“RISE” Up Reduce School Suspensions: Unsilenced Voices of African American Students, Families, and Communities

Introduction

The disproportionate school suspension phenomenon is neither novel nor confined to contemporary times only. Over five decades, schools have meted out school suspensions to African American children and youth more frequently and more harshly than any other racial group (Townsend Walker, 2014). Equally disquieting is that at every educational level from Pre-K to 12^th grade, African American students have, and continue to receive more frequent and draconian school suspensions than their peers by school personnel (Skiba, et al.; 2014; Townsend, 2000). For those youth, schools have relegated more disciplinary decisions to school resource officers, which led to increased student arrests and forays onto the school to prison pipeline (Guerrero, 2021). African American learners are not just disproportionately suspended in urban schools. Instead, their disproportionate suspension rates cut across suburban and rural schools also (Smith et al., 2016), even when lunch eligibility status is held constant (Bradshaw et al., 2010).

The weight of the school suspension literature has focused on African American males to the exclusion of African American females. Researchers have called for a centering of African American females in the discussion (i.e., Epstein, Blake, & Gonzalez, 2017), especially in light of unnerving school suspension reports and chilling video footage of African American middle and high school girls subjected to violent and abusive treatment by violently at the hands of school resource officers (i.e., Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015). Thus, African American girls’ absence in the school suspension literature belies the increasing rates at which they are suspended and treated harshly by school personnel, including school resource officers. Examples abound compelling African American girls to be more prominently situated in the discussion. While African American males are suspended three to four times more often than White males (Townsend Walker, 2014), African American girls are suspended six times more often than their White female counterparts (Blake et al., 2011).