In the last three years, Marcquees Banks has been taken out of class twice and sent to another school for getting into fights.
The third time he got into a scuffle, something different happened: A counselor at Augustus Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles pulled Banks and the other teen aside and told them they needed to talk.
Seated face to face, Joseph Luciani asked them to explain why they’d fought and how they felt — part of the school’s new approach to discipline that is catching on in urban districts and focuses more on students working out their differences with counselors than suspensions.
“I realized we had a lot of similarities,” said Banks, 17, who said his father is involved in a gang and his mother jobless.
At Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, the shift has been tectonic. Five years ago, students were scolded with 74,765 days of suspension; last year, they received 8,351, an 89 percent decrease.
The decline comes on the heels of a nationwide push to rollback zero-tolerance policies instituted after the deadly Columbine High School shootings that emphasize harsh discipline for even minor misbehavior in favor of support-focused alternatives.
[For more of this story, written by Christine Armario, go to http://www.dailynews.com/socia...n-school-suspensions]
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