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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