Three students stabbed in one week. That's how 2018 began for New Rochelle High School in Westchester, New York. These school stabbings came just months after the highly publicized, fatal stabbing of a student at Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation in the Bronx.
As Americans try to understand the increase of violence in their public schools, the Obama administration's 2014 school discipline reforms have received a lot of attention. The policy, written by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, took the form of a discipline guidance letter. It warned school districts that if their disciplinary procedures showed a disparate impact on students based on race, then the federal government could investigate them for civil rights violations. It also encouraged districts to use alternative discipline programs and classroom management practices in place of traditional discipline policies.
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