Giving Compass' Take: 

• A Chalkbeat analysis of Colorado school districts found that the state disproportionately suspends black and Hispanic male students more frequently than others. 

• How can schools provide trainings to work on racial and implicit bias? How can we adopt restorative justice practices and hold teachers accountable for implementing them?

• Cultural responsiveness in the classroom forces educators to think about how varying experiences will impact students, and learn to embrace diversity. This could be a potential solution to problems like these. 

Young black boys are suspended at disproportionate rates in school districts across Colorado. Some rural districts have the highest early childhood suspension rates in the state. And despite nationwide debate about the impact of harsh discipline on young children and local efforts to bring the numbers down, suspensions in the early grades are actually going up.

These are a few of the findings from a new Chalkbeat analysis of three years of data on out-of-school suspensions given to students in kindergarten through second grade.

At least three large metro Denver districts have recently launched their own efforts to reduce the number of small children sent home for misbehaving — but not without some trepidation from teachers.

Supporters of policies that limit suspensions of young children say such discipline doesn’t work to change students’ behavior, harms them educationally, and disproportionately affects boys and children of color.

Opponents of such policies say suspension is a tool sometimes needed to help restore classroom order, ensure student and teacher safety, and focus a family’s attention on the problem.

The five districts with the lowest suspension rates among the state’s 30 largest, are scattered geographically and range in size, but generally have fewer students from poor families and fewer students of color than high-suspending large districts.

While black boys make up only about 2.3 percent of the state’s kindergarten to second-grade students, they receive almost 10 percent of suspensions given in that age group. Such disparities exist in all 14 of the state’s 30 largest districts for which data was available.

At the state level, Hispanic boys make up 17 percent of the kindergarten through second-grade population but receive 29 percent of suspensions. At the district level, the picture varies.

Read the full article about disproportionately suspending students of color by Ann Schimke and Sam Park at Chalkbeat.