Homeless and foster youth are some of Southern California’s highest need students, but they are also the students who find themselves excluded from classrooms the most.
A recent study from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project and the National Center for Youth Law found in district after district that suspensions fuel dramatic disparities in class instruction time for students with unstable homes or disabilities.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has emerged as an exception to this pattern, reserving suspensions for the most extreme forms of misbehavior and using counseling and other in school interventions to address most behavioral issues, district officials said.
In the 2021 to 2022 school year, students in California lost about 10 instructional days due to suspensions per 100 students enrolled, the study found.
Foster youths lost 77 school days, almost eight times as many days as the state average, while homeless students lost 26 school days and students with disabilities lost 24.
Losing significant time in the classroom not only exacerbated learning loss during the pandemic, but also severed students’ connections to vital school resources, the study’s authors concluded.
“Kicking them out, even for one day, might cause them to miss the day of the week that they get counseling services or the day they receive intensive reading instruction,” said Daniel Losen, co-author and the senior director at the National Center for Youth Law. “For a homeless student, they might literally be kicking them out onto the streets.”
Foster youth, in particular, are more likely to exhibit behavioral challenges resulting in suspensions, because of the high levels of stress, trauma and instability they experience, Losen said. Suspensions can have dramatic consequences such as putting their foster family placements in peril, the study notes.
That, he argues, makes it even more essential that schools adapt alternative approaches to discipline that let foster…
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