Reducing Public Health Risk Factors through Changes in Suspension and Expulsion Policies

The purpose of the session is to examine the truancy and school attendance issue from the public health perspective, including: Definitions and extent of truancy; risk factors; traditional and effective truancy prevention approaches; and innovative approaches, with a special focus on learnings from the California Endowment project, “Examining Suspension and Expulsion Policies and Practices and Related Student Mental Health Issues in California”; and the experience of the National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention's work with the Federally-funded Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative. In the last two decades, school districts, mental health providers, juvenile and family courts, and police departments have begun to take more sophisticated approaches to truancy. These approaches seek to prevent rather than to punish truancy, question the logic of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, and address the four categories of truancy-related risk factors: Family, school, economic, and student. Truancy reduction programs that promote consistent attendance by addressing the risk factors that lead to truancy can also improve academic achievement while reducing problem behaviors, including substance abuse and delinquency. The session will present findings related to school suspension and expulsion policy, including the failure of zero tolerance approaches, and how truancy and chronic absenteeism—often steppingstones to dropping-out of school before graduation—have consequences for children, the adults these children will become, and the broader society in which they live.