Student discipline: Are schools equipped to handle behavioral extremes?

Nine years ago, when I began writing about school discipline, the big revelation was that children as young as 6 were being suspended. Today, in the wake of the pandemic, teachers and families are probably pining for those gentler times.

In the past 12 months, students from the Seattle, Renton and Highline school districts have been charged with crimes ranging from assault to murder, some of which happened inside school buildings.

It should never have come to this.

None of these kids were unknown to school officials. All had school discipline records. One of them is a 12-year-old girl who was returning to class after a long-term suspension. On her first day back, she was arrested for assaulting a teacher and now faces nine months in juvenile prison for a series of subsequent offenses.

Another student, just 14, was a freshman at Ingraham High School when he was charged with fatally shooting a junior in the hallway last fall. An educator who knew him the year before, in eighth grade, described the boy as a deeply impressionable kid with a “beautiful heart that no one will get to see now.”

The eldest of the three, 17-year-old Miguel Rivera Dominguez, had been suspended from Highline High School before being charged with first-degree murder for shooting a passenger on a Metro bus last month. He faces three years to life in prison if convicted. (Judges have wide latitude in cases involving juveniles.)

If you are a person who believes, as I do, that no child is born a killer, the obvious question is what are we doing wrong? Kids’ lives outside of school shape their psyches, but blaming families leaves us with the same problem: disconnected young people with no vision beyond the moment. Prior to the crimes with which they are now charged, all three students had been suspended from school, which raises an unavoidable question: Does punitive discipline work?

If it did, two young men might be alive, and a dedicated teacher would not be thinking about leaving the profession.

Let’s start with her. Stephanie Hartung was in her 11th year at Dimmitt Middle School in Renton when she noticed a new name on her class roster last spring. She stopped at the student’s age. The girl was a sixth-grader, but Hartung teaches seventh.

Only after Hartung raised questions did an administrator explain that the student was returning to school after a suspension and might do better, behavior-wise, in a classroom with kids she didn’t know. The school’s safety plan required that she never be allowed to wander the halls alone, Hartung told me. An adult would escort her to all classes.

Hartung wasn’t worried. She loved Dimmitt. She was accustomed to kids who presented a challenge, and she relished getting them excited about the future through her career-and-college-prep class. When her new pupil showed up on a Thursday morning in March, Hartung’s students were discussing the difference between “wants” and “needs.”

“I need to kill myself,” said the girl, according to Hartung’s recollection.

She immediately called the main office. By then, her student had moved on to wants: “I want to die. I want a hole in the ground.”

At the time, Dimmitt Middle School was in turmoil. The principal had recently quit, and no one knew who was in charge. An administrator-in-training was dispatched to Hartung’s class and, after talking briefly with the student and her teacher in the hallway, he deemed the girl calm enough to return to her desk. Hartung followed a few moments later to see her student threatening to throw a chair across the room at another kid.

She was “completely gone,” Hartung said. The girl’s eyes had lost focus. She referred to her teacher by another person’s name, then beat Hartung so severely that an ambulance was called, along with the police.

Hartung suffered a concussion, black eye and other injuries. Her student was charged with assault.

“How is it that she can’t be in the hallways by herself, but it’s fine for her to be in a classroom, with me and a bunch of other kids?” asked Hartung, who did not return to Dimmitt for the remainder of the school year.

School discipline was always a loaded topic. The vast majority of suspended kids are low-income youth of color, and a data analysis I did in 2015 showed that certain students were disciplined again and again, suggesting that the intervention does little to change their behavior. It is associated primarily with an increased risk for dropping out.

At the time, many teachers felt that restorative justice — which focuses on repairing relationships — was a worthy response to kids in crisis. But that was pre-pandemic. As with everything else, COVID-19 changed the game. Just last week a 13-year-old at Tillicum Middle School in Bellevue, who’d already threatened suicide and seen his mother overdose, told a staffer that he wanted to “bring a gun to school and shoot everyone,” according to police, who knew there were guns at the boy’s home.

“I think the situation is as dire as it is because we lost a lot of connection points,” said King County Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jamie Kvistad, who reviews school-related crimes that land in juvenile court.

“We ask our schools to do so much — provide education, exercise, food, art and music, mental health treatment. But a school can’t be everything to every student. There has to be parent involvement. There has to be community involvement.”

Even educators who proudly describe themselves as social justice warriors say the restorative approach sounds naive today, considering the relentless pressure to catch kids up academically.

“You cannot expect a teacher to address the root causes of violence and do relationship-building when they have 30 students and an academic pacing guide that allows for no more than a few minutes of so-called social-emotional learning,” said Renton Education Association President Julianna Dauble. “You cannot overcome trauma or generational poverty simply by holding a class meeting.”

Much has been written about the change in student behavior after kids spent 18 months trying to learn through computer screens. When they returned to school post-pandemic, most of those in Hartung’s class seemed stalled socially, without the “educational stamina,” they’d shown before.

But schools are confronting this reality with the same tools they’ve been using for years. When I called the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, I heard about threat assessments and safety plans and multitiered systems of support — a stew of policy-speak that is legions away from the reality of a suicidal 12-year-old willing to kick a grown woman in the face.

“Behavior is a language,” a middle school teacher once told me.

I believe that. The question is whether schools are equipped to handle the tirade coming from our kids.