In the same way that overall safety is important in schools, student discipline is an important part of creating an orderly and caring environment in which students can learn and teachers can teach. There are many ways in which teachers and administrators work to create orderly schools and various types of disciplinary actions are utilized. Each North Carolina school district sets its own disciplinary policies. Many school districts use after-school, Saturday, or in-school detentions to address disruptive or inappropriate student behavior. Usually, schools reserve out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for recurring, egregious or illegal offenses committed by students. In addition to having information about your district’s overall safety, it is worthwhile to have some idea of how many major disciplinary actions have occurred in your district.
This Report Card focuses only on the highest levels of disciplinary action that schools can take:
Individual schools may have additional disciplinary data, like numbers of in-school suspensions or detentions. These other consequences are not required for state reporting.
In addition to looking at the number of suspensions and expulsions in this district, also think about these data in terms of the number of school days lost. Suspensions mean lost school time; if a school district has a lot of out-of-school suspensions, the students who are suspended are losing a large number of school days each year. The typical North Carolina school year is 180 days and a 10-day suspension is more than 5 percent of the instructional time in that year.
For additional technical information about these data, see the Data Sources & Information Guide.