Baltimore District Tackles High Suspension Rates

Community pushes for positive approaches to reduce nonviolent incidents in schools.

Baltimore

Driven by an increasing belief that zero-tolerance disciplinary policies are ineffective, more educators are embracing strategies that do not exclude misbehaving students from school for offenses such as insubordination, disrespect, cutting class, tardiness, and bringing cellphones to campus.

Increasing pressure from civil rights and youth-advocacy groups, which have been highly critical, in particular, of the disproportionate numbers of suspensions and expulsions of African-American boys, also have spurred a move away from one-size-fits-all policies, experts say.

Here in Baltimore, a communitywide movement to support alternatives to out-of-school suspensions got under way two years ago, largely at the behest of the Open Society Institute-Baltimore, a locally run arm of the New York City-based Open Society Institute, the foundation set up by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. With a mission to address issues that contribute to Baltimore’s chronic rates of poverty, dropouts, and crime, OSI- Baltimore zeroed in on the city...