Exclusionary Discipline Effects in Rural North Carolina

By Chloe Johnson

In Indianapolis, Indiana, thirteen-year-old Levent is frequently celebrated for his test scores at school. Instead of educators at his school investing in his potential for success, he is often excessively disciplined or suspended for age-appropriate activities (McCoy, 2025). Further, the administration at his school has been given notice of Levent’s documented disability: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Many school rules maintain exclusionary rules that offer little guidance for disabled students when crises happen, leading to discipline that does not match the action. In schools today, the rules that are supposed to protect students are marginalizing them.

Levent’s experience is not an isolated one — his reflects overlapping crises converging on the same students. Exclusionary discipline practices (EDP) has long been identified as a key entry point into the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the pattern by which suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests increase students’ likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Black students bear this burden disproportionately: nationally, Black children represent roughly 16% of K-12 enrollment but 43% of students who receive multiple out-of-school suspensions (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2019). Second, this pipeline is unfolding alongside a documented youth mental health crisis. Rather than operating separately from that crisis, exclusionary discipline appears to worsen it: longitudinal research following students subject to EDPs found they were more likely to exhibit both externalizing symptoms (aggression, disobedience, destruction of property) and internalizing symptoms (low self-worth, anxiety, guilt), along with a persistent sense of unfair treatment by educators — effects that compounded over a four-year follow-up (Thompson et al., 2025). Third, students with disabilities sit at a particularly acute intersection of these crises. Nationally, students with disabilities are suspended at far higher rates than their non-disabled peers (Leung-Gagné et al., 2022), and when disability status intersects with Black identity — as it does for students like Levent — the risk compounds rather than simply adds. Exclusionary discipline policies frequently offer little guidance for responding to disability-related behavior, meaning the punishment imposed often does not match, or even address, the underlying need.

In North Carolina, this issue is pertinent due to the spike in in-school-suspensions post-pandemic (NCDPI). Exclusionary discipline is defined as any school rule that aims to remove a child from the classroom or school environment. Students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, and students who are Black or two or more races were more likely to receive in-school suspensions than their counterparts (NCDPI, 2024-2025). These same students are also more likely to receive alternative learning placements (ALP) and short term suspensions (STS). While exclusionary discipline often takes place away from other students, and in another classroom, violence and emotional distress inflicted upon students may take place as a part of the discipline process.

In Wake County Schools, 371 students were restrained or secluded more than 1,000 times. Most of these students were elementary students with disabilities, and more often than not they were Black. Not only is this unjust, but it’s illegal. Secluding and physically restraining children without a 504 plan or imminent harm is illegal under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 115C-391.1(b), (e)-(g). While this case received significant media attention, physical assault and emotional distress should not be the hurdle to justice for youth in North Carolina. Children who are excluded in classrooms and in school, often under agonizing circumstances, are also the students who are also marginalized by society. If institutions like education, which are supposed to protect children, are chambers of stratification by discipline, shall we question the policy itself?

Exclusionary Discipline and Outcomes

While exclusionary discipline is not a new practice, it has come to the attention of disability and educational justice advocates for the intersection with use and outcomes in children. In New York City schools, children who are subject to exclusionary school discipline practices (EDPs) are more likely to exhibit externalizing symptoms (e.g. aggression, disobedience, destruction of property) and internalizing symptoms (low self-worth, anxiety, and guilt) as well as perceived unfairness by their instructor (Thompson et al., 2025). In a second wave four years later, adolescents demonstrated the cumulative, adverse effects of repeated EDPs on adolescent mental health and perceived unfair treatment.

The theory of EDPs is often predicated upon the idea that removing a student, or students from the school environment, may improve the school climate for many. However, in a similar study by AIR in the same district, exclusion from the school environment did not improve perceptions of school climate for other students (AIR, 2021). Nor did it reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, or result in improved academic achievement for peers. Further, the more severe the exclusionary discipline, the greater its negative effects were on a student’s future academic performance, attendance, and behavior.

Exclusionary Discipline on Rural Students

North Carolina has the second largest rural population in the country. In schools where material resources and opportunity are scarce, like access to 504s, behavioral assessments, and social-emotional learning tools, EDPs may be more common. In many schools across the country, including rural schools, police officers, security guards or school resource officers (SROs) will be installed to protect students from harm that may occur during the school day. Contention has arisen on the effectiveness of SROs along with their ability to enact discipline policy. While school discipline policy is mandated statewide, a “Dear Colleague” letter dated January 8, 2014, by the Obama administration outlined two themes that the OCR looks for when investigating claims of discrimination in school discipline, including different treatment and disparate impact based on race. Over the past two Trump administrations, this guidance has been effectively dissolved (Trump, 2025). While you may not automatically think of a “Dear Colleague” letter preventing EDP in rural areas, this is often one of the most vulnerable areas to discriminatory discipline.

24% of residents in the rural South are Black, and when a Black student is living in a rural county, their likelihood of receiving EDPs double to quadruple compared to an average white student (NCDPI). The rate of discipline in these districts is various, and literature has demonstrated that harsh discipline could be related to slanted racial composition of the student body. Regardless of a student’s geography, gender, school achievement, economic level of the school, or the severity of the student’s behavior was attending a school with a higher percentage of Black students (Welsh et al., 2025). Perhaps this research demonstrates that racial disparities in punishment persist even when controlling for socioeconomic status, geography, gender, and the specific type of infraction.

For the three case studies above, they are diverse in their student populations. Vance and Anson counties share similar Black student populations (47.3% and 44.6% respectively), median income, and child poverty rates — yet their short-term suspension rates differ by 1.33% (415, 547 per 1000 students). Harnett County, with a notably lower Black population share (19.8%) and higher median income, shows a lower rate of short-term suspension (208 per 1000), however not nearly as high as Anson or Vance. This pattern is consistent with Welsh et al.’s (2025) finding that the racial composition of a school predicts exclusionary discipline more strongly than poverty, geography, or the severity of student behavior. These findings suggest in rural NC, exclusion and bias, not just resource scarcity, drive the disparity.

Short Term Suspensions per 1000 students in rural counties in North Carolina, 2017-2018 to 2021-2022, comparing Anson County, Vance County, and Harnett County to the 100-county NC average

Rural schools across North Carolina struggle with a lack of material resources including well-trained personnel who are equipped to provide culturally responsive care in crisis situations. Existent studies indicate that rural schools tend to have harsh discipline codes and SRO’s may use discretion and authority in handling violence, drug use, and gang-related issues (Ruddell & May, 2011; Hunt, 2012) putting students in contact with the criminal justice system. Due to SRO’s versatile mandate which differs given the district, the position is versatile in nature, many SROs and school police have taken it upon themselves to enforce an individualized curriculum. School resource officers’ in North Carolina, no matter the county, are given the mandate to support and mentor students in their learning environment while promoting safety and security (Office of Justice Programs, 1995). The current climate in rural schools suggests otherwise, specifically for marginalized students, and finding pathways to justice for these students is paramount.

Policy Proposals

1. Install Full-Time Behavioral Wrap-Around Care Team in Schools

One promising response to this resource gap is the wraparound model — a coordinated system of care built around a student and their family, rather than a single service delivered in isolation. Wraparound has traditionally operated on an individual basis, but the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated its adaptability at a community scale, as neighborhoods organized collective wraparound-style responses ranging from mutual aid networks to vaccine delivery to food security efforts. In schools, behavioral wraparound services are most effective when staff, students, and families are all active participants rather than passive recipients. The model rests on two guiding principles: family and youth voice and choice, and a team-based approach. In practice, this means families and youth retain genuine autonomy through interpersonal support and through collaboration with their existing family and kinship networks, while a team works cooperatively toward an outcome-based plan that honors each participant’s strengths — an approach shown to cultivate durable, healthy partnerships between families and school staff.

Education-based wraparound remains a comparatively young field, with more practice and research still needed (Eber et al., 2002). But the infrastructure for it already exists in most schools, in the form of Specialized Instructional Support Personnel (SISP) — counselors, social workers, nurses, and psychologists trained to help students navigate barriers to learning (Public Schools First NC, 2025). These professionals are chronically underutilized despite being essential to wraparound care: partnering with families, practicing cultural humility, and coordinating across systems are core to their training. This matters directly for the disparities outlined above. When a student is facing in-school suspension, SISP can intervene before that suspension escalates — working with families and administrators to identify meaningful support rather than default to exclusion, and in doing so, functioning as a genuine diversion point away from the school-to-prison pipeline. For rural districts specifically, where these positions are often understaffed or absent entirely, investing in SISP capacity may be one of the more direct levers available to reduce reliance on exclusionary discipline.

2. Restorative Justice rather than Community Policing

Across North Carolina, School Resource Officers (SROs) have become a normalized presence in public schools, justified as a necessary response to concerns about school violence. While these policies are framed around safety, in practice they frequently have adverse effects on school safety. Research has consistently shown that the presence of police in schools increases student contact with the criminal legal system, particularly for minor, nonviolent behaviors that could be handled by educators (Geller and Fagan, 2021). This shift reflects a broader trend in education policy: rather than addressing the underlying conditions that shape student behavior, schools have increasingly adopted punitive approaches that mirror broader “tough on crime” policies of the late twentieth century.

Students of color, particularly Black students, have historically been subjected to disciplinary action in schools — from disproportionate arrests to zero tolerance policies that criminalized petty behavior — the late twentieth century transformed police presence and power in schools (Skiba et al., 2014). The expansion of policing in schools contributes directly to what is often described as the school-to-prison pipeline, where educational institutions become sites of surveillance and exclusion rather than support and development (Geller and Mark, 2022; Sorenson et al., 2021). Importantly, there is limited evidence that SROs meaningfully improve school safety. Instead, their presence can undermine trust between students and institutions, particularly in communities already over-policed outside of school (Whitaker et al. 2023). When students perceive school environments as punitive or adversarial, the community may lose trust in the school to protect students. Henceforth, it becomes more difficult to foster the relationships and sense of belonging that are essential for learning. To begin community-building and cultivate trust between students, educators, research shows counseling services, mental health support, and conflict resolution programs are most effective at improving students’ behavioral outcomes (Mann, 2019). At the same time, schools often remain under-resourced in the areas that support these positive outcomes.

Restorative Justice is an emerging practice in schools to cultivate belonging between students and staff. Restorative practices tend to root out the causes of student misbehavior while reducing exclusionary approaches (Darling-Hammond, 2023). In a 2023 study of 485 middle schools and two million students, schools who utilized restorative justice practices saw declines in student misbehavior, gang membership, victimization, depressive symptoms, and substance abuse. Additionally, schools that utilized restorative practices also saw improvements in average school GPA and school climate. The shift from punitivity and surveillance to building community awareness represents how responsibility and accountability can be embraced by a community.

Conclusion

A youth mental health crisis is unfolding nationwide, and rural youth face a particular vulnerability within it. During a formative, transitional stage of life, the institutions meant to support them — their schools — are too often the setting where they are unfairly targeted. In places that should be safe for all children, Black youth are disciplined at disproportionately higher rates, a pattern that intensifies in counties with larger Black populations. This disparity points to an urgent need for further research into school policing in rural counties, particularly majority-minority counties, where the intersection of geography, race, and exclusionary discipline (EDP) remains poorly understood. School resource officers and community policing mandates have shown mixed effectiveness overall, and troubling patterns specifically in how they discipline Black students (Skiba et al., 2014). Behavioral wraparound services and restorative justice frameworks offer a different path — one grounded in evidence of lasting, positive effects that keep students in school rather than pushing them out of it. Realizing that path will require rural districts to be given the resources, staffing, and policy support to make it possible.

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