This story about absenteeism in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

Pandemic-related school closures wreaked havoc on attendance. Strict quarantine periods and policies demanding students stay home at any hint of a cough or runny nose tormented schools even after they reopened. Students got out of the habit of getting to school on time or going consistently at all.

By the 2021-22 school year, districts and charter networks across the country were facing what many dubbed a crisis of absenteeism. Students weren’t showing up, and educators had to act. 

In Arizona, many responded as they had prior to the pandemic: with punishment, maintaining or even increasing the share of students they suspended for missing class. Yet others sharply limited the number of students suspended for attendance-related violations in the wake of the pandemic, and dozens more pushed ahead with less punitive strategies they had already adopted.

Agua Fria Union High School District had just 6 percent of in-school suspension days assigned because of attendance problems in 2021-22, compared with 40 percent in 2017-18.

These distinctions — directly tied to the freedom afforded Arizona school systems to design their own disciplinary policies — emerged as part of a nearly yearlong investigation into attendance-related suspensions by The Hechinger Report and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. The first-of-its-kind analysis found nearly 47,000 suspensions for missing class over a five-year period, with Black, Latino and Indigenous students frequently receiving a disproportionate share. 

Because this disciplinary tactic has uneven support across schools, whether students experience it can depend more on where they go to school than the fact that they missed class.

Related:When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Take, for instance, Glendale Union High School District. Across its 11 schools, which together serve almost 16,700 students, district data shows administrators handed out nearly 12,500 suspensions for attendance violations over the past five school years. In 2021-22, they meted out nearly 2,200 of these in-school suspensions — more than in any of the preceding years analyzed. A district spokeswoman declined to comment on the data, saying it was under review.

Agua Fria Union High School District, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction. The 9,200-student district used to be one of the state’s top suspenders for attendance. During the 2017-18 school year, students spent about 409 days in in-school suspensions for attendance violations — about 40 percent of all such suspensions, according to district records. Last school year, they spent 36 days, or 6 percent.

Educators there and in other districts that avoid using attendance-related suspensions say doing so requires a two-pronged approach: focusing on making school a place where students want to be while approaching absenteeism as a problem to solve, rather than a behavior calling for punishment. 

They contend this strategy, not suspensions, is what actually improves students’ attendance — and it avoids the damaging consequences of blocking kids from class. 

“We are not providing the student resources to cope in healthier ways when we use suspension alone,” said Phillip Nowlin, Agua Fria’s deputy superintendent of academics and schools. 

“Our goal is to keep them in the classroom and identify the root of the behavior.”

Indeed, educators in several districts that rarely suspend for attendance violations say addressing the causes of student absenteeism is crucial. 

In some districts, school leaders have forged relationships with community partners willing to buy alarm clocks for students to help them get up and out of their homes on time. Others described principals picking up students in their own cars to get them to class. 

In other cases, where academic struggles or bullying was to blame, tutoring and counseling helped re-engage students and keep them in class.

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Darryl Williford is assistant principal of the K-8 Michael Anderson School in the Avondale Elementary School District, where district leaders have encouraged a particularly data-driven approach to tracking student absenteeism, identifying who needs support and then focusing on relationships to address families’ needs. 

Williford said he used to call parents regularly to detail the consequences they might face if their child’s attendance didn’t improve. Now, he said, he calls with the goal of finding out what is keeping a child from school and how he might help.

Ensuring kids get to — and stay in — class is especially important given the type of teaching and learning that is more common in classrooms today, where students carry on academic conversations and problem-solve together during hands-on assignments, he said.

“Every discipline issue that comes up, we’re always asking: ‘Why? I see this behavior, I recognize this behavior — what’s contributing to it? What do we need to do to overcome it?’”

Bajah Ali, principal of El Dorado High School

He can’t remember the last time he suspended a student for missing class.

“A kid comes to school and they’re late … and I’m going to send them right back home? That just doesn’t make sense to me,” Williford said. “My job is to make sure the kids are in school as much as possible.” 

In some districts, leaders’ shift away from attendance-related suspensions is a recent one. But other Arizona educators have fought the practice — and promoted alternatives geared toward eliminating barriers to attendance — for years. 

Related:Inside our analysis of attendance-related suspensions in Arizona

Bahja Ali, a former caseworker for the state, said witnessing one too many suspensions for attendance violations spurred her to become an educator in the first place. One of the students on her caseload was a pregnant teen suffering from morning sickness, she recalled. The school’s response to her irregular attendance was blocking her from class even when she was feeling well. 

Ali’s voice gets animated when she tells this story. 

“Why are we not looking at why they missed in the first place instead of going to punishment?” asked Ali, now principal of El Dorado High School in Chandler. 

Limited research exists on whether suspensions are actually effective when it comes to discouraging absenteeism — and the debate can be fierce. Administrators in districts that suspend for attendance violations argued students had to be held accountable for their actions, particularly when their absences created liability concerns. Often, they said, kids failed to take lesser forms of punishment seriously.

But Arizona educators like Ali believe suspending for an absence or a tardy hurts more than it helps, and shouldn’t happen at all.

An alternative charter school, El Dorado serves about 220 students searching for academic and behavioral support they couldn’t find at traditional schools. Ali tells students that their past makes them who they are, but it doesn’t define them, and at her school, she creates room for students to develop new habits and try on new educational identities.

“Every discipline issue that comes up,” Ali said, “we’re always asking: ‘Why? I see this behavior, I recognize this behavior — what’s contributing to it? What do we need to do to overcome it?’ ”

Her students notice. 

El Dorado senior Tyequan Colkey, for instance, said he spent his middle school years in Buffalo, New York, regularly getting suspended for absenteeism. He became numb to the punishment and said he stopped caring when he got suspended. “I didn’t go to school anyways, so it didn’t do nothing,” he said. Indeed, all a suspension accomplished was further alienating him from school.

“It showed me that they didn’t want me there anyways,” he said. “So why would I go?”  

Related: Restorative justice is about more than just reducing suspensions

After moving to Arizona at 16, he first attended a large, traditional high school, where he felt lost and unsupported. He frequently skipped class, he said, and when the pandemic shut down his school, all he needed to do was ignore his computer. 

When Colkey transferred to El Dorado last school year, he brought his attendance problems with him. But Ali and her staff chased after him, overwhelming him with phone calls, texts and even home visits, trying to convince him to show up. They told him he was capable and a leader and shouldn’t throw away his potential. At school, teachers gave him more personal attention and worked to help him understand the course content. 

While he admits to being late on occasion, Colkey, 19, said he now goes to school daily. 

“They’re putting in the effort,” Colkey said of El Dorado staff. “I might as well put in the effort, too.”

He’s due to graduate in the spring, and he hopes to follow his high school diploma with a college degree.

While alternative schools tend to be known for their smaller student populations and more flexible policies, leaders of some larger, more traditional school districts have also committed to minimizing harsh punishments. 

Lupita Hightower, Arizona’s Superintendent of the Year and head of the Tolleson Elementary School District, sets the tone for five schools serving about 2,900 students, advocating against attendance-related suspensions and expulsions.

To be effective, the approach has to “come from the top,” she said, and then “everyone has to be in agreement on that philosophy.”

Related:Students can’t learn if they don’t show up at school

In Tolleson Elementary School District, every adult is called a “treasure hunter,” tasked with searching for the talents, skills and intelligence that exist in every child and believing that all children are capable of success, “no exceptions.” Each child in the district is paired with an adult treasure hunter, like Hightower, who checks in with them regularly. 

Student clubs and extracurriculars, including an award-winning mariachi band, aim to help students find a welcoming home in their schools. A health clinic in the district, funded with philanthropic dollars, helps address illnesses early and get kids back to school. Even the school food is considered a way to entice students to show up: “Pozole day” is a favorite, Hightower said, and she has heard students complaining to their parents when they get picked up for appointments early and miss the Mexican soup.  

“They’re putting in the effort. I might as well put in the effort, too.”

Tyequan Colkey, senior at El Dorado High School

Though Hightower is proud of the district’s disciplinary record over her nearly 12-year tenure as superintendent, the approach hasn’t come without criticism. When Tolleson Elementary’s school board presented at a national conference about its efforts to reduce suspensions and expulsions, for example, some in the audience argued that the model meant a lack of accountability for kids. 

Hightower doesn’t see it that way. The district uses peer mediation and a program called restorative justice that encourages students to take responsibility for their actions, while still limiting suspensions.  

“For us, it’s not like the kids are running around wild,” Hightower said. “There’s a lot of strategy and a lot of work around that philosophy and that belief.” 

This story about absenteeism in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about racial bias in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Camron Olivas has been suspended at least five times throughout middle and high school for being late to class. While his mother cares for his toddler sister, his older brother drives him in, and they frequently arrive after the first bell. During the day, Camron said he sometimes remains in the hallways too long between classes, talking to his friends.

Punishments for the teen’s tardiness have escalated from warnings to in-school suspensions to multiday out-of-school suspensions.

Camron, 15, attends Deer Valley High School, just west of Phoenix, where he is one of an outsize number of Hispanic students who have been suspended for attendance violations, according to district data. Camron, who is also Native American, most recently spent a day in the in-school suspension room in October, a punishment that forced him to miss seven whole periods for occasionally being a few minutes late to some of them. The next day, he had to catch up on what he missed, while also taking in new lessons.

“I never thought it made sense,” Camron said of the punishment.

Students all over Arizona are suspended for not showing up to class, whether it’s because they arrive late, leave campus midday or fail to make it at all, an investigation by The Hechinger Report and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting has found. And, the data shows, Black, Latino and Native American students are frequently overrepresented among those blocked from class for missing class — what some argue is evidence of a potential civil rights violation.

Nationally, researchers have tied similar discipline disparities to school attendance policies and the unequal application of punishment. The policies tend to be more accepting of reasons that white students are most likely to miss class, and educators unevenly assign discipline of all kinds, allowing bias to creep in. The consequences can be steep: These inequities in school discipline — what some researchers have dubbed the “punishment gap” — contribute directly to racial differences in academic performance.

“Students have a right to be treated in equity with their peers, and when there’s unexplained disproportionality, it’s really incumbent on schools to understand why that disproportionality exists and to work to rectify it,” said Darrell Hill, attorney and policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Students from historically marginalized groups who receive excessive suspensions in response to tardies or unexcused absences could “certainly” have grounds for a civil rights claim, Hill said.

The Hechinger/AZCIR investigation offers one of the most in-depth analyses ever conducted of suspensions for attendance violations. Because most states and the federal government don’t collect detailed data on the reasons behind suspensions, the extent of this controversial practice has long remained hidden.

The analysis revealed nearly 47,000 suspensions for attendance violations over the past five school years, across more than 80 districts that suspended students for missing class. The true scale of the problem is likely much larger, as almost 250 districts failed to provide comprehensive data in response to public records requests.

“You’re going to suspend me for being late, and then you’re going to make me fall behind in class more. It’s like, what was the point?”

DaMarion Green, Dysart High School student

Cumulatively, Black and Hispanic students were overrepresented among those punished every year, among 20 districts that supplied usable demographic data. (Together, they accounted for 90 percent of all attendance-related suspensions in the sample.) Last school year, for example, Black students made up 6 percent of the total enrollment across all 20 districts but received 15 percent of suspensions. Hispanic students made up 43 percent of enrollment but received 68 percent of suspensions.

White students, meanwhile, were largely underrepresented, making up 37 percent of enrollment and receiving 23 percent of suspensions.

Among the dozen districts with enough data to assess Native American student representation, these students sometimes accounted for double or triple the share of suspensions that would be expected based on their proportion of enrollment.

Presented with the results of the analysis, Kathy Hoffman, Arizona superintendent of public instruction, issued a statement saying the findings confirmed “why it is vital for Arizona to focus on equitable and fair treatment of all students.” But she did not address the state’s role during her four-year tenure, instead urging her recently elected successor to “work with our schools toward solutions that uplift and support students of color in Arizona” once he is sworn in.

“When students of color are disproportionately disciplined, it impacts the time they can spend learning in the classroom and hampers their ability to succeed academically,” Hoffman said.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. departments of Justice and Education issued joint guidance to schools about racial disparities in school discipline. They cautioned that a disciplinary policy that had an adverse impact on students of a particular race and was “not necessary to meet an important educational goal” violated civil rights law.

The agencies highlighted out-of-school suspensions for missing school as cause for particular concern.

“A school,” the guidance read, “would likely have difficulty demonstrating that excluding a student from attending school in response to the student’s efforts to avoid school was necessary to meet an important educational goal.”

Related: Inside our analysis of attendance-related suspensions in Arizona

The Trump administration rescinded the guidance in 2018, saying it went beyond what the Civil Rights Act required. But the departments asserted that “robust protections against race, color, and national origin discrimination … remain unchanged.”

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has yet to issue fresh guidance on the topic. But Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon, who first ran the office under former President Barack Obama, said her staff would use the same process it used then to assess whether disparities in discipline constitute unlawful discrimination.

“It’s kind of just how they see you. If you hang out with certain kids, it happens a lot. Especially for being late.”

Antoine Moore, Deer Valley High School student

The Office for Civil Rights considers more than just data when deciding whether or not discrimination occurred. But Lhamon said the numbers uncovered by the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis offer justification for an investigation. “Disparities of any kind are notable and worth evaluating,” Lhamon said.

“I am very concerned when I hear about kids missing instructional time,” she added.

In some Arizona districts, the imbalance in who gets suspended for attendance violations is striking.

Glendale Union High School District, for example, handed out nearly 12,500 suspensions for attendance violations over the past five school years. And while Latino students made up about 60 percent of its enrollment, they accounted for up to 90 percent of students suspended. Black students represented about 8  percent of students enrolled but as much as 21 percent of students suspended, while Native American students made up about 2 percent of enrollment and as much as 6 percent of suspensions.

Kim Mesquita, Glendale Union High School District spokeswoman, did not comment on the disparities in school discipline by race. In response to questions about the district’s frequent use of suspensions for attendance violations, she said the district was “reviewing the data” and “determining what is effective and what is not.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Researchers have found that racial disparities in who is disciplined for absenteeism can be attributed, in part, to attendance policies themselves. School districts punish students only for unexcused absences, making district approval for missing school crucial. And white students are more likely than those of other races to be absent for reasons that schools excuse.

“Racism is so blatantly written into the policies,” said Clea McNeely, a University of Tennessee research professor who studied attendance policies in a nationally representative sample of 97 school districts.

McNeely and her team found that school districts were less likely to excuse absences caused by life circumstances more typically experienced by Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.

Students who go to the doctor when they’re sick have an easier time getting illness-related absences excused, for instance, and white families are more likely to receive medical care. Kids whose families can’t afford reliable transportation are more likely to rack up tardies that lead to suspensions. Schools will often excuse an absence for a child visiting a parent in the military, but not one for visiting a parent who is incarcerated. The list goes on. Centuries of discrimination, sometimes government-sponsored, have led to racial patterns around poverty and incarceration, making Black, Latino and Indigenous families less likely to be insured, more likely to live in poverty, and more likely to deal with incarceration.

Across three districts where McNeely’s team studied individual absences, 13 percent of white students’ absences were deemed unexcused, compared with 21 percent of absences by Hispanic students and 24 percent of absences by Black and American Indian students.

Arizona districts have policies similar to those McNeely studied. In Dysart Unified School District, for example, illness, medical appointments and approved family vacations are among the reasons students can qualify for an excused absence.

Black students make up about 7 percent of Dysart’s enrollment, yet they received as much as 13 percent of suspensions over the past five school years. Hispanic students make up around 40 percent of enrollment and received as much as 67 percent of suspensions.

In one study, absences among Black students were unexcused 24 percent of the time, compared with 13 percent for white students.

Renee Ryon, spokeswoman for Dysart Unified, said discipline for attendance violations is clearly described in the student handbook.

“Either students come to class on time, or they are marked tardy or absent,” Ryon said via email. “Dysart is dedicated to serving all students, and we would be remiss if we did not do everything in our power to ensure they are all in class on time in order to learn, regardless of their demographics.”

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions

The wisdom of suspending students for missing class, however, is disputed. Some Arizona students said their districts shouldn’t suspend students for attendance violations — logic that matches that of researchers, advocates and educators who say discipline is not the answer to absenteeism.

“Everyone has something at home,” said DaMarion Green, a sophomore at Dysart High School. “They might be going through something and that’s why they’re late, and this doesn’t help nothing.”

DaMarion, who is Black, said he has been suspended about four times for being late in the mornings. To him, it all just seems illogical.

“You’re going to suspend me for being late, and then you’re going to make me fall behind in class more,” said DaMarion. “It’s like, what was the point?”

Sometimes, disparities in school discipline can be attributed directly to those making decisions about whether or not to dole out punishments. Two decades of research have demonstrated that Black students, while no more likely to misbehave, are more likely than their white classmates to be referred to the principal’s office — specifically for subjective offenses, such as defiance.

McNeely’s team found a similar pattern in punishment for absenteeism. Researchers looked closely at absences and truancy court referrals in three school districts, finding that American Indian, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than their white peers to be sent to court, even when they miss the same number of days of school.

Arizona students also described a level of subjectivity in how educators decide who gets punished for being late to class, even if none who were asked tied it to racial bias. At Deer Valley High School, which Camron attends, kids noted some students didn’t face any consequences for missing class, while others got suspended.

Last school year, Black students made up 6 percent of the total enrollment across 20 Arizona districts that supplied usable demographic data but received 15 percent of suspensions. Hispanic students made up 43 percent of enrollment but received 68 percent of suspensions.

Camron’s own brother, a senior at the high school, arrives late just as frequently as Camron. But his brother’s first-period class this year is physical education, and the teacher is more lenient, Camron said. And while Camron’s midday tardies certainly count against him, his peers described similar cases of disparate treatment.

“It’s kind of just how they see you,” said Antoine Moore, 16, who said he has never been suspended for attendance violations but knows students who have. “If you hang out with certain kids, it happens a lot. Especially for being late.”

At Deer Valley Unified, overrepresentation among Black and Hispanic students suspended ranged from 2 to 12 percentage points above their share of student enrollment over the past five years.

Gary Zehrbach, deputy superintendent of administrative leadership and services in the district, said the suspensions logged for attendance violations were “usually related to multiple disciplinary infractions,” but exactly how often isn’t clear in the data. He did not respond to requests for comment on the racial disparities within the suspensions.

Related: Students can’t learn if they don’t show up at school

Still, not every student who makes a habit of being late or has unexcused absences ends up getting suspended for it.

Jalen Greathouse, 16, attends Valley Vista High School in Dysart Unified. He said getting punished for being late to class depends, in part, on the teacher overseeing that class. Teachers can choose to have students who are late get “swept” into a classroom where they sit out the rest of the period and administrators assess whether they qualify for a longer suspension.

“Some teachers are cool with it,” Jalen said. “Other teachers are like, ‘One second late — go to sweep.’ ”

Students don’t report having their behavior curbed by suspensions for attendance violations. The punishment, after all, doesn’t give them control over much of what keeps them from school. And when they do get suspended, which Jalen so far has not, they miss important instructional time.

Researchers have found missing just two days of school per month — for any reason — can lead to serious problems. Students who are absent that much are more likely to have trouble reading in third grade, to score lower on language and math tests in middle school, and to drop out of high school. Students who get suspended see similarly depressed academic performance and graduation rates — areas where Black and Latino students already tend to trail their white peers.

A study by researchers from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University examined the impact of suspensions on racial differences in reading and math performance, dubbing the racial disparity the “punishment gap.” A full 20 percent of the difference in academic performance between Black and white students, they said, can be explained by Black students’ higher rate of suspensions.

When the Obama administration issued its guidance on school discipline, it focused on racial disparities among students being suspended. Supporters and critics alike credited the now-rescinded guidance, currently “under review” by the Biden administration, with driving down suspensions, in part because of the threat of investigation it implied.

This past August, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced a resolution with California’s Victor Valley Union High School District, in which the district agreed to revise its discipline policies and remove tardiness and truancy as reasons for suspension. The Office for Civil Rights had found enough evidence to conclude the district disproportionately disciplined Black students for missing class, among other things.

Still, Lhamon said school districts have a responsibility to fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights Act, whether her office is investigating or not.

“The obligation is an obligation every day,” she said, “for every school community.”

This story about racial bias in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about suspensions for truancy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

PHOENIX — Guadalupe Hernandez’s attendance problems started in kindergarten.

The boy, who has two attention disorders and oppositional defiant disorder, often refused to sit still for circle time. He also experienced separation anxiety while away from his grandmother, Frances Yduarte, who raised him. He’d spend his days distracted from lessons, wishing he was home with her.

Guadalupe started asking Yduarte, whom he calls mama, to let him skip school. Frequently, she did. Eventually, school administrators responded to his absences with punishment: Guadalupe said they gave him an in-school suspension, keeping him away from his classmates for an entire day. The next year, in first grade, he said administrators escalated the punishment to an out-of-school suspension, temporarily barring him from school altogether.

To Yduarte and Guadalupe, the discipline didn’t make any sense. She was struggling to get him to class, and now the school was telling her not to bother.

“They should have talked to me,” said Guadalupe, now 13, “instead of just coming to conclusions and straight up suspending me.”

Suspending students for missing class — whether it’s because they showed up late, cut midday or were absent from school entirely — is a controversial tactic. At least 11 states fully ban the practice, and six more prohibit out-of-school suspensions to some extent for attendance violations.

That leaves schools in much of the country, including Arizona, free to punish most students for missing learning time by forcing them to miss even more. Yet the scope of that practice is largely hidden: The federal government doesn’t collect detailed data on why schools suspend students, and most states don’t, either.

Arizona collects limited discipline data from its districts. But a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Hechinger Report and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting has found that attendance-related suspensions are pervasive, in some districts accounting for more than half of all in-school suspensions.

Related: How the pandemic has altered school discipline – perhaps forever

Hechinger and AZCIR obtained, through public records requests, data from 150-plus districts and charter networks that educate about 61 percent of Arizona’s 1.1 million public school students. The majority had suspended students for attendance-related violations, collectively assigning nearly 47,000 suspensions over the past five school years. Of those, 1 in 5 were out-of-school suspensions. Totals for the full public school population are likely much higher, given that almost 250 school systems failed to produce comprehensive data — or any data at all — under Arizona public records law.

Among districts in the Hechinger/AZCIR sample that suspended for attendance, missing class led to 10 percent of all suspensions, resulting in tens of thousands of additional missed days of school. A deeper analysis of 20 districts that provided extensive demographic data revealed Black and Hispanic students frequently received a disproportionate share of these suspensions.

Students may miss class for any number of reasons, including transportation problems, family responsibilities or disengagement from school. Suspending them, experts say, not only fails to remedy these underlying challenges but, as with Guadalupe, can lead to further disengagement and worsen the attendance problems the discipline was meant to address.

Suspensions can also contribute to new problems, such as lower academic performance and higher dropout rates. The consequences can extend beyond high school, researchers have found, with suspensions linked to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system. Nationwide, critics of the punishment cite missed class time as a key problem with it, and the U.S. Department of Education now tracks days lost to out-of-school suspensions.

“If a child is struggling to get to school or class and this is the issue, then removing them from the place that we want them to be is really counterintuitive,” said Anna Warmbrand, director of student relations for Tucson Unified School District, where district policy prohibits out-of-school suspensions for attendance violations alone.

But many districts continue to suspend kids for missing school, not just for dayslong absences but also for showing up a few minutes late to class, the 11-month Hechinger/AZCIR investigation found. In conversations with more than 75 students in two Arizona districts that frequently suspend for attendance violations, kids described how administrators mete out the punishment routinely.

Richie Taylor, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education, noted that state statute generally allows school boards to set their own rules when it comes to discipline. But after reviewing preliminary Hechinger/AZCIR findings, he suggested it may be time to examine what he called “state policies, or lack thereof, that lead to overly punitive disciplinary actions related to attendance and result in more time spent by students out of the classroom.”

“If the past few years have taught us anything,” Taylor said of the pandemic and its aftermath, “it is that regular in-person learning is critical to a student’s academic success.”

For years, it was a battle getting Guadalupe to his Phoenix elementary school in the Washington Elementary School District. Yduarte said she would wake him up, pull the blankets off him and tell him it was time to go. Sometimes, he’d negotiate: “I’ll go at 10,” or “I’ll go at lunchtime.” Sometimes, he’d plead: “Get me out early, mama — please, please get me out early.” Other times, he’d just lie there in silence.

“That was a daily thing for him,” Yduarte said.

Guadalupe missed so much school that, when he did show up, he couldn’t follow what was happening in class.

“Most of the things that we were learning, I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t getting much help,” Guadalupe said. “I just didn’t feel comfortable coming to school anymore.”

Guadalupe remembers a two-day out-of-school suspension in first grade. It was the first time the school had punished him by forcing him to stay home, he said. He was chastened for a day, returning to school as instructed when his suspension was over. But the effect didn’t last. He didn’t go the following day. The suspension, he said, made him want to go to school even less.

The district declined to comment on his case, citing federal student privacy laws, but a spokesperson, Pam Horton, said it generally does not suspend students for attendance violations. Data provided by the district shows that it has, however, issued suspensions for attendance issues — at least 650 over the past four school years.

Related: Students can’t learn if they don’t show up at school

Under Arizona law, students are considered truant if they miss at least one class period without a valid excuse. The law defines excessive absences as missing 10 percent of school days or more, a level more widely referred to as chronic absenteeism. State statute allows districts to set their own punishments for missing school and suggests a range of consequences for chronically absent students, including failing a subject, failing a grade level, suspension and expulsion.

Districts and charters use a mix of approaches to address absenteeism, the Hechinger/AZCIR investigation found, including warnings, parent conferences, detentions, in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions. In a relatively small portion of cases, schools refer kids who are frequently absent to the courts for truancy, which can lead to criminal charges for children or their guardians.

Strategies for combating absenteeism can vary within a single school system. Several administrators contacted for this story said they did not realize how often certain schools in their districts were suspending kids for attendance violations.   

Arizona places pressure on schools to reduce chronic absenteeism, evaluating elementary and middle schools in part on the number of their students who miss at least 10 percent of school days. In fact, most states now expect districts to pay attention to this issue, informed by research that says an average of two absences per month can create a tipping point in early literacy, performance on standardized tests and dropout rates. But the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis indicates suspensions in many Arizona districts are compounding an absenteeism problem already exacerbated by the pandemic.

Colorado River Union High School District, near the Nevada border, is among the most punitive districts in the Hechinger/AZCIR sample. It serves fewer than 2,000 students but assigned 351 out-of-school suspensions for attendance-related violations over the past five school years. Most of those suspensions happened at Mohave High School.

Principal Gina Covert said the school has a homeless liaison and a psychologist intended to help students overcome barriers to their attendance, but “there are times when consequences have to happen.”

For the first few weeks of this school year, teachers and administrators were relatively lenient, she said, explaining school rules and guiding students who tested those rules back to class. But by late August, Covert said students without a hall pass received a suspension.

“We’ve been training them now for five weeks,” she said at the time. “They need to be where they’re supposed to be.” 

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

Lucky Arvizo is principal of Somerton High School in the Yuma Union High School District, which serves about 11,000 students and handed out 535 attendance-related out-of-school suspensions over the past five years — one of only three districts issuing more of these suspensions than Covert’s. He described a similar policy of gradually escalating discipline and said he considers suspension in response to poor attendance a last resort.

“But when it does happen, the student thinks, ‘Oh, wow, this is more serious than I thought.’ And that behavior changes,” Arvizo said.

Several current and former school officials disagree. During a suspension, they said, students don’t get support to change bad habits, and they don’t get help with barriers that might keep them from school, such as family and work commitments. Suspensions similarly fail to address school-based issues that can contribute to poor attendance, like bullying or academic troubles.

Missing just two days of school per month has been tied to lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school.

Limited research exists on whether suspensions are an effective strategy for discouraging absenteeism. One study found that while kids who received out-of-school suspensions for truancy were less likely to be truant again in the short term, repeated use of suspensions actually led to greater absenteeism in the long term.

That absenteeism can have lasting consequences: Missing just two days of school per month has been tied to lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school. Meanwhile, the growing body of research on suspensions more generally shows they harm kids and their learning, leading to growing calls to address misbehavior in ways that keep students in class.

Terri Martinez-McGraw, executive director of the National Center for School Engagement, says suspensions are counterproductive. Her group counsels schools to address absenteeism with problem-solving, working with students to identify exactly why they’re missing school and addressing those root causes.

“Our kids have the answer,” Martinez-McGraw said. “If we sit down and talk to them about their behavior, they’re going to let us know the whys and the whats and how we can get that behavior changed.”

In Guadalupe’s case, suspensions added to his time out of class, while doing nothing to change his academic trajectory.

Related: A third of public school children were chronically absent after classrooms re-opened, advocacy group says

Yduarte said Guadalupe was consistently failing all his classes. He struggled to read and do grade-level math and couldn’t follow what was being taught in science and social studies.  

Yduarte said she tried to convince the school to give him extra services to help him control his behavior and catch up on his work, but the help was intermittent. When he was given more one-on-one attention, he would go to school more willingly, she said. But when he didn’t get that extra help, he’d go back to begging to stay home.

“What they never understood,” Yduarte said, “was because he hadn’t been in school for so long, he didn’t know what was going on at school, he didn’t know his work, and there was nobody there to help him with it.”

Dysart Unified School District serves about 23,000 students across 140 square miles of Maricopa County, its sprawling campuses dotting the dry valley terrain. The district handed out nearly 12,000 attendance-related suspensions over the five-year period reviewed.

During the 2018-19 school year, the last full year before COVID, Dysart suspended students nearly 3,500 times for being late to class. During the roller coaster of 2020-21, school leaders suspended students more than 1,000 times for being late, according to the district’s data. In total, over the past five years,nearly 60 percent of all in-school suspensions in the district were for attendance violations. (This includes single-period or half-day suspensions.)

It’s not hard to find Dysart High School students who’ve been suspended for being late. Most students have six classes each day, 180 days of the year, providing more than 1,000 chances to rack up a tardy. School policy indicates six tardies lead to a one-day in-school suspension. Three more lead to a three-day stint in the suspension room, where students are expected to stay quiet. They can work on assignments or, as one sophomore put it, stare at a wall.

Five Dysart students who had been suspended for being late to class said various circumstances contributed to their tardiness. One said she was suspended when her school bus arrived late, while two others were suspended after relatives dropped them off after the bell. Two more students said they overslept or lost track of time. A sixth said her friend was suspended for missing class while in the school bathroom dealing with her menstrual cycle. She had blood on her clothes and spent unexcused time cleaning herself up.

Another student, whose name is being withheld due to privacy concerns, described the school’s suspension policy for tardiness as “stupid.”

“If you’re late in one class, and it’s repeated,” she said, “I feel like they shouldn’t take your learning away from your other classes, because then you’ll fall behind.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

District officials said they could not comment on individual suspensions. But Renee Ryon, Dysart Unified’s director of communications, said students would only get suspended after a late bus arrival if they didn’t “promptly report to class.” And she defended the district’s suspension policy for repeated tardies.

“While it may seem odd to take students out of class in response to attendance issues, it is important to remember that it is also a safety issue if students aren’t where they should be during class time,” Ryon said. “We take safety very seriously and must be able to account for each student throughout the day.”

Still, advocates say schools should address the root causes of absenteeism rather than resort to disciplinary action. Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of the national nonprofit Attendance Works, urges schools to identify the barriers keeping students from class — including transportation issues, family instability, bullying, mental health problems and academic struggles — and offer solutions like bus passes, counseling, tutoring and other support to reengage students and keep them in class.

Students simply can’t benefit from instruction and opportunities in the classroom, Chang said, if they’re not there.

DaMarion Green, 16, said he has gotten approximately four in-school suspensions for arriving late to first period, all at Dysart High School, where he is a sophomore. Each time, he slipped behind in his classes without access to his teachers.

“That’s the whole point of a teacher, is to give you help,” DaMarion said. In the suspension room, he said, he couldn’t ask any questions. “They just want you to be quiet.” 

Though Arizona largely leaves disciplinary policy decisions to districts and charters, state legislators can, and do, intervene when they want to ban or limit certain punitive practices.

By the start of the 2021-22 school year, for example, lawmakers had stepped in to stop schools from suspending kids in kindergarten through fourth grade for all but the most serious disciplinary infractions — a move that should have indirectly eliminated attendance-related suspensions for the state’s youngest learners. But the law did not establish a state-level process for enforcement.  

Indeed, the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis suggests some districts may be flouting it. Phoenix-based Wilson Elementary School District, for instance, assigned eight out-of-school suspensions and 26 in-school suspensions to its youngest students for missing school between September and December of 2021, according to its own records. (Only a handful of districts provided discipline data to The Hechinger Report and AZCIR in a format that tracked student grade level along with suspension type.)

Superintendent Ernest Rose, who moved to Wilson from Tucson Unified in 2021, doesn’t defend the suspensions. After noticing an overreliance on suspensions in general, he said, he introduced a new code of conduct in January that discourages suspending kids for attendance violations, among other changes.

“It doesn’t make sense to punish someone for attendance by sending them home,” Rose said, adding that the change required a shift in mindset among district staff.

Related: Why is it so hard to stop suspending kindergartners?

Darrell Hill, policy director for the ACLU of Arizona, said advocates previously pushed for legislation explicitly targeting schools’ ability to suspend students because of excessive or unexcused absences, but conversations stalled. And while he still supports a law to end the practice, he also wants policymakers to give educators and administrators more resources to help struggling students.

“Schools haven’t been equipped to deal with these issues in any way but a suspension or expulsion,” Hill said. “So … they rely on exclusionary discipline even when it is clearly detrimental to the students they’re serving.”

In Guadalupe’s case, his attendance issues led to even more extreme consequences. While Yduarte said she remains his legal guardian, Guadalupe now lives with a foster family southeast of Phoenix. He was placed in foster care in large part due to his many absences from school while living with Yduarte. But the move came with a bevy of supports.

At his new public school in Chandler, Guadalupe said he gets counseling and after-school tutoring, and his doctors have finally settled on medication that helps him control his behavior disorders. He qualified for special education services shortly before moving, and the new supports have contributed to a turnaround: Guadalupe said he feels caught up academically, and he goes to school consistently.

Both Guadalupe and Yduarte hope the boy will soon be able to move back home.

Yduarte has a nagging worry that if he ends up in another school that responds to absenteeism with suspensions rather than supports, he’ll get off track again. But Guadalupe assures her he’ll be able to maintain his momentum at any school.

Yduarte remains cautious: “You’ll try.”

Fazil Khan contributed data analysis to this report.

This story about suspensions for truancy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about attendance-related suspensions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

“Education Suspended,” a collaboration between the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and The Hechinger Report, represents an ambitious, nearly yearlong effort to better understand the impact of school absences on Arizona students. When kids aren’t in class, they aren’t learning, a reality underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This series isn’t just about why students may miss class, though. Our collaborative investigation is more about what Arizona schools do to students who are consistently absent — or, as we ultimately found, what they do even if kids are repeatedly a few minutes late, sometimes through no fault of their own.

Administrators at schools of varying sizes, types and demographic makeups often respond to a range of attendance violations by keeping students out of class altogether, in the form of in- or out-of-school suspensions. Being blocked from class for missing class, however, compounds the problem these officials say they’re trying to solve.

Yet, without comprehensive data readily available at either the state or federal levels, it was initially impossible to see how widespread the practice of suspending students for attendance issues was, or how many additional school days kids were missing as a result.

We also couldn’t tell which districts most frequently used suspensions in response to attendance problems, how heavily they leaned on out-of-school suspensions, which types of attendance violations were being punished most often, and whether students from historically marginalized groups were overrepresented when it came to disciplinary action.

So we submitted hundreds of records requests and used the responses to create an original database to answer those and other key questions.

Here’s a closer look at how we did it, and the decisions we made along the way.

Why were public records requests needed to access this information?

Districts and charter schools periodically collect and report suspension and expulsion data to the U.S. Department of Education as part of the Civil Rights Data Collection, a federal effort to ensure the country’s public schools do not discriminate against protected classes of students. Though Arizona displays the results online as part of its “school report card” system, CRDC data couldn’t address the questions we sought to answer.

The data does not tie suspensions to violations, making it impossible to see whether a school system suspended students for attendance issues in general, or which types of attendance violations it suspends for specifically. CRDC data also does not provide a full picture of suspension lengths, which we needed to determine how long students were being blocked from class as a result of missing class.

The Arizona Department of Education does not collect detailed disciplinary data for all students, either. It does, however, maintain enrollment data and chronic absenteeism data that we used to establish district baselines for comparison.

What information did reporters ask for?

To fill these data gaps — and allow us to see, for the first time, which school systems use suspensions in response to absences, tardies and other attendance issues—AZCIR and The Hechinger Report submitted more than 400 records requests to districts and charter systems throughout the state.

We asked for disciplinary data capturing in-school and out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and transfers that:

• Spanned the 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.
• Included the reason for each disciplinary action.
• Noted, for suspensions, how many days the punishment lasted.
• Was broken down by race/ethnicity, gender and disability status.

We also requested information on truancy referrals, since some schools refer students with excessive absences to the court system.

Were records requests sent to every school system in Arizona?

We excluded the following from our analysis:

• Alternative schools, which explicitly serve at-risk students: those with a history of disruptive behavior issues, for example, or those who have previously dropped out of school or are primary caregivers. Since alternative schools tend to treat discipline differently than traditional campuses (for example, by committing to avoiding highly punitive measures), their data could skew the results of our analysis.
• Accommodation districts. We used a similar rationale here, since these districts also tend to serve student populations with specific needs (such as students in juvenile detention, students experiencing homelessness, students on military bases or reservations) in nontraditional learning environments.
• Career and technical education districts, another type of unconventional educational setting that focuses on preparing students for the workforce. CTEDs require a majority of instructional time to be conducted in a field-based or work-based learning environment.
• Small rural districts that have so few students, the Department of Education redacts any meaningful data.

Did all Arizona school systems provide responsive data?

No. Several school districts were slow to comply, in many cases only providing data after several rounds of follow-up. Hundreds of other districts and charters either didn’t provide usable data or respond at all (a violation of Arizona public records law).

It ultimately took more than six months to get responses from about 200 district and charter systems, and many were incomplete. Some were missing demographic information, or did not specify how long suspensions lasted. A handful did not tie disciplinary actions to violation categories. Others redacted all data points representing numbers smaller than 11, citing student privacy concerns.

School systems also provided responses in a wide range of formats. A portion sent clean databases that could be analyzed immediately, while many more sent spreadsheets or PDFs that required significant standardization before they could be analyzed. Some sent scanned copies of individual incident report forms or other files that included thousands of narrative descriptions. In those cases, we read the descriptions and logged the corresponding data points in spreadsheets.

Why was there so much variation in disciplinary data?

At a basic level, the discrepancies make sense, because schools aren’t required to maintain this data in a uniform way. Districts and charters use a variety of digital student management systems that generate different types of reports, and some smaller schools don’t use a digital system at all.

In other circumstances, the discrepancies were either deliberate or avoidable. For instance, some school systems, acting on advice from their attorneys, converted spreadsheets to PDFs before providing their data. Some districts claimed current employees were not familiar enough with their student management systems to produce responsive reports — one wanted AZCIR/Hechinger to pay more than $400 for employee training in order to get the data (we did not). Others said they could only provide data for certain years because they had switched student management systems and had not retained records from prior systems.

How did you standardize the data?

We first reviewed each school system’s data to determine whether it had suspended students for attendance violations over the past five school years.

Sometimes, it was easy to identify attendance-related violation categories: “truancy,” “tardy,” “unexcused absence,” “excessive absences,” “ditching,” “skipping,” “other attendance violation,” and so on. Other times, we had to make a judgment call. For instance:

• We considered “leaving school grounds/campus without permission” and “elopement” (fleeing the campus) attendance violations, as students were being punished for leaving during the school day.
• We considered skipping an in-school suspension to be an attendance violation, since those occur during class time, unlike out-of-school suspensions.
• We did not consider skipping an after-school detention to be an attendance violation, since that would happen outside of school hours.

If a school system did, in fact, suspend for attendance-related violations, we worked to clean and standardize its data so we could add it to our master database.This involved (1) making basic fixes to ensure data was consistently formatted and (2) using data analysis software to calculate total in-school suspensions, total out-of-school suspensions and days missed as a result, by violation type and school year. When provided, we also calculated demographic totals — by race/ethnicity, gender and disability status — by violation type and school year.

A few things worth noting:

Data for some school systems indicated they doled out partial-day suspensions, such as sending a student home on out-of-school suspension “for the rest of the day.” When districts calculated the time missed for us, we used their numbers. When they didn’t, we calculated estimates ourselves based on details in the incident description. (For example, if a district noted a student was sent to the in-school suspension room the last two of six class periods, we estimated 0.3 days missed. If the incident time indicated a district sent a student home about halfway through the school day, we estimated 0.5 days missed.)

Some school districts listed a minimum duration of one school day for all suspensions, then claimed that many suspensions were actually for less than one day when contacted about total days missed. If districts could not provide more precise suspension durations, we used the data as submitted.

We did not calculate suspension lengths for districts that only listed start and end dates for each incident. Doing so would have required determining total days included in the range, then reviewing both standard and academic calendars for each year to subtract weekend days and school holidays for every suspension.

In at least five cases, we could see a district suspended students for attendance problems, but data integrity issues did not allow us to glean much more. We ultimately excluded those districts from our database, since their data was not usable for detailed calculations.

What did the final AZCIR/Hechinger database include?

Our database included the number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions each district issued, by school year and violation type, as well as how long the suspensions lasted. We also added demographic data for those suspended when available. We distinguished between true zeroes and missing or redacted data points, since those differences matter.

We categorized each violation category as attendance-related or not, so we could analyze the number and rates of suspensions for attendance issues — the most original part of our data-driven reporting. Among other questions, we wanted to know: What proportion of suspensions were for attendance violations overall? Which districts used them most often? Were school systems using in-school or out-of-school suspensions more to punish kids for missing class time? Which types of attendance violations were being punished most frequently? How much additional class time were kids missing as a result of these suspensions?

How did you analyze the data?

We did topline calculations using data from districts and charters that suspended for attendance violations. We first determined the total number of attendance-related suspensions for the five-year review period, as well as the total days lost to those suspensions. We did the same calculations for in-school suspensions specifically, as well as out-of-school suspensions.

Because we received suspension data organized by incident, not by student ID, totals represented the number of suspensions issued, not the number of students suspended. In a group of 100 suspensions, for instance, one student could account for 10 of them.

Because several districts did not provide the lengths of any of all suspensions issued, we also knew total days missed would likely be an undercount.

Though the analysis did not include all Arizona school systems, or complete data for every district that did respond, the calculations offer a better understanding of the proportion of overall suspensions tied to attendance violations, illustrating for the first time just how pervasive the practice of suspending for attendance issues is across Arizona — and what that means in terms of additional days missed, even if approximate.

The in-school versus out-of-school suspension comparison revealed that more than 1 in 5 attendance-related suspensions in our sample were served out of school, a practice experts argue is even more detrimental than in-school suspensions when it comes to student disengagement. It also showed, as we explore in part two of this series, that attendance-related suspensions tend to disproportionately affect Arizona’s Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students.

How did you do the district-level analysis?

At a more granular level, we wanted to better understand which district and charter systems most harshly punished students for attendance issues, and whether that was consistent over the five school years analyzed.

Because student populations varied widely from district to district, though, looking at raw numbers of suspensions issued and the resulting days missed — by district and year — wasn’t a fair comparative measure for every question we were trying to answer.

We instead used Arizona Department of Education enrollment data to calculate annual rates of attendance-related suspensions for each school system. Specifically, we analyzed the number of suspensions issued for attendance violations by district, per 1,000 students, per school year. This allowed us to compare districts, and also to see if and how a district’s use of suspensions for attendance violations changed over time.

We then used ADE’s chronic absenteeism data to calculate annual chronic absenteeism rates for each school system (again, per 1,000 students). We used those rates to determine if districts that most heavily relied on suspensions for attendance issues were the same as those with high rates of chronic absenteeism.

To examine specific subcategories of attendance-related violations — for instance, to see where suspending for tardies was most common — we filtered our database using keywords. In cases where districts grouped multiple offenses leading to a single suspension, we counted that suspension when calculating totals for each subcategory. For example, a suspension for “truancy/tardies” would appear both in the total number of tardy suspensions and the total number of truancy suspensions.

These analyses helped inform our decisions about where to focus our efforts when it came to interviewing district administrators, school officials and students.

How did you check for overrepresentation of certain racial/ethnic groups?

Though roughly 75 school systems provided some level of demographic breakdown for their suspension data, much of the race and ethnicity data was incomplete or heavily redacted.

To ensure our analysis was as accurate and fair as possible, we opted to analyze only the top 20 districts with the highest number of attendance-related suspensions and the most comprehensive demographic data (for both discipline and overall enrollment) for disproportionality. These districts accounted for just over a quarter of the state’s public school population but nearly 90 percent of attendance-related suspensions in the AZCIR/Hechinger sample.

To check for overrepresentation of certain racial/ethnic groups, we compared each group’s share of attendance-related suspensions within a district with its share of district enrollment, as supplied by ADE, for a given year. If the former was higher — for example, if Black students represented 10 percent of a district’s relevant suspensions but only 5 percent of its student population — that group was understood to be overrepresented, and thus disproportionately affected by attendance-related suspensions. This also allowed us to see that white students tended to be underrepresented among those suspended.

Two items worth mentioning:

• Because data for Indigenous students in particular was even more limited, analysis of that group involved about a dozen of the top 20 districts.
• Some school systems differed in how they treated students identifying as Hispanic — whether they listed a student identifying as Black and Hispanic under both Black and Hispanic or under “two or more races,” for instance. We generally had to defer to the school system when it came to race/ethnicity categorizations, which means it’s possible a small number of students appeared more than once in a district’s data.

This story about attendance-related suspensions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post Inside our analysis of attendance-related suspensions in Arizona appeared first on The Hechinger Report.