The youngest students in Texas could be suspended more easily if a bill that proposes to rewrite school discipline laws passes in the Legislature.
House Bill 6 is a priority on that side of the Capitol, and it undercuts previous reforms aimed at ensuring children in pre-K through second grade can remain in school except under the most extreme circumstances.
Talia Richman, who reports for the Education Lab at The Dallas Morning News, said the reforms took place after lawmakers were confronted with the fact that tens of thousands of very young children were being suspended from school in Texas.
“What they decided to do is say, okay, unless this child does something really, really extreme, something like bringing a gun to the class, something like bringing drugs to school, you can’t kick those kids out,” she said. “You can’t kick them out of the building. Because they’re saying when the kid is sent home, does that really deal with the underlying issues of why a child might be acting out?”
These reforms had a big impact on those suspension numbers for kids 4 through 8 years old, Richman said.
“There are still some of those extreme circumstances and still districts suspending young students, but not in the same massive numbers that were seen before the reforms,” she said. “But now districts are saying we need more tools. We need more flexibility when it comes to discipline because school safety is a huge issue.
“And they say we’ve thought a lot about safety outside of the building with armed guards, but what about safety inside the building – even young children can have the ability to really be disruptive and cause the rest of the classroom to not be able to learn.”
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HB 6 would make it much easier for schools to remove younger students from campus.
“You would be able to kick out a young student for any conduct that results in repeated or significant disruption to the classroom,” Richman said. “So that’s a pretty vague set of standards, but it really opens up the idea that you could be kicking out more of these young children, because what one advocate told me is kids that age are pretty frequently disruptive. It’s kind of the thing.”
A coalition of school districts across the state is pushing for this law.
“They are really focused on student behavior management reform, that’s what they’re calling it,” Richman said. “And they think that the way current state law is written just ties their hands in a lot of ways. So they have asked lawmakers to think about reforms to school discipline because they want more flexibility to do things their way, the way they wanna do them on their campuses and their districts for their community.”
This coalition of districts also says it surveyed teachers about the level of disruption in their classrooms.
“They’ve had to, in some cases, clear the classroom to deal with one disruptive student and, you know, put the rest of the kids outside,” Richman said. “They’ve talked about teachers who have actually been assaulted by children. And so they’re bringing these concerns forward.”
However, some advocates have concerns about the impact this policy change will have on students — especially the most vulnerable young kids.
“This really pits this idea of school safety for administrators, for teachers, against advocates’ concerns about a return to zero tolerance discipline,” Richman said. “Research has repeatedly shown [discipline] is subjective … things like being disruptive, unruly, that can really target students of color, students with disabilities, and disproportionately kick them out of the classroom.
“What advocates are concerned about is a return to policies that really perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline and don’t ultimately set these vulnerable students up for success in life.”
