Earlier this school year, Loreal Hamilton’s fourth-grade son got into a scrape at Link Elementary. A classmate hit him with his jacket, so Hamilton’s son hit him back. It didn’t matter who started it — their principal sent them both home from the Spring ISD campus with a suspension.
Hamilton’s son missed three days of classes for getting into a schoolyard fight — even though he maintains that he acted out of self-defense. While Hamilton understands her son deserved some form of punishment, she wishes the school had come up with a different solution.
“The principal and the assistant principal just didn’t want to come up with something else like lunch detention,” Hamilton said. “They were just like, ‘These are the rules’.”
For the past decade, Spring ISD has suspended students like Hamilton’s son at one of the highest rates in the region, causing them to miss critical learning time and potentially setting them on a path to lower academic achievement down the line, a Houston Landing analysis shows. Spring’s suspension rate, at 21 suspensions per 100 students, is roughly three times the state average
The history of disciplinary issues in Spring has frustrated students and teachers, who have made it “loud and clear” that the district needs to provide help with curbing bad behavior and keeping more kids in class, Superintendent Lupita Hinojosa said.
This school year, however, the northwest Harris County school district is working to change. At a board meeting last October, Spring officials unveiled a discipline and equity plan with the goal of reducing total disciplinary infractions by 10 percent by 2027. The plan involves conflict resolution training, monthly meetings with campus behavior coordinators and a second chance program, among other new practices.
“Teachers need help,” Hinojosa said at the Oct. 3 board meeting. “Number one has been this constant consternation with discipline and is it being addressed or not. We were being very straightforward and punitive (before), and now we have these resources.”
The early results are promising, district leaders said at the time. Through the first 25 weeks of the school year, suspensions were on track to fall roughly 40 percent according to district-provided data. If those trends kept up through May, it would mark one of the larger single-year declines for a large Texas district in recent history.
Spring administrators did not provide official comment by the time of publication or make anyone available for an interview for this article after multiple requests over six weeks. In a board workshop meeting on Tuesday, Spring’s assistant superintendent of student success Efrain Olivo, Jr. credited the district’s success to a wholesale shift in campus culture.
“I know the good things that are happening at the campuses,” Olivo said. “These things are really taking hold, and the culture of the campuses are changing.”
The district’s reforms offer some consolation to Hamilton, whose son has stayed out of trouble since the incident last fall.
“It’s still upsetting because we want our kids to defend themselves,” Hamilton said. “But I do agree that he should have told a teacher instead of hitting the kid back.”
‘Straightforward and punitive’
School districts have used suspensions for decades to punish students and try to create a better learning environment for better-behaved children. In recent years, however, some educators and researchers have argued suspensions fail to change student behavior and stunt students’ academic progress by pulling them out of the classroom.
In Spring, the district has relied heavily on suspensions. For the past decade, Spring’s suspension rate has hovered between 16 to 21 suspensions per 100 students each year — a rate two to three times greater than the statewide average.
Across Texas, districts with similar demographics as Spring — where 90 percent of students are Black or Latino and 85 percent are considered economically disadvantaged by the state — also suspend students at above-average rates. But even among those districts, Spring still stands out for its high suspension rate.
The trend is especially apparent at Spring’s middle schools. Six of the district’s seven campuses with the highest suspension rates are middle schools. Bammel Middle School in particular issued about 1,275 suspensions to the 1,000 students that attended the campus last school year, the highest suspension rate of any school in the region.
While some teachers may argue that suspensions are necessary to keep classrooms on track, some experts have found that these kinds of methods may not work as intended.
Lin Liu is an assistant professor of criminology, law and society at the University of Florida. Her work focuses on corrections, juvenile justice, and how discipline can impact students’ future behavior. Although counterintuitive, so-called exclusionary disciplinary practices like suspensions can actually increase a student’s likelihood to misbehave, Liu said.
“Researchers found that those who experienced suspension actually are more likely to perceive the school as a less equitable climate…maybe they think their punishment was especially harsh, so they think of the school’s authority as less legitimate,” Liu said. “We can imagine the school comes up with all these rules, all these guidelines, all these policies. The student might also perceive those rules, those guidelines, as not that legitimate either.”
Spring parent Alejandra Posadas didn’t know what her son did to get suspended at first. She got a call from his high school one afternoon informing her that her son could not return to campus for the rest of the week. When he returned, he would have to spend three more days in in-school suspension, where he would be pulled out of his regular classes to serve an extended detention.
Six years later, she still remembers the confusion she felt trying to get information from his school and advocate for her son.
“It was an awful experience at that time, but I defended myself,” Posadas said at a board meeting in February. “My son was like, ‘Mom, you really did your homework!”
A change in culture
For the past two years, the Spring school board has surveyed parents, teachers, and community members to find the top seven issues the board should address. Once a year, the board invites parents to a roundtable to discuss those issues.
“Many, many parents requested discipline,” board president Justine Durant said about this year’s roundtable in February.
Roughly 40 parents attended last month’s Building Bridges with the Board event to discuss school climate and discipline, among other topics. Several of the parents in attendance, including Hamilton and Posadas, had children who had been suspended at Spring.
But by the time the roundtable took place, the district had already begun the work of lowering suspensions. As of mid-February, Spring had issued 2,238 out-of-school suspensions for the 2024-2025 school year, putting the district on track to decrease its suspension rate by roughly 40 percent from the previous year.
The results blow the district’s own written expectations out of the water. The district’s discipline and equity plan outlines a goal of decreasing total disciplinary infractions by 10 percent by 2027. The goal for the 2024-2025 school year is to reduce infractions by 5 percent.
The same plan did not set goals to decrease suspensions altogether, but it did set goals to reduce suspensions of both African-American males and special education students by 10 percent. Both groups tend to be disciplined more often than their peers; Last school year, roughly 1 in 5 or 21 percent of out-of-school suspensions Spring issued were to special education students. Special ed students make up just under 12 percent of the district’s total enrollment.
Board members Carmen Correa and Natasha McDaniel asked district officials what could have prompted such a precipitous drop in a relatively short period of time. Chief of district operations Mark Miranda offered to share more details at a later date.
“I think it’s a combination of a lot of different things,” Miranda told the board in October.
Part of the district’s new plan requires teachers to undergo deescalation training and administrators to regularly monitor campus disciplinary practices. With community and student feedback, the district has also revised its student code of conduct and plans to continue revising it with an eye towards equity, Olivo said in this week’s board workshop.
Olivo credited most of the progress, however, to the district’s “See Something, Say Something” program implemented last school year and the resulting change in campus culture.
“I’ve been to all three of the high schools, most of the middle schools, a lot of the elementaries, and I see a total difference in the hallways,” Olivo said. “The hallways are clear, and if the hallways are clear, that means (students) are in class and at least have the opportunity to learn. Before when they were meandering around the hallways they had the opportunity to get into some issues.”
Although only in her first year at Bammel Middle School, assistant principal Samatha Mullins said teachers and administrators have observed a similar shift at the campus that had previously issued more suspensions than it had total students.
“We saw that parents wanted to volunteer,” Mullins told board members this week. “They believed in our vision. They wanted to support the change. They wanted to support the culture we established.”
While encouraged by the early numbers and testimony, trustee Correa asked to dig deeper in the district’s results to track which strategies were responsible for the precipitous drop. Correa added that the district had a history of fidelity issues when it comes to data collection and wondered if infractions had fallen because teachers were reporting fewer of them.
Kregg Cuellar, the district’s chief of academics and school leadership, defended the district’s results and the layers of effort and monitoring that went into them.
“I physically see it walking into campuses,” Cuellar said. “It just feels different. It’s a testament to the work that these great leaders and their colleagues are doing every day.”
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