

12.) Child Find. Child Find. Child Find!

If a child is having consistent behavior issues, especially to the point it is impeding his/her ability to access instruction (e.g. constantly being sent to the principal’s office or ISS, or sent home/suspended, and so is not in the classroom), then it is imperative the child be fully evaluated for a potential disability, or potential underlying deficits in processing. Schools have an affirmative duty to locate and identify children who may have a disability. School personnel or parents/others can bring a child who may need testing to the attention of the school. A request for full evaluation should ideally be made in writing to the school, and the school must respond to the request within 3 days. You can find a full explanation of the Child Find and evaluation process in the Virginia Dept. of Education guidelines for parents.

13.) 504 Plan for Behavioral Supports.

Every child will not qualify for an IEP—however, even if a child does not qualify for an IEP, it is very possible they will qualify for a 504, as long as there is documentation of a diagnosis, and evidence it is impacting the child in the school environment. Here’s a good side-by-side comparison of 504 plans vs. IEPs.

14.) request day treatment

In Virginia, most areas have a local mental health-provider that provides some sort of in-school counseling support that can serve to de-escalate a student in crisis, process before, after, or during the child’s school day, or be on hand during specific classes to support a child. This service must be pre-approved and paid for by insurance, most typically by Medicaid. Most of the kids on our caseload have Medicaid, but it’s our understanding that private insurance does not support this service. FAPT can pay for this for non-Medicaid children, but generally won’t if the child already has an IEP, since the IEP can & should provide an equivalent of this support. Also, be aware that Medicaid is limiting length of time it will pay for day treatment, on the working theory that the service should help the child stabilize and ultimately no longer be needed. So again, if you have a child utilizing day treatment, look at building an equivalent to the service into their IEP. If they have never been comprehensively evaluated for an IEP—time to get on that! One final note about day treatment is that the child will need to be at a cognitive level where it’s deemed they can benefit from talk-based therapy, since that’s the primary mode day treatment uses. Often guidance counselors can help refer a child for day treatment.

15.) Link to community resources

If your connection with the child or family has led you to believe that there are bigger, long-term issues going on than can be solved inside the walls of the school, consider connecting to outpatient counseling. Additionally, if the child has a case manager or pediatrician, it’s possible the parent may give permission for contact between those entities and the school, to assist with conveying relevant information and creating a coherent plan to address ongoing issues. The child may need further assessments from a developmental pediatrician, autism testing, etc.