Nancy Keuffer is the behavior support coordinator for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. She says district leaders have been taking a close look at school discipline policies.

“We have been very targeted as to what’s happening where, in what schools, and at what grade levels, and how that relates back to our code of conduct,” says Keuffer. “If there are some things that need to be changed, we have a group that is making a lot of change in the past few years. I think that’s why we’re seeing the reduction in out-of-school suspensions.”

The goal is to reduce not only the total number of students who get suspended, but more specifically to address the racial disparities in how that punishment is handed out.

In Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, black students make up just 11 percent of total enrollment, but account for 39 percent of all out-of-school suspensions and 41 percent of in-school suspensions. Latino students are 14 percent of the school population but make up between 19 and 22 percent of suspensions.

Looking at data from the 2013-14 school year, Kueffer says that’s changing.

The number of incidents in which students received out-of-school suspension dropped 42 percent for black students, 31 percent for Latino students, and 22 percent for white students from the previous year.

She credits in part the implementation of the Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support program throughout the district.

“Many schools are at different implementation levels, but just PBIS alone showed a great drop in out-of-school suspensions across the board,” says Kueffer. “If you look at when we started PBIS to now, we’ve had an 80 percent drop in out-of-school suspensions. But we still were seeing that disproportionate practices were happening, so we knew we needed to do some work around equity.”

To better focus on the racial disparities, officials began scrutinizing the patterns of discipline in each school on a regular basis.

“We started building strategies around having school leaders look at data monthly and question what was actually happening at their schools, in their grade levels and in each classroom, being very targeted and specific about working with teachers who might need more support working with students of color,” says Kueffer.

School administrators are also considering a new code of conduct that outlines appropriate interventions focused on teaching rather than punishing. That code will be reviewed for the next year before being fully implemented.

Keuffer says an updated report on suspension numbers using data from the most recent school year will be available at the end of the month.