National Forum for Youth Violence Prevention

ED is working closely with DOJ and HHS to enable selected schools to put in place or strengthen a range of
universal and tailored interventions—also known as tiered behavioral supports—in cities of the National
Forum for Youth Violence Prevention. As the ten cities that comprise the National Forum have pledged to
strengthen local capacity to prevent youth violence and gang violence, tiered behavioral supports ate a key
strategy to boost school capacity to prevent youth violence and improve service delivery to students. Federal
partners awarded supplemental grants to the National Forum to implement tiered behavioral supports in 2013.

Fiscal Year 2014 Appropriations

The President’s 2014 budget request proposed and Congress appropriated funds for a number of new
programs to help schools, and their partners, better support student mental health and behavior while
improving student safety. The appropriation includes funding for a new School Climate Transformation Grant
program, to be administered by ED, to help schools train their teachers and other school staff to implement
evidence-based strategies to improve school climate, and $5 million in Juvenile Justice and Education
Collaboration Assistance Grants, under DOJ to engage law enforcement and/or juvenile and criminal justice
systems in developing collaborative approaches that reduce the use of suspension, expulsion, and arrest as
responses to youth misbehaving. In addition, $55 million was provided for HHS to implement Project
AWARE, (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education) to increase awareness of mental health issues
and connect young people with behavioral health issues and their families with needed services.

These funds will be awarded as part of a new interagency framework for reducing youth involvement by
helping judges, educators, school administrators, law enforcement and other involved persons keep students
in schools and out of the juvenile justice system while improving the safety and climate within schools, It
emphasizes the use of multi-tiered behavioral frameworks, which help educators implement evidence-based
pfactices that prevent misbehavior, provide critical mental and emotional supports to troubled and at-risk
students, and thereby reduce reliance on suspensions and expulsions. These programs will build upon the
work and successes of ED’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and Office of Elementary
and Secondary Education, HHS’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and DOJ’s
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, all of which have invested in behavioral research,
demonstration, and technical assistance activities for more than 20 years.

| See press releases: hurp://www.ed.gov/news/press-rele secretary-duncan-attorney-general-
holderannounce-effort-respond-school-prison-p and http://www.justice. gov/opa/pr/2011/July/t1-ag-95 1. bem! .

a Council of State Governments (2011). Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline
Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement. Accessed July 2013 at
hrtp://knowledgecenter.csg.org/drupal/content/breaking-schools-rules-statewide-studh

Updated 4-10-14



system, and provide practical examples of alternative approaches that maintain school safety while ensuring
academic engagement and success for all students. As of winter 2014, federal partners have organized ten
separate webinars focusing on such topics a

youth courts, restorative justice practices, addressing truancy,
multi-tiered behavioral health frameworks and the recently released legal guidance and best practices guide.
Additional webinars are also planned. For more information regarding the webinar series, refer to

hetp://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/events/webinars or www.juvenilejustice-tta.org/events/ssdWebinarSeries.

Facilitating School-Court Partnerships

DOJ has provided financial assistance to the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ)
to replicate successful school-court partnerships working to reduce referrals to court of students for non-
serious behavior and to expand the use of positive disciplinary practices in schools. To this end, NCJFCJ’s
Judicially Led Responses to Eliminate School Pathways to the Juvenile Justice System project (School Pathways project)
will provide training and technical assistance to a cohort of 16 court sites committed to working on these
issues. NCJFCJ has also trained a cadre of judges who will guide and support other judges to convene
ptoblem-solving school-court teams; developed relevant curriculum; and will, through DOJ’s support, fund
the evaluation of these demonstration sites.

Integration into Federal Grant making
R

ace to the Top ~ Di

In the 2012 Race to the Top—District competition, a $400 million investment to help school districts to
implement comprehensive education reform, ED included a program requirement that districts with students
of color or students with disabilities overly-represented in the district’s discipline rates must conduct a root
cause analysis and develop a plan to address these root causes. Further, the sole competitive priority of the
competition was devoted to integrating public and/or private resources to augment school capacity to provide
student and family supports that address the social, emotional, and behavioral areas of high-need populations.

Center on Great Teachers and Leaders

This is a critical time for school districts and states to rethink human capital management in education~
specifically, how schools and districts select, support and evaluate educators. Given the feedback ED has
received from educators — the concern that student misbehavior often interferes with instruction — school
climate and student supports must be part of this conversation. This is why, during the 2012 grant competition

for the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders, one of the major technical assistance efforts to assist in building

the capacity of state education departments, specified that the awardee would help states to integrate the
competencies relevant to student engagement and positive discipline practices into comprehensive teacher
and principal evaluation systems, professional development, and other essential activities for supporting and
enhancing the educator workforce. See http://www.gticenter.org/ for more information regarding the Center

on Great Teachers and Leaders.



Supportive School Discipline Initiative

In summer 2011, Education Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder announced the launch of a
collaborative project — the Supportive School Discipline Initiative (Initiative) ~ between the U.S. Departments
of Education (ED) and Justice (DOJ) to support the use of school discipline practices that foster safe,
supportive, and productive learning environments while keeping students in school.! The announcement came
shortly following the release of the Council of State Government’s groundbreaking study of nearly one million
Texas students, Breaking Schools’ Rules? which highlighted a number of significant findings regarding one state’s
school discipline practices, including:

* Nearly six in ten public school students studied were suspended or expelled at least once between
their seventh- and twelfth-grade school years.

* Students involved in the school disciplinary system averaged 8 suspensions and/or expulsions
during their middle or high school years, while 15 percent of involved students were disciplined
11 or more separate times.

* Controlling for campus and individual student characteristics, students who were suspended or
expelled for a discretionary violation were nearly three times as likely to be in contact with the
juvenile justice system the following year.

* African-American students had a 31 percent higher likelihood of a school discretionary discipline
action, compared to white and Hispanic students, and nearly three-quarters of the students who

qualified for special education services were suspended or expelled at least once.

Since its establishment, the role of the Initiative has been to coordinate federal actions to provide schools with
effective alternatives to exclusionary discipline while encouraging new emphasis on reducing
disproportionality for students of color and students with disabilities. This brief outlines the successes and
achievements of both Departments in collaboration with other federal agencies and private entities. The
majority of these achievements align with four guiding strategies for this federal effort — building consensus;
investing in research and data collection; issuing guidance; and building awareness, capacity, and leadership.
Beyond these four core strategies, ED and DOJ have also worked to embed strategies for improving school
climate and school discipline policy and practice into various existing grant programs.

Building Consensus for National Action

The cornerstone of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative is the School Discipline Consensus Project,
managed by the Council of State Governments. DOJ has awarded $840,000 to the Council of State



Governments to initiate the Project, officially launched in October 2012, a sum matched by philanthropic
collaborators. The two federal agencies have worked in collaboration with the Atlantic Philanthropies, the
California Endowment, Novo Foundation, and others to support the Council of State Governments to
conduct a process to develop consensus recommendations to dismantle what is commonly named the
“school-to-prison pipeline.” The Schoo! Discipline Consensus Project brings together practitioners from the
fields of education, juvenile justice, behavioral health, and law enforcement, as well as state and local
policymakers, researchers, advocates, students, and parents to collaboratively develop a comprehensive set of
recommendations for change agents working to address this issue. To date, the Council has convened three
working sessions — two in Washington, DC, and one in Oakland, CA — at which participants began developing
and refining recommendations. ‘The final recommendations will be released by the summer of 2014,

Investing in Research and Data Collection

ghts Data Collection (CRDC)

In March 2014, ED released the 2011-2012 CRDC, for which ED's Office for Civil Rights collected data from
all school districts in the country (approximately 17,000 districts). In addition to being the first universal
collection since 2000, for the first time the CRDC included data on preschool suspensions. In all, the data
highlighted how different groups of students, such as boys and girls of color or students with disabilities, were
treated across a tange of discipline indicators. The database tracks the total number of students receiving in-
school and out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, the number of students referred to law enforcement,

the number of students with school-related arrests, and the total number of students expelled under zero-

tolerance policies. For more information regarding the CRDC, see http://ocrdata.ed.gow/.

Incentives to Research School Discipline Practice

DO} awarded nearly $1.5 million through the 2012 Field Initiated Research and Evaluation Program to focus
on research and evaluation studies of school-based practices that relate to reducing student victimization and
the risk of delinquency. As one of the grant recipients, Texas A & M University received funding to explore
the potential of the school discipline system as an intervention to reduce juvenile justice contact among all
youth, but particularly youth of color.

In the fiscal years 2013 and 2014 requests for applications for the Institute Education Sciences’ Education
Research Grants program, ED specifically encouraged applications from researchers who proposed to
conduct research on the types of programs, practices, and policies that support academic learning by keeping
students in schools and engaged in learning.

Issuing Policy and Legal Guidance

‘itles IV_and VI Civil Rights Guidance

In January 2014, ED and DOJ released joint legal guidance to assist public schools and districts in
administering student discipline to meet their legal obligations under Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights



Act of 1964 which prohibit disctimination on the grounds of race, color, or national origin. For more

information, see www.ed.gov/school-discipline.

Guiding Principles: A Resource Guide

In January 2014, ED released a resource guide to state-, district-, and school-level officials outlining
“principles” for improving school climate and discipline practice. The resource guide includes: 1) an organized
set of guiding principles and related action steps to help schools to improve school climate, improve discipline
policy and practice, and reduce disproportionality, 2) a directory of federal resources to assist with the
implementation of the principles, 3) a compendium of state-level laws and regulations relevant to school
discipline policy and practice, and 4) this overview of the Initiative’s activities. For more information, see

gov /school-discipline,

Mythbuster on Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (F

RPA)

ED released a short FERPA mythbuster to clarify the circumstances under which schools may share education

records with juvenile justice agencies. This resource document refutes the belief that FERPA prohibits schools
from sharing records with juvenile justice agencies and provides links to additional resources and technical
assistance.

Building Awareness, Capacity, and Leadership

2012 National Leadership Summit and the Supportive School Discipline Community of Practice

The Initiative provided assistance to the New York Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children
to host the March 2012 National Leadership Summit, which convened teams of top state education and
judicial officials. Teams from forty-five states, territories and the District of Columbia assembled to undertake
the work of improving policy and practice related to school discipline. The Summit brought together expert
practitioners, researchers and innovators from education, justice and school health to help kick off planning

and action by the attending leaders in partnership with their local counterparts.

In the following months, the Initiative launched a web-based community ~ the Supportive School Discipline
Community of Practice (SSDCOP) — for the state leaders that attended the March 2012 Leadership Summit
to provide regular opportunities to consult with each other and share information about best practices in
school discipline. Since its launch, it has organized four smaller, topic-specific communities at the request of
its membership: Discipline Policy Reform; Supportive Discipline Practices; Truancy Prevention; and Juvenile
Justice Alternatives. To date, the SSDCOP has 20 strong state participants, some of which are leads of state
task forces engaged in school discipline practice reform. For more information regarding the SSDCOP, see
http://ssdcop.neglected-delinguent.org/.

Supportive School Discipline Webinar Series

In January 2013, the ED, DOJ, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a
Supportive School Discipline Webinar Series. The webinar series is designed to inctease awareness and
understanding of school disciplinary practices that push youth out of school and many times into the justice