New WA school discipline rules leave families, advocates wary

SEATTLE – The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction adopted new student discipline rules last month, despite pushback among families and advocates who believe the new rules will send schools back in time.

Advocates feel the new rules give teachers more authority to decide when to send a student out of the classroom.

Some parents feel it weakens the requirement to let them know when their child has been removed.

And state Superintendent Chris Reykdal said the updated rules merely remove much of the bureaucracy.

“The former rules created a disincentive to address classroom behaviors in the moment,” Reykdal said. “There is no evidence that the new rules will cause disparities to persist or worsen, but we are committed to continuing to monitor this closely and making adjustments as needed.”

The new rules go into effect Friday. School districts have just nine weeks to make sure their policies comply before school starts in September.

Technically, similar emergency rules have been in place since the fall. Krystina Cummins, whose seven children have been enrolled in a variety of school districts throughout the Puget Sound region, saw a difference and didn’t like it.

Throughout her eldest son’s educational career, he’s been consistently suspended, or Cummins has been asked to pick him up from school and take him home because of his disruptive behavior.

He was removed multiple times from the classroom this year, but Cummins wasn’t notified.

“These are children, still minors, they’re still under their parents’ care, so the parent has a right to know what’s going on,” Cummins said. “Parents need to be at the table when you are creating these laws and rules and codes that are changing.”

How did we get here?

Over the past decade, a mountain of research has shown discipline that removes kids from the classroom leads to lower graduation rates and sees students of color and students with disabilities kicked out of class more often than their peers.

“Exclusions didn’t lead to better behavior or improved behavior, as we saw. It honestly led to more exclusions,” said Christine Mattfeld, the program manager of attendance and discipline at Seattle Public Schools.

In 2016, lawmakers passed a monumental bill that attempted to dramatically shift educators away from exclusionary discipline and aimed to ensure districts didn’t stop educating students who were behaving badly.

But OSPI said the rules that accompanied the bill couldn’t be implemented properly due to online learning during the pandemic, a lack of funding and confusing language.

Eight years later – with a global pandemic come and gone – 7.1% of Black students were suspended at some point. In contrast, 3.1% of white students were sent out of class, according to statewide data from OSPI for the 2023-24 school year.

OSPI received consistent feedback from K-12 teachers, principals, district administrators and school board directors, as well as from students and families, that the rules were not working, so it implemented the emergency rules for 2024-25.

“OSPI would have diagnosed these challenges much faster had there not been a pandemic immediately following the implementation of the rule changes,” Katy Payne, a spokesperson for OSPI, wrote in an email earlier this year.

Nonprofit groups and lawyers who advocate for students with disabilities felt the agency only spoke with teachers unions and principals associations and failed to gain student and family input until after the emergency rules were already in place for months.

“What was so disingenuous about saying that it was an emergency is that (OSPI) spent months working on this with their chosen partners,” said Katherine George, a board member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government and a public records lawyer. “There was time. It was not an emergency.” (George represents the Seattle Times in freedom of information lawsuits.)

In January, OSPI announced four public hearings, held between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., for the community to weigh in on the student discipline rules.

“The damage is done,” George said. “Even though they eventually got around to having public hearings, those hearings were on the same rule changes that had been worked out in a private, one-sided process.”

Derick Harris, the executive director of the Black Education Strategy Roundtable, a nonprofit focused on closing the achievement and opportunity gaps for Black students, felt the public hearings weren’t accessible.

“Making that transition from where most jobs are off at that 5 o’clock hour, it was nearly impossible to be able to make it to these hearings in time,” Harris said.

What changed?

The old rules included a guide with a list of alternatives to punitive discipline that teachers were required to follow before sending a student out of the classroom. The new rules did away with that menu, to align with current state law, but some advocates don’t believe this was necessary.

The new rules align with guidelines created by the Professional Education Standards Board, a 12-person board appointed by the governor whose members are often practicing educators.

Attorneys for Education Rights, a group of attorneys who advocate for students with disabilities, fear that more kids will now be kicked out of class in an unofficial way.

When students are sent out of school, “it sends the message that there are some kids that we don’t want in our school communities,” said Nicholle Mineiro, an education lawyer and board president of Attorneys for Education Rights. “It sends a message to the school community that they aren’t wanted, and it sends that same message to those children, too.”

Cummins witnesses this effect in her eldest son.

“It doesn’t work to sit here and put my child in a closet in a room with just a table and make him eat lunch by themselves because you want to give him lunch suspension,” Cummins said. “That’s not beneficial for him at the end of the day. How is that going to help him even want to come to school?”

The new rules also get rid of the requirement that teachers must notify principals, and principals must tell the student’s parents as soon as possible. Instead, school boards are tasked with creating a policy that determines when a teacher reports a classroom exclusion.

Erin Okuno, the director of the Office of Education Ombuds, which is part of the governor’s office and fields questions from parents about education issues, said many calls the office receives deal with miscommunication between a school and a parent.

“Timely communication and being in constant conversation, especially with kids who need support, can help to prevent bigger problems,” Okuno said.

Okuno pointed out that the new rules change “emergency expulsion” to “emergency removal,” which will help families to understand their student is removed from class but is not necessarily forever expelled.

“I think it will help calm things down for a moment,” Okuno said.

Washington’s shift away from suspension and expulsion mirrors what has happened nationally. About eight years ago, other states’ discipline policies also shifted toward nonpunitive or nonexclusionary practices. In the past few years postpandemic, there’s been a shift back toward teacher control, said Zeke Perez, an assistant policy director at the Education Commission of the States.

States like Alabama, Florida, West Virginia and Louisiana have passed teachers bill of rights legislation that outlines a teacher’s authority to exclude a student from a classroom or to use other forms of discipline in certain cases, Perez said.

Is student behavior changing?

Across the nation, teachers have reported student behavior growing more challenging since the pandemic. An OSPI spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency heard anecdotal stories from educator groups about students with “big behaviors” who injured teachers and caused classrooms to be cleared.

But Washington teachers and district discipline leaders who spoke to the Times caution that it isn’t as simple as students behaving badly. Staffing cuts meant fewer adults in the classroom.

“It is undeniable. (The pandemic) radically changed a lot of things. It radically changed us,” said Mattfeld, SPS’ program manager of attendance and discipline. “It’s not just kids’ behaviors but also adults who have come back and had to respond to kids’ behaviors.”

“During the 2024-25 school year, with the emergency rules in effect, OSPI did not hear the same levels of concern,” Katie Hannig, a spokesperson for OSPI, wrote in an email.

Gerald Rhoden, a third-grade teacher in the Federal Way School District, noticed classroom fatigue, shorter attention spans and more social and emotional needs in his students after the pandemic, but he doesn’t necessarily equate that with worse behavior.

“It took more social and emotional lessons and more conversations and more relationship building; it took more basically love to help get the students back on track,” Rhoden added.

Rhoden isn’t concerned about the changes the new rules bring. If the teacher-student relationships and the classroom culture are strong, discipline and the need to exclude a student from class aren’t an issue, he said.

While the rules have changed, Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos stressed that the law itself has not. Santos was one of the original sponsors of the student discipline bill in 2016.

“The law is very clear. There is no getting around the law,” Santos said. “The onus is on the school and the school district to continue to provide that education even if that might be in an alternative setting.

“You cannot, under our state constitution, divorce students from their constitutional right to an education.”