Lacy Elementary School Discipline Analysis

Analyzing discipline data assists school staff in effectively implementing techniques to reduce current discipline issues, as well as improve academic achievement. Looking for patterns in discipline data allows those analyzing to effectively compare school data to national trends, as well as enabling them to generate a professional development program to assist in increasing academia by lowering discipline rates. According to Predy, McIntosh, and Frank, the most common way to analyze discipline data is by using discipline referrals, due to the basic uniformity of the office discipline referral information (2014). By using discipline data, Lacy Elementary School can create a plan to lower discipline referral rates by focusing on issues that

Disciplinary incident categories presented include: bullying, disorderly conduct, explosives, insubordination, knife possession, staff assault, student assault, tobacco possession, vandalism, and other incidents. Bullying and knife possession account for the 20% of incidents that have a fluctuation trend with more incidents in the second year than in the first or the third. Insubordination serves as the only area showing a decrease in discipline incidents. All other categories show an overall increase over the three year span. While analyzing the increase in discipline incidents, analysis also occurred in the incident breakdown by ethnicity. All areas of discipline incidents studied display a disproportionately high rate of African American male students committing incidents as opposed to both ethnic and gender cohorts, as well as a general increase in

Again, as in disciplinary incidents, the disproportionate ratio of African American Males has continued into the disciplinary actions based on office referrals. The highest incidence of discipline action occurs with out of school suspension, where African American males account for between 70.83% and 77.69% during the three year period analyzed. Again, females and other ethnicities represent a much lower percentage, even though the school enrollment remains the same as disciplinary incidents. Lacy Elementary school office referral disciplinary action categories all represent reactionary techniques to discipline, which lead to students having to commit an action in order to receive the attention or punishment in hopes of correction. Finally, the disciplinary actions represented remove the student from the learning environment, which keeps students from reaching their full academic potential. If students are not in the classroom learning, we cannot expect them to perform at a high academic level, because they are not receiving the necessary classroom