Students with disabilities more likely to be snared by subjective school discipline rules

For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip.

Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice.

But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school.

The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance.

Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, an investigation by The Hechinger Report found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/03/school-discipline-rules-ensnare-students-with-disabilities/72950642007/

All too familiar with this crap. My son was never suspended, thankfully, because we knew the law, had a good lawyer, and the superintendent was scared of both him and my late ex, probably. But he could have been....