The nation's schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning, free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved, but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the school itself, and the surrounding community. Establishing reliable indicators of the…

Well over three million children, K-12, are estimated to have lost instructional "seat time" in 2009-2010 because they were suspended from school, often with no guarantee of adult supervision outside the school. That's about the number of children it would take to fill every seat in every major league baseball park and every NFL stadium…

This guide to student disciplinary hearings provides an understanding of procedures and options during the student suspension or expulsion process through the perspectives of the different participants. Section 1, "Why Hearings?" discusses due process and the three categories of student disciplinary hearings: pre-suspension, suspension, and…

This study found that a linear discriminant function was able, with 73 percent accuracy, to distinguish between learning-disabled dropouts (n=213) and learning-disabled graduates (n=92). The discriminant function was composed of six variables--student ethnicity, reading ability, family intactness, family socioeconomic status, school transfers, and…

Despite the legal mandate for fulltime school participation between the ages of 6 and 18 and the mandate for high school completion, many youths do not fulfill these expectations and are viewed as dropouts. To investigate the characteristics of seventh and eighth grade students who leave school and the reasons why they do so, school personnel in…