Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Nevada lawmakers push to harden school discipline for violent students

CCSD and RTC Partnership Announcement

Christopher DeVargas

The Clark County School District’s transportation department’s roster of bus drivers is depleted, which is causing havoc for children who ride a school bus daily and their parents.

Nevada lawmakers are considering dialing back restorative justice student discipline systems to make it easier to remove violent and disruptive children from classrooms.

Assembly Bill 285 does not do away with restorative justice entirely, authors told the Assembly Education Committee late last week.

Rather, the proposal would remove the requirements that each district have a restorative justice discipline plan. It also allows administrators to remove, suspend or expel students without creating an individual restorative justice plan first.

In districtwide and individual cases, the idea would be to have plans based on restorative justice, but discipline would still be progressive, or continually more severe, in nature. The bill also eliminates the law that says no children under age 11 can be expelled.

Assemblywoman Angie Taylor, one of the bill’s sponsors and a former Washoe County School District Board president, said the bill seeks balance between growing violence and the statistical reality that suspended and expelled students are disproportionately minorities, especially Black males.

Restorative justice is rehabilitative in nature and seeks to repair harm rather than excluding students through suspension or expulsion.

Nevada passed its restorative justice law in 2019. The late Assemblyman Tyrone Thompson, its main architect, wanted to address the disproportionate effects on nonwhite students and narrow the school-to-prison pipeline.

“Restorative justice, it’s a big phrase,” said Taylor, D-Reno. “The narrative around it means a lot of things to a lot of people. This bill is not intended to be all things to all people.”

Frustrated teachers know that violence is a problem, especially after the coronavirus pandemic started in 2020.

Angie Joy, who teaches at Lynch Elementary in Las Vegas, said she once had a girl who would throw objects and flip desks. After several weeks, her principal required the child’s parent to sit with her in class. That lasted one day before the parent simply transferred the girl to another school.

Something similar happened this year with a boy in her second grade classroom. As Joy began documenting the boy’s behaviors, which she said cost the class an hour and a half of lost instruction time every day, she noticed he had a history of disruption in his first grade class that wasn’t stopped.

When she spoke to the boy’s father, he transferred him to another classroom to see if it would make a difference. It has not, Joy said.

“Unlike me, his new teacher is breaking,” she said.

Kristan Nigro, who teaches kindergarten at Schorr Elementary in Las Vegas, said a girl in her class hit another student in the face with a hardcover book on the first day of school, causing her to rethink everything she had in her room.

The girl had daily outbursts that caused the whole class to live in fear. Nigro said she threatened to quit when the girl threw sharp scissors at her face.

Nigro called restorative justice a failure.

“I was most recently told by a 5-year-old that they wanted to stab me and watch me bleed out,” she said.

Norris DuPree, a marriage and family therapist who works with the Washoe County School District, said restorative justice, done right, is a systematic approach that reacts to red flags.

He acknowledged that teachers and students absorb troubled children’s outbursts caused by their personal trauma, creating a synergistic effect that he likened to the tension and fear of living in a home with domestic violence.

Teachers need compassion, and so do the children who are acting out, Dupree said.

“They need a way that they can come back, and they need grace,” he said. “Restorative justice offers them grace to come back.”

Marie Neisess, president of the Clark County Education Association, said the 2019 legislation was “passed with the right intentions, but four years later the lack of resources and proper implementation has only contributed to the crisis of violence in our schools today.”

Paul LaMarca, who oversaw the implementation of restorative justice in Washoe County, as the school district’s chief strategy officer, said the proposed changes are not about discipline but about safety and student learning.

He said removal can be necessary, but schools want students to come back eventually, and they need a system to reintegrate them.

“It’s not about exclusionary practices versus restorative practices,” he said. “Those things have to work in combination.”

Charter schoolteacher and Assemblywoman Selena Torres, D-Las Vegas, is another AB285 sponsor who worked on the original legislation. She said an update needs stronger language on training educators at all levels.

Torres said educators understand the law as a blanket ban on suspensions and expulsions, which she said isn’t true.

Possession of a dangerous weapon, for example, qualifies for immediate removal under state law.

Tonya Walls, representing the Las Vegas organization Code Switch Restorative Justice for Girls of Color, said she’s disheartened to hear from teachers living with daily violent outbursts.

“However, I do want to make clear that restorative justice as I am speaking about it is not what’s happening in this state or in the Clark County School District,” she said. “Restorative justice has not been implemented as per the legislation and I believe that it’s being scapegoated because of implementation challenges, accountability challenges and a lack of fiscal support.”

The committee did not vote on the bill.

The Nevada Senate has a similar, Republican-led bill to remove restorative justice requirements, but still allow the concept. That bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing.