Mackey pre-files school discipline reform legislation

Bills would limit school suspensions, ban corporal punishment

Rep. Ian Mackey (Tim Bommel/House Communications)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — This morning, State Rep. Ian Mackey, D-St. Louis, pre-filed House Bills 159 and 160 to improve and modernize punishment techniques in Missouri’s K-12 schools.

“Republican and Democratic lawmakers across the state agree that more must be done to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” Mackey said. “We should start by reforming how our state’s youngest students are disciplined at school.”

HB 159 would limit the ability of Missouri schools to suspend students in kindergarten through third grade. In 2016, St. Louis City Public Schools became the first large school district in the state to prohibit such suspensions, and since then, several districts have either instituted similar bans on suspensions, or have committed to studying the issue. Kansas City Public Schools currently prohibits most suspensions for students through the fifth grade.

“When young students are sent home from school as a form of discipline, especially when it’s on a repeated basis, it can send families into chaos. It results in student learning loss, missed work for parents, and can put children in unsafe environments when they should be in the classroom,” Mackey said. “Suspension of young students is a consequence that serves no valuable purpose in reforming challenging behavior.”

At least 16 states currently have such prohibitions in place at the statewide level.

Mackey also said this bill will also examine what are commonly referred to as “shadow suspensions,” which occur when parents are called during the school day and asked to pick up their child. These pick-up requests are rarely reported by school districts as suspensions. HB 159 will require this data to be reported to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

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Mackey’s other bill, HB 160, prohibits the use of corporal punishment in Missouri K-12 schools, a practice currently banned in 31 states. While use of corporal punishment has been on the decline for years across the state, one Missouri district, Cassville R-IV, recently announced it was reinstating the practice of hitting kids as punishment for challenging behavior.

“State-sanctioned corporal punishment is already banned in other Missouri codes, why is it still acceptable in our schools?” Mackey said. “A child cannot be hit by an adult as a form of punishment if they are in foster care, a group home setting or other forms of state custody. There is no justifiable reason a child should expect to be hit by adults when they are at school.”