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Nine girls slumped onto bean bags and rocking chairs inside Kennedy-Curry Middle School’s Room 225. Think of it as a place of peace, a Dallas ISD staffer told them.
“Any conflict that you had outside of here has to stay outside of here,” Albert Brown stressed. “What we’re doing here, now, is that we are just having a conversation.”
A few days earlier, a conflict brewed among the girls over who was friends with whom and who was being left out. The disagreement escalated on social media over a weekend and one student threatened another with a fight.
By 9 a.m. the following Monday, administrators pulled the students out of class and sent them to the school’s reset center, a cornerstone of Dallas ISD’s discipline overhaul that’s aimed at keeping more kids on campus and solving underlying behavior issues. The goal of such centers is to tackle the negative impact of exclusionary discipline, which removes students from class and disproportionately affects students of color.
Trustees voted last summer to eliminate nearly all suspensions — both in- and out-of-school — and replace them with trips to reset centers so students can keep up with their classes while working on their behavior.
“Our mindset is: We don’t kick kids out,” Kennedy-Curry Principal Shadaria Foster said. “We don’t throw students out because we are all they have.”
The district — like many nationwide — has a troubled history of disproportionately disciplining students of color, especially Black students. In the 2019-20 school year, more than half of the district’s out-of-school suspensions were assigned to Black students even though they made up only about one-fifth of DISD’s enrollment.
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Dallas school trustees passed a resolution declaring Black lives matter and committed to improving racial inequities. District staff recommended the reset centers, which launched this school year.
Coordinators were hired at comprehensive middle and high schools and were charged with training campus staff on restorative practices that could deescalate conflicts before they became worse. Teachers were told to send students to centers in lieu of suspensions.
School leaders across Texas are sure to be watching. Dallas is known as a pioneer in addressing discipline. After the district eliminated suspensions for its youngest students in 2017, former state representative — now mayor — Eric Johnson successfully got the practice codified into law not long after.
Now the lessons DISD learns on how to fairly discipline students through such centers are likely to be replicated on campuses elsewhere. And district officials are keenly aware of the national attention they’ve drawn with this new approach.
DISD’s discipline overhaul is “going to be one for the books when it’s all done,” Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said. “That’s going to be an interesting study.”
So far, data from the first semester shows a dramatic decline in disciplinary action when compared to 2019-20, the last school year when most students were learning on campus.
In fall 2019, about 4,800 students received out-of-school suspension and roughly 1,100 received in-school suspensions. In the first semester, about 1,200 students were referred to the reset centers. The percentage of students repeatedly being disciplined also decreased from 28% in fall 2019 to 13% in fall 2021.
But racial disparities still persist. Of those students sent to reset centers last semester, 45% were Black and nearly half were Hispanic. Nearly 20% of DISD students are Black and 71% are Hispanic.
Advocates stress that the racial disparities are a glaring issue that must be scrupulously tracked.
Jazmyn Ferguson implored the district to stay focused on its initial vision for the reset center initiative. Ferguson serves as the director of organizing strategy with Leadership for Educational Equity, a nonprofit focused on ending inequity in education.
“Don’t forget that you all said that you were going to end exclusionary discipline practices for Dallas ISD,” Ferguson said. “As you look at the data, can you say that you are doing that?”
In response to the demographic discipline breakdown, the district plans to review campus and student-level discipline data to determine where the most support is needed and assign resources accordingly, spokeswoman Robyn Harris said.
Hinojosa said preliminary data has shown very promising results with lower recidivism rates and more kids staying in school, though he continues to hear concerns from some educators.
“Everything I see is great. Everything I hear is not. So the truth is somewhere in between,” he said. “But in the end, it was a huge victory.”
The reset center program is sure to change after its first full year in place, although it is not clear how. The district policy that codifies the centers will go before the board this summer, giving trustees an opportunity to make changes.
Racial disparities
Schools nationwide have long struggled with the school-to-prison pipeline, the practice of pushing kids out of school and into the criminal justice system. Suspending students removes them from the classroom and the triggering altercation.
But it doesn’t rectify the underlying problem, said Foster, the principal.
“After three days [being suspended, students] are going to come back and they are going to come back with the same behavior,” Foster said. “So how do we change the behavior?”
That’s the goal of the reset center. When Kennedy-Curry administrators brought the group of girls into the room on a recent Monday, they wanted to explain potential consequences so their argument wouldn’t devolve into a physical fight.
They could face suspension as a mandatory removal from campus is necessary in some cases — or worse.
“You get to fighting, you get to swinging, so what’s the outcome of that?” Brown asked the girls.
Your face gets messed up. Jail. You don’t go to prom. You lose out on the opportunity to participate in sports.
Brown, a manager in DISD’s department of student engagement and support, nodded and encouraged them to continue thinking through possible outcomes to their decisions. The only thing they can control is themselves, not what other people say about them, he added.
After 30 minutes in the center, Brown sent most of the students back to class. The majority acknowledged that fighting wouldn’t help the situation.
“The whole goal of the reset initiative is really to get students to reframe their thinking,” Brown said. “Figure out why they are responding and what they are responding to and to develop skills to self-regulate.”
Initial data from the first semester shows that fewer students are being disciplined with full-day assignments to the rooms. The number of students returning is also low.
But the proportion of Black students being disciplined is still out of line.
Andrew Hairston, director of the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, suggested that the results at schools like Kennedy-Curry indicate the reset center concept works. But more help is needed to carry out the vision, he said, especially at schools that have reported more discipline issues.
If you had two or three staffers like Brown on every campus, for instance, schools could cover more ground.
“We need bold political will from these district leaders to say because the resources are not in place, let’s look at that multimillion-dollar police and security budget once and for all,” Hairston added.
The district allocated roughly $17 million from its general fund to the police department in 2021-22. The budget for the reset centers is $21 million for the next three years. The money for the centers could disappear as DISD is tapping federal pandemic aid, which expires after that time.
“That twofold approach to address exclusionary discipline and significantly divest from school policing, I think has to be hand in hand in this conversation,” Hairston said.
Ground-level training
Just as teachers need to learn how to deescalate conflicts so they don’t erupt into fights, they must understand the impact of removing a student from a classroom, said Zena Amran, a 10th-grade history teacher at Spruce High School.
DISD educators should be held accountable for their new learned practices, she added, suggesting that it be included in their evaluations.
“We have to show test scores — well, show how well you are managing your classroom in good, equitable, effective ways,” Amran said.
The district has identified training as one of the key areas of improvement as the reset center concept moves forward, which advocates say is key in reducing racial disparities. When the program first rolled out, 52 coordinators were given training and charged with bringing it back to their campuses.
But the quality and kind of training varied by campus, and the discipline patterns illustrate those discrepancies. At a school board meeting in January, trustees questioned staff on why one campus — Ann Richards STEAM Academy — recorded a twofold number of disciplinary incidents more than other schools.
District administrators responded that the school needed additional training and that teachers on the campus were disciplining students for offenses like not responding to teachers. The educators needed more instruction on how to use the centers and deescalate tricky situations, the officials said.
Implementing a large-scale change in disciplinary procedures is a huge challenge and requires continuous coaching, Foster emphasized.
While most teachers embraced the mindset shift at Kennedy-Curry, many teachers still struggled, she admitted. Some veteran educators were used to sending a kid out of the classroom when they disagreed with or defied instructions.
Campus administrators also need to buy into the idea for it to truly work, said Jonathan Feinstein from Education Trust. But that isn’t happening at every DISD school.
The remaining handful
After just a few months, principals urged the district to tweak the centers and find a new “middle ground.”
The campus leaders said they didn’t want to send their students to alternative schools meant for severe offenses, but they also didn’t feel they had the resources in place to address bigger conflicts, like a large brawl.
An in-between step for the handful of students struggling was needed, they said. District staff suggested a central reset center that would remove students from campus but still focus on addressing behaviors.
Trustee Joyce Foreman was one of the few school board members receptive to the idea.
“I clearly understand this notion of school-to-prison pipeline, but what I’m not ready to do is sacrifice 100% of the kids for 10% that might be having issues,” she said at a January meeting.
But most trustees worried that removing a student from campus would be the least helpful approach. They suggested that a better middle ground might be adding resources to the campus so more intensive work could be done in a familiar environment with adults who already had relationships with students.
They also questioned whether creating an off-campus reset center was just implementing suspensions under a different name.
“A central Reset Center is precisely counter to that goal,” trustee Joe Carreón said at the same board meeting. “We are taking kids out of school again.”
Given trustees’ opposition to the substantial change so early in the program’s rollout, district staff backtracked on the central reset center idea. Then at a May meeting, DISD officials proposed sending students with ongoing violence infractions to the off-site disciplinary campus for a five-day period when they could work on correcting behavior issues.
“We felt like we needed to get a handle on these situations where we have kids that are constantly creating situations in a campus that are of a violent or aggressive-type behavior,” Sherry Christian, the district’s deputy chief of staff, told trustees. She noted that more than 230 students have fought multiple times this school year.
But trustees still pushed back, asking for research that supported such an approach. They wanted to review full-year discipline data before making major changes.
Advocates argue that the situations vexing principals are indicative of longstanding problems that can’t be solved with one or two trips to a reset center. Behavior issues often involve complicated situations at home, including parents who might not understand what the school is trying to accomplish.
For instance, at Kennedy-Curry, even after Brown dismissed the majority of students back to class, he kept two students behind who had a still-simmering conflict. One threatened to visit the other’s home and beat her up, triggering her to start crying and leave the room.
Both girls called their parents, who said maybe they should fight to quash the argument. Brown got on the phone and explained what he was trying to do.
“We’ve got to fight that battle, too,” Foster said.
But both Brown and Foster remain deeply invested in their work and the notion that learning how to address conflict now is vital.
“If they learn these lessons now as students,” Brown said, “it helps them later in life as adults.”
Did you know that what you just read was a solutions journalism story? It didn’t just examine a problem; it scrutinized a response. By presenting evidence of who is making progress, we remove any excuse that a problem is intractable. This story is supported by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. If you value solutions-based reporting, consider supporting our public-service journalism by donating to our Education Lab.
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The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
