North Carolina public schools reported decreases in dropouts and incidents of school violence during the 2023-24 school year, according to new consolidated school crime and discipline data reports from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI).

During the State Board of Education’s February meeting, DPI discussed the limitations of the reporting and ways to move forward.

“For learning to occur in a classroom, students need to be engaged and know that they are safe and supported by the adults in their school building. School leaders must intentionally create safe and supportive schools,” the report’s introduction says. “… The purpose of this report is to provide aggregated and disaggregated summary data that are descriptive, meaningful and allow for opportunities for comparative analysis in student discipline and dropout outcomes.”

North Carolina law requires the State Board of Education to publish an annual report on school dropout rates, suspensions, expulsions, reassignments, uses of corporal punishment, and alternative learning programs. 

According to the report, the last instance of corporal punishment reported was during the 2017-18 academic year, when two public school units employed corporal punishment for a total of 60 uses. There were no new incidents in the 2023-24 academic year. 

New sections in this report that were not included in the previous reports include missing student demographics, student offenders, and crimes in schools. 

Much of the data is collected through PowerSchool’s Incident Management Module, the report says. To protect student privacy, North Carolina suppresses information if a data point contains fewer than 10 students. If the student count coupled with other data being presented in the report’s tables can reveal sensitive information about students, information will be withheld or suppressed about the data figure.

DPI stated cautions and limitations of the report, including the use of multi-year analyses which span the COVID-19 pandemic.

In North Carolina, schools were closed for about two weeks in March 2020, followed by remote instruction beginning in April through the remainder of the school year. Schools offered a mix of in-person and remote instruction during the 2020-21 school year, and there has been an increase of remote learning to this date post-pandemic, the report says. Therefore, people should exercise caution when those years are compared to more current data. 

“When looking at the data long term, it’s important to remember that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of schools,” DPI’s Chief Accountability Officer Dr. Michael Maher said in a press release. “The way classrooms operated in 2018-19, let alone 10 years ago in 2013-14, to now is vastly different given the use of technology and other factors. While crime and violence in schools is never what we want, it is promising to see that rates have dropped this year.”

The data in the report was presented to the Board on Feb. 5 and is centered around the 2023-2024 academic year, referred to as the last school year throughout this article. 

Reassignments and alternative learning

The report identifies two things as reassignments for disciplinary reasons.

In-school suspension (ISS) is when a student is assigned to another area of the building apart from their regular classroom for a short period of time. An alternative learning placement (ALP) is a disciplinary action where students are reassigned for a longer period of time. In ALPs, students often receive their course work digitally and have supervising teachers. 

While the number of ALPs decreased last school year, the report found an increase in the number of both in-school and long-term suspensions.

For every 1,000 students enrolled, the report shows that 175.38 students were assigned ISS for half an instructional day or more. These rates are up 2.9% from the 2022-23 school year.

The total of 264,510 ISS assignments is higher than the number of students who were assigned ISS — meaning that some students went to ISS multiple times. Most of the students sent to ISS were male, making them about twice as likely to be disciplined in this category than female students. 

Overall, the report shows that Black students, students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, male students, and students who identified with two or more races had the highest rates of in-school suspensions last school year, when analyzed per every 1,000 students within the various subgroups.

Information in the report was also provided by grade level. Students enrolled in middle school grades were the group with the most in-school suspensions in 2023−24 and had the highest rate of in-school suspensions per 1,000 students (325.81). By grade level, ninth grade students received the most in-school suspensions, followed by seventh grade and eighth grade students.

ALPs for disciplinary reasons were down 17.2% between last school year and the 2022-2023 academic year.

Looking by subgroups, Black students, American Indian students, students with disabilities, and male students were placed more often compared to others. The rate of placements for students with disabilities was 1.9 times higher than students without disabilities.

Students in high school received the most ALPs — accounting for more than half of the placements reported in North Carolina last year. However, students in middle school grades were placed the most often, at a rate of 6.64 placements for every 1,000 students, the report said. 

Suspensions and expulsions

Across North Carolina, 245,566 students were suspended, and 30 were expelled during the 2023-24 academic year. 

As defined by the report, a short-term suspension is defined as excluding a student from school attendance for disciplinary reasons for up to 10 days. Long-term suspensions can be 11 days long, last until the end of the school year, or be 365 days long, depending on the case.

Expulsions are the indefinite exclusion of a student from school enrollment for disciplinary reasons. Being expelled usually only happens to students who are at least 14 years old who present a danger to others, the report says. Some districts allow students to apply for readmission after a certain period. Otherwise, they would have to enroll in another district. 

According to the report, short-term suspensions only slightly decreased between the 2022-23 school year and 2023-24. Last year, 244,836 short-term suspensions were reported. This data also continues the trend of male students being disciplined more often than female students.

Among those students, the report found that 51,817 of them received multiple suspensions. Of those who received multiple suspensions, most missed five days or less. However nearly 40% of students who received multiple suspensions missed over 10 days of school.

American Indian students had the highest short-term suspension rate. When aggregated by grade level, middle school students had the most reported suspensions, at 100,098. 

Schools reported 22 more long-term suspensions last school year than in 2022-23 — about a 3% increase. Of the 730 reported long-term suspensions, 15% of them were given to students with disabilities. Black students were on the receiving end of this punishment more than other races, and males more often than females. 

The state had about half as many expulsions as the previous school year — down to 30 expulsions, from 64 the year before. Among those expelled last year, 70% of the students were male. About half of the students expelled were Black. Ninth graders received the most expulsions, or 12 students, followed by 10th and then 11th graders. 

Dropouts

The report found that 10,559 students dropped out of North Carolina public schools last year. This is not much more than from the number of students who dropped out during the 2022-23 academic year, or 10,523 students.

However, the rate of high school dropouts decreased by 3.7% during the same time period.

Dropouts are defined by the report as students who were enrolled in the 2023-24 school year and were not enrolled by the 20th day of the 2024-25 year. These students are not temporarily absent due to suspension or illness. They did not enroll in another school (public, private, or homeschool). This would also mean they did not graduate or enroll in a district-approved educational program.

About a third of all dropouts reported occurred in the ninth grade. The majority of dropouts — 88.5% of those students — left between ninth and 12th grade. Looking in terms of subgroups, half of the students who dropped out were male. Black students, Hispanic students, and white students accounted for 90% of those who dropped out. Then, students with disabilities accounted for 20% of all students who dropped out in grades first through 12th during the 2023−2024 school year. 

The most cited reason for dropping out across all grades was attendance issues. Among high school students specifically, the third most reported reason was lack of engagement with school and/ or peers. However, this accounts for only 8% of high school students who dropped out. The second most reported reason was “unknown.” 

School crimes 

The Board has 16 criminal acts that are considered “reportable crimes.” These acts are listed below. 

• Assault involving the use of a weapon (AW)
• Assault resulting in serious bodily injury (AR)
• Homicide (D)
• Kidnapping (K)
• Rape (R)  
• Robbery with a dangerous weapon (RW)
• Sexual assault (SA)
• Sexual offense (SO)
• Taking indecent liberties with a minor (IM) 
• Assault on school personnel (AP) 
• Bomb threat (BT) 
• Burning of a school building (BS)
• Possession of a firearm or powerful explosive (PF)
• Possession of a weapon (PW) 
• Possession of controlled substances (PS) 
• Possession of alcoholic beverage (PA)

Schools are designated as “Persistently Dangerous Schools” if they report at least two violent acts and a rate of five or more violent acts per thousand students in two consecutive years with “conditions that contributed to the commission of those offenses are likely to continue into another school year,” the report said. No schools have ever been designated as Persistently Dangerous by the Board.

Counts and rates reported include all offenders from reported acts, not just student offenders. Events are reported whenever schools become aware of them, not necessarily when they occurred. Therefore, events that happened in the previous year may not be included until the following year.  

Last school year, 12,212 acts of crime and violence were reported across North Carolina public schools. The total number of crimes decreased by 7.4% when compared to the 2022-23 academic year. However, between the 2018-2019 academic year and the 2023-24 academic year, the number of crimes increased 27.8%, and the rate of crimes increased 28.8%. 

Possession of controlled substances was the most frequently reported act of crime. It accounted for 57.4% of all acts reported. The second most frequent act was possession of a weapon, or 19.5% of the acts. Assault on school personnel came in third at 13.4%. During the 2023-34 school year, these assaults increased by 10.8% from the year before.

The number of reports of a possession of controlled substances increased by over 52% from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2023-24 school year. 

When observing the trends of acts of crime and violence over the past 10 years, possession of a controlled substance was the most reported crime since the 2014-2015 academic year.

Most categories have started to decline since post-pandemic increases.

All of the 12,212 acts of crime or violence reported last school year were committed by students, except for one possession of a firearm or powerful explosive act. 

Most of all of the reported acts occurred in grades nine through 12.

In the entire state of North Carolina, 42% of the 2,724 public schools had no acts of crime to report last school year. About 35% of schools had up to five acts of crime to report. Then 76 schools had over 30 acts of crime to report per school. Nearly 23% had six to more than 30 acts. 

“While crime and acts of violence in schools are always unacceptable and hinders the learning and growth of students,” state Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green said in a press release. “I’m optimistic that reductions in the rate of crime, violence and dropouts in high school reflect positive change. It is promising that 77% of North Carolina public schools reported zero to five acts of school violence. There is still much work to be done to address the race, gender and disability disparities; I look forward to working with others to address these rates in the years to come.”

What now?

In a presentation of the data to the Board, DPI’s Ellen Essick recommended also reviewing other available data from the Department of Health and Human Services, along with data on attendance, academics, and economics. Essick is a section chief of NC Healthy Schools & Specialized Instructional Support & Academic Standards.

In the future, she said there should be a focus on prevention and using a whole child approach.

“We need to include our families in these solutions and the community, and, most importantly, the culture in which each community lies,” she said. “I mean, everyone’s different. We can’t take a one size fits all approach to this work, but we can start including that work.”

One example Essick gave was offering behavioral support to a student immediately after they receive a suspension.

“So we’re automatically starting to look at the needs of those students, not just putting them somewhere or suspending them, but saying, let’s find out what’s going on behind why you guys are suspended,” Essick said.

Members of the Board expressed concerns about the data. They raised concerns about access to mental health supports, assaults on school personnel, support available for school personnel, and funding. 

Ian House, a student advisor to the Board, pointed out the prevalence of offenses in middle school grades. 

“And I think it comes down to the emphasis we put on education in the middle school years, because we (the Board) have spoken before (about how) in elementary school, students and parents are invested in the education of their students,” House said. “In high school, students are invested in the education of themselves because they know, in their eyes, it matters the most, because it’s what colleges are going to see, it’s what defines their future. But they’re not viewing middle school education in the same light.”

The full report can be read here, and the abbreviated presentation of the data presented to the Board can be viewed here.