In the same way that overall safety is important in schools, student discipline is an important part of creating an orderly and caring environment in which students can learn and teachers can teach. There are many ways in which teachers and administrators work to create orderly schools, and various types of disciplinary actions are utilized. While each North Carolina school district sets its own disciplinary policies, many schools use after-school, Saturday, or in-school detentions to address disruptive or inappropriate student behavior. Usually, schools reserve out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for recurring, egregious or illegal offenses committed by students. In addition to having information about your school's overall safety, it is worthwhile to have some idea of how many major disciplinary actions have occurred in your school.
This Report Card focuses only on the highest levels of disciplinary action that schools can take:
Individual schools may have additional disciplinary data - like numbers of in-school suspensions or detentions - these other consequences are not required for state reporting.
Since school districts determine their own rules for student discipline and the way discipline is reported, and since those rules are not standardized from district to district, no state-level averages can be provided.
For additional technical information about these data, see the Data Sources & Information Guide.