Arizona lawmaker Rep. Laura Terech is again trying to bar schools from using out-of-school suspensions to punish students who miss class, arguing the strategy is not only ineffective but harmful, and disproportionately affects Black, Latino and Indigenous students.
I always thought that is was weird to punish missing school by not letting you come to school. It also made it better to miss a whole class if you were late few times because being late for class and missing class was different tracks for punishments.
It also wasn’t really applied equally. I would know, I had a lot of attendance issues in my junior and senior year when I was living on my own.
Turns out that if you had a gifted kid that suddenly has to work to live, they stopped looking gifted, and start missing a lot of school. I think they made some exceptions for me simply because if they didn’t it would be a very bad look on the district.
I think in my case the factor there was I would roll in on a standardized testing day, get 100% on every single aspect of the standardized tests. And walk out and go back to work.
But yeah, if I was Black or Latino I don’t think I would have gotten that same consideration - gifted or otherwise.
