The typical suspension length at my high school was three days. I’d heard of year-long, but I never actually heard of anyone getting it. It was always out-of-school suspension as well. To my recollection, there was no such thing as in-school suspension at my high school.

There is certainly a move away from out-of-school suspension, for a variety of reasons.

The unappealing idea of students serving out-of-school suspensions roaming their communities during the day, possibly getting into more trouble, prompted some schools to create or expand their in-school suspension programs. In Louisiana, state officials became so concerned about suspended students missing instructional time that the legislature began funding in-school suspension programs.

The Kentucky Department of Education encourages school districts to develop policies that include well-rounded academic offerings for those students who stay in school during suspension. (Education World)

But it still exists. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have a job, for a majority of the clients in our program are there because of year-long, out-of-school suspension.

Out-of-school suspension (for simplicity, just “suspension” hereafter) is the lazy way out, though. It puts the burden of educating the most troubled students on someone else. In our organization’s case, that “someone else” receives most of funding through “professional begging” — that’s what the organization’s director likes to call his continual grant writing.

Suspension addresses only the behavior; it does nothing to correct the causes of the behavior. To be sure, those causes are myriad and most of them out of the effective reach of a public school system. If a child has been suspended for the remainder of a school year, the situation has reached a point at which therapists are probably necessary. Short of dealing with the causes, school systems are simply putting off the inevitable: a sense of failure so deeply ingrained and reinforced that the child gives up on doing anything other than fulfilling everyone’s expectations.

An old saying comes to mind: “If you think you’re going to succeed, you’re probably right; if you think you’re going to fail, you’re still probably right.” School systems that kick the tough kids out of school are feeding into the latter. Then organizations like ours have one more shell to break through before we can start reinforcing the former.