Students rally for a ‘solutions’ bill

N.Y. lawmakers asked to curtail school suspensions

ALBANY — Even bullies shouldn’t be suspended, a student said Monday at a rally to persuade state legislators to support a bill that sharply limits suspensions.

The student, speaking in a near-whisper into the microphone, described how he’d been bullied in middle school. After he told adults, they suspended the other student for three weeks. But that was it — no counseling, no mediation, no education on how to handle conflicts. So when the student returned to school, he bullied even more.

The former bullying victim spoke in favor of a bill dubbed Solutions not Suspensions. The proposed bill would limit suspensions to a maximum of 20 days, a reduction from 180 days. It would ban suspensions for tardiness, absences, violations of the dress code, not having an ID and willful disobedience. Also, students in pre-k through third grade could not be suspended for any reason except when required by federal law.

School districts need to stop suspending students and instead focus on teaching students how to behave, legislators said at the rally.

Each legislator cited their experience as a former public school teacher or school social worker. They’d been in the thick of it, they said, and found suspensions were ineffective. Students returned to school without having learned the essential skills of emotional regulation and conflict management.

They should be in school learning those skills, said Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs, D-east Harlem.

He wants an approach “that teaches children to learn from their mistakes,” he said. “School suspensions only remove the children from school and don’t address the behavior.”

Other legislators said they wanted a bill restricting the length of suspensions because too many students were suspended for “stupid offenses,” as Assemblyman Brian Cunningham, D-flatbush, put it.

Examples included a boy who wore too many bracelets on his wrist, said Assemblyman Juan Ardila, D-queens.

The most common reason for suspension is “defiance of authority,” not physical harm or disrupting the classroom, said Rae Shih, education counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Students described many times in which they were suspended for “defiance” due to a dress code violation.

“There are a lot of assumptions about suspension,” Shih said. “‘Let’s get bad kids out of the classroom so my kid can learn’ is a very overly simplistic idea.”

Multiple studies have not shown that other students do better academically when their peers are suspended, she added.

That may be because students are often suspended for reasons unrelated to classroom behavior. Shih cited one case in which students were using scissors for a classroom project when the fire alarm went off. One student put his scissors in his pocket, went outside with his class and then stopped at the bathroom on the way back.

A security officer searched him and found the scissors. He was suspended for being a “threat,” she said.

“We see a lot of things that should not be impacting education,” she said.

Legislators have tried to pass the bill in previous sessions. It never got out of committee.

But this year, they promised the students, was the year it would get done.