This Urban Texas School District Restorative Discipline Practice (RDP) initiative was founded and funded on the description that RDP is designed to proactively build relationships, improve school climate, and reduce suspensions of African American (AA) males. This RDP phenomenon was reactively implemented in a Reset Center where suspended students…

Restorative Practices is a social science that studies how to create, strengthen, and repair relationships. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the impact restorative practices have on the rate of out-of-school suspensions and office discipline referrals, as well as the perceptions educators, have regarding the…

School discipline is a salient problem of educational policy and practice. Teachers play an important role in the production and disruption of racial inequities in school discipline, yet there remains a need to disentangle the relationship between teacher characteristics, their perceptions of school climate, and school discipline patterns. This…

This study evaluated the comparative effects of presession and interspersed attention on the disruptive behavior of an at-risk student in an inclusive fourth-grade classroom. Data indicated a decrease in disruptive behavior during both presession and interspersed attention conditions with the interspersed condition producing the lower level.…

School safety continues to be a concern in today's schools, and comprehensive approaches to school safety are one way to address this concern. However, few comprehensive approaches have been rigorously evaluated. To address this gap, we evaluated the implementation and effects associated with Safe Communities Safe Schools (SCSS) comprehensive…

Exclusionary discipline practices have a direct negative impact on individual students, schools, and society at large. To improve equity and cultural responsivity, active efforts to assess the contextual fit of effective strategies are necessary. The following study describes the Inclusive Skill-building Learning Approach (ISLA), an intervention…

Restorative justice (RJ) practices have expanded significantly with the aim of improving school safety. Despite RJ's potential for transformative change, the factors driving these changes have rarely been the focus of rigorous scientific investigation. This qualitative study applies a system change framework to examine how organizational system…

This research was a quantitative case study on the possible relationship between school climate, student behavior, student achievement, and classroom facility factors in an urban Midwest high school. Specific variables included lighting, wall color, classroom temperature, school climate, student behavior, and student academic achievement. The…

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between five school productivity measures at 248 Tennessee high schools and educators' perceptions of these institutions' climate for student discipline. Grounded in archived accountability information stored on the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) website, these five productivity…

Exclusionary discipline practices (EDPs) have been linked to poor academic performance and student dropout rates. Research shows that students suspended, expelled, or placed in alternate learning environments fare worse academically than their peers. This qualitative case study explores the experiences of classroom teachers in Northwest Louisiana…

Zero tolerance as an approach to school safety has been around for almost 3 decades. Despite widespread criticisms of zero tolerance policies, few empirical studies have investigated the relationship of zero tolerance with school safety. More generally, the Government Accountability Office report on school shootings noted the need for research on…

Across the country, school districts, their stakeholders, and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about suspensions, particularly about suspending students from elementary school and disproportionately suspending ethnic/racial minority students. Suspended students are less likely to graduate, possibly because they miss the…

Exclusionary discipline practices have a direct negative impact on individual students, schools, and society at large. To improve equity and cultural responsivity, active efforts to assess the contextual fit of effective strategies are necessary. The following study describes the Inclusive Skill-building Learning Approach (ISLA), an intervention…

In December 2018, the Trump administration rescinded the Department of Education's 2014 "Dear Colleague Letter" (DCL), thus returning to local school districts and boards their traditional authority to set discipline policy. Although it was frequently described as "nonbinding guidance," the DCL was anything but. Instead, the…

Though there is extensive research on the health outcomes of individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), society at large has not embraced this ground-breaking research and many still believe that the use of harsh punishment for students provides the same intended result as a discipline approach that teaches coping…