Interesting Quote: Carolyn Laub, Founder and Executive Director of Gay-Straight Alliance Network

Expelling Young has not made Arsenal Tech High School safer. Neither would simply turning the punishment around by suspending or expelling the students who bullied Young. Studies show that zero-tolerance policies and punitive discipline have failed to improve school climate. Instead, they allow a school's culture of intimidation and violence to go unaddressed while individual students are pushed out without learning from their behavior. Discouragingly, those suspended or expelled students tend to be the ones suffering most from their unsafe school climate in the first place. Punitive discipline actively harms and disproportionately impacts LGBT youth and low-income students of color. 

According to the Dignity in Schools Campaign, which hosts a database of research on school discipline, LGBT students are 1.4 times more likely to be expelled than their straight peers. 

Simple punishment does not address the core issues: the prejudices that students and school staff hold, and their tolerance for a certain level of daily psychological and often physical violence. Just as we need context to understand and address Young's case, we need context to understand why students bully other students and how we can change that behavior. A young person who yells homophobic slurs at his peers learns nothing from a three-day suspension, and the school staff who suspend him learn nothing about that student and any personal issues that might have spurred his behavior.

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