Lowering Suspension and Office Referrals within an Urban Middle School: A Variable in Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Background: Stakeholders in the educational community have many tools that can lower school suspension rates and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Methods and resources require school leadership creating campus buy in, student engagement, creating a class management system, creating a rapport with the campus police officer, and creating engaged classrooms. It takes a team to come together to create a nurturing environment. Purpose: The data will show a decline in unwanted student behavior. The goal is to lower the suspension rates by using techniques to create a positive school environment. Techniques utilized are that of utilizing campus police officers as an institutional agent, leaders setting the school culture, student engagement, class management systems and all stakeholders buying in. The data and process will be presented to the community and the staff. The methods which were used to decrease unwanted behavior in the school will be used to create a district wide initiative. Methods: Discipline data will be taken from an urban school district in Houston, Texas. The data will be extracted from the district database, student management system and E-School from 7th and 8th grade. The data will then be exported to create pivot tables for each year from 2014 to 2017. The pivot tables will describe the incident that took place and how many referrals were written for each institutional agent. Each institutional agent will then be assessed through observation over a period of three years, in how they were immersed in each key component studies.