“A lot of them internalize a lot of the stigma that comes with that, I don’t want to say title, because that’s not who they are, that’s just something that’s placed on them but…If a school could see them as an individual instead of just a justice engaged student, I feel like that is a way for them to be supported.”
Expulsion and Suspension as a Concept
Utilizing suspension or expulsion as disciplinary tactics can often bestow labels on kids that become difficult for them to shake off during the rest of their time in the educational system. Sometimes these labels are not only external baggage that the student must carry with them throughout their educational journey, but also internalized stigma that shapes their own self-understanding. Young people throughout the community turned a critical eye towards suspension and expulsion because they felt that on balance, they appeared more like carceral practices within the education system than effective forms of discipline. Largely, as they saw it, disciplinary tactics like expulsion and suspension had little to no place in the educational system and including these forms of discipline as potential punishment for unwanted behavior was a telltale sign that schools were more invested in sorting out the good and bad students than ensuring schools were a truly inclusive space.
Several young people in a roundtable discussion came to the conclusion that expulsion and suspension were problematic concepts because they often serve as a means to use labels to stigmatize students without addressing the root causes of their behavior. The disciplinary power of expulsion and suspension, they fear, may really be its ability to impose a negative identity on a young person. The group’s understanding and critique of disciplinary practices in schools was deeply informed by their overarching goal of being student advocates for progressive changes both in the school system and in society more broadly. In this particular conversation, which occurred in August of 2024, discussants referred to those who had experienced these forms of discipline as justice engaged youth. As one young lady explained to a member of the discussion group who was unfamiliar with the term, justice engaged youths are young people “who are either suspended or expelled or previously were incarcerated and could also extend to having ankle monitors, stuff like that or if they have a probation officer.”
More Than Students
Students pointed out that ignoring root causes while still punishing misbehavior is an over-evaluation of the role school plays in the minds of many young people. Students live complicated lives and often those complications supersede the importance of any demand placed on them by the school district. These students noted that far too often, students are expected to treat school as a sort of abstraction from their actual lives. When they are at school, it seems that they are being asked to divorce themselves from their ‘real lives’ and then are punished for their inability to do so. They believed that schools are unable to account for the ways that the background conditions of students’ lives sometimes enable, provoke or exacerbate the behaviors which suspension and expulsion are meant to address. Schools seem to hold the incorrect assumption that students will be more likely to follow the schools code of conduct following a suspension or expulsion; an assumption that ignores how students view their relationship to their school and the imposed rules.
One young person noted that when they were in high school, many of their peers were tasked with serious responsibilities like earning an income, caring for family members or maintaining the household. For many of these kids, these responsibilities were critical to maintaining their well-being and therefore often ranked higher on their priority list than complying with the rules their school had in place. As she put it, many young people “can’t put academics first and school has a culture where they constantly try to make it seem like ‘oh you’re a student first, you should always put your academics before everything else.’ It’s like no, this is a survival thing, academics is literally on the bottom of your list because you’re literally just trying to survive.”
Disproportionate Discipline, Considering Circumstances
What seemed to trouble these young people most about the use of suspension and expulsion was the way it tracked with other systems which disproportionately affect marginalized youth. Although they did not mention specific statistics in their relative schools, they all had the sense that school suspensions and expulsions would be disproportionately high amongst students of color and poor students. As one DPS alum put it, “People don’t realize how big of an impact poverty has on students. Whether it’s food insecurity or not having access to technology or the internet to do your work at home, I think that it affects how students are able to perform in schools. I think that a lot of schools assume that students’ home life is okay, which is not a good assumption.”
One student noted that simply holding students to certain standards without providing needed context does not allow for the school system to act humanely or responsibly. They went on to say that when put into the appropriate context, something like chronic absences might not be grounds for removing a child from school. Another student recalled, for instance, that they had once missed a tremendous amount of school in a semester, but it was because their sister was experiencing mental health challenges and she often chose to stay home to be with her. In retrospect, she doesn’t think that having been suspended or expelled for missing school would have been an appropriate or helpful response to that situation.
Relating to Justice Engaged Youth
Particularly telling was the way being labeled as a justice engaged student seemed to serve as a basis to separate students from one another. These young people perceived these forms of discipline more as a vehicle to provide a label, than as a genuine effort to address problematic behavior. Attempts to separate students based on their interactions with the justice system were troubling for many community members in light of the growing skepticism that the carceral system had any actual interest in advancing justice. As one young woman put it, “We all know the justice system is not justice or equal or fair at all. So to truly place a perspective on a student that quite frankly is a false perspective is not fair to the student.”
Many of the young people noted that they believed there was a difference between how students and educators reacted to justice engaged youth. Educators, administrators in particular, they believed, were more prone to care about whether or not a student had previously been suspended or expelled. As one recent graduate explained, “It’s more the administrators and staff, to be honest. That’s where 99 percent of it comes from. So I think to better engage them, I feel like it comes down to actually getting to know them. I feel like after staff hear a student is justice engaged, they put a label on them like that’s a bad kid. I have to constantly look over your shoulder to make sure you’re not doing something bad.”
For many, it remains unclear what the purpose of suspension and expulsion is. Conceptually, they seem to indicate that one is deemed unfit to participate in normal school life for some period of time, but it is not obvious how these forms of discipline will leave one better equipped to succeed in a school setting after the punishment is dispensed. Furthermore, it seems that these forms of discipline may result in internal and external stigmatization, which can make it difficult to navigate the school system.
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