Rather than creating safer schools, punitive policies--such as zero-tolerance discipline policies--appear only to have created hostile learning environments. In response, many advocacy organizations have urged schools to adopt a human rights framework, including restorative practices. Schools with restorative approaches have noted dramatic…

Every day in New York City, between 90,000 and 100,000 young people, almost all of them Black and Latina/o, must show up to school thirty to forty-five minutes before their first class begins because they attend schools with metal detectors and scanners. School administrators and policymakers have accepted this scenario as part of Black and…

This study explored administrators' attitudes about the use of physical restraint in their school settings. Administrators of day treatment and residential programs for elementary students with emotional and behavioral disorders in the Mid-Atlantic states were surveyed on their attitudes toward, and the use of, physical restraint within their…

The present paper reviews the literature regarding time-out interventions employed in home, school, and clinical settings. Characteristics examined include types of time-out, populations and settings, legal implications, and research implications. Policy recommendations for teachers, parents, and clinicians regarding time-out interventions are…

Incidences of staff terminations under clouded circumstances are filled with legal and ethical dilemmas. The benefits of an informal process similar to "plea bargaining" are discussed. There is less emotional and financial toll for the accused employee, and school boards benefit as well in terms of the media, cumbersome disciplinary…

Discusses whether notice and a hearing are required when a student is transferred, for disciplinary reasons, from a New York vocational school to another school. Proposes amending the law to expressly require the same due process protection for disciplinary lateral transfers as is required for student suspensions. (Author/MLF)

Suspension and expulsion should be a school's court of last resort. Before moving straight to suspension, school officials should provide discipline options such as counseling and alternative schools. Describes a rural New York school district where suspension and expulsion are rare. The goal is to keep every student in school so they can learn.…

Well-disciplined schools make appropriate school discipline a part of every curriculum, program, and practice. Key organizational variables include staff and community involvement, sensitivity to students' racial and socioeconomic concerns, and effective intervention strategies, such as the anger-management seminars, awareness discussion groups,…

This paper explores spatial theory, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of space, power, and the subject, as a frame within which to examine moves toward security in North American urban schools. We bring into play empirical data from an ethnographic study of New York City and Toronto schools where policies and technologies of record-keeping,…