Public school students can be suspended for up to 180 days, for actions that pose “imminent and severe endangerment” to the health and safety of other students or school employees.
Under previous law, students could be expelled from school for up to 80 days. But for serious offenses, mental health assessments and court hearings can’t always be resolved in that period.
The district superintendent will have to notify the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce that the student is being expelled.
Additionally, the student and their family would be notified under the new law, and the school has 15 days to create an education plan for the student if they do not have an individual education plan (IEP) and 10 days if the student has an IEP.
Shannon Cox, the Montgomery County Educational Services Center superintendent, said the updated law still requires students to be educated while they are expelled, and the student is still expected to eventually come back to school.
The updated law would help ensure the student isn’t thrown back into a school community without a reunification process, Cox said.
“It just allows the parents and the school to sit down and have those conversations collectively,” Cox said.
Just keeping kids at home without any educational abilities is considered an exclusionary practice, Cox said, because those kids are not getting the same access to education as their peers.
However, Renee Murphy, managing attorney for the Meaningful and Appropriate Education practice group within Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc, a local nonprofit that represents people in poverty, said there are no parameters around how long the expulsion could go on, meaning a student could be excluded from school from kindergarten to graduation. The additional 90 days could be renewed indefinitely under the law, she said.
Murphy said ABLE is worried that students living in poverty, students of color, students with disabilities and those with mental health issues may not get the help they need. The new law also doesn’t lay out what education has to look like while the student is suspended, which likely means the student will be home-schooled — something that doesn’t work for all students.
Murphy said superintendents have been under more pressure from the community to get certain students out of the classroom.
She said ABLE supports giving students an education during their expulsion, which is a step up from previous law, and getting students the help they need. The problem is the law doesn’t help students get what they need, she said.
“There’s literally no boundaries in the law, introducing a ton of subjectivity,” Murphy said.
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