Battle Ground School District – Suspensions 2014-2015-2016

How many suspensions occur in your school district? How do you find out? How have they changed over time?

We filed a Public Information Request with the Battle Ground School District asking them for data on suspensions by school for the three (3) most recent years. In the table below we share the information we received. In this blog story you will also find links to the actual data spreadsheets by year along with the “key” describing what the reason was for each suspension. We encourage you to do the same for your school district, assemble the information and share it with us for publication.

This is NOT an attempt to say that the school district is doing a good or bad job. It’s not a condemnation of parents. It’s merely a snapshot of suspensions to help raise awareness. We have no data on why some go up and some go down. We do know that many districts are rolling out their PBIS (Positive Behavioral Intervention System) and Social/Emotional Health Systems in an attempt to reduce the number of incidents. Indeed, some districts try NOT to suspend students…rather…they keep them on campus but in a separate classroom. Any of those (or other factors) could reduce the reported number of suspensions – implying there are fewer issues when there aren’t.

Note: If there is no information listed it’s because we received none. On that basis it would be reasonable to assume there were no suspensions for that year at that school.

Please note this does NOT include expulsions nor does it include violent behaviors.

Questions:

1) The numbers have declined the last three (3) years. Why?

2) Have the rules changed? If so then have the issues declined or the district has just changed the way it deals with issues and thus doesn’t report them the same way or as many?

Here are the files used to build the table:

2014 Suspensions – BGSD_Suspensions_2014

2015 Suspensions – BGSD_Suspensions_2015

2016 Suspensions – BGSD_Suspensions_2016   

Suspension Codes – BGSD_Suspension_Codes_LIst of codes_Dec2016