I work with a lot of teens with behavior problems and so I see a good amount of out of school suspensions. What has always driven me crazy about school suspensions is that they keep kids out of school who don’t particularly want to be in school in the first place. Further, many schools count suspensions as absences and any more than three days absent in the quarter and the student fails all of his classes for that term. I have seen patients get suspended for 3 days in the first week of school and consequently have zero incentive to try that quarter as they have already failed their classes. Guess what happens? The student starts to skip school and digs a deeper hole for himself.
Because out of school suspensions have been linked to increased dropout rates there has been a push for alternative discipline measures such as restorative justice. The central premise of restorative justice is that the student performs some kind of action to atone for the disruption he has caused to the community. Rather than just missing school, the student hopefully learns from the mistake that he has made. A summary of research findings on restorative justice can be found here: http://ht.ly/2HBmw. Certainly, restorative justice interventions take more time and planning than traditional school suspensions. However, once school staff embrace a system to develop restorative justice interventions, this style of discipline becomes ingrained in the school culture. As reasearch shows, a restorative justice culture can go a long way to reducing further discplinary infractions in the short-term and dropout in the long term.