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Some Schools Tend to Skip Mental Health Services [USNews.com]

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It's well established that black students have higher rates of suspension, expulsion and police arrests at U.S. public schools than other racial and ethnic groups. The office of civil rights inside the Department of Education monitors racial disparities in school discipline and found that black students were expelled and suspended at three times the rate of white students. Last year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for schools to administer discipline more fairly.

Now a new analysis of the discipline data shows that not only are schools with more black students more likely to punish students more severely, they're also less likely to steer students to mental health services. By contrast, more heavily white schools were more likely to respond to infractions with counseling and to devise behavior plans to help a student deal with anger or hyperactivity, for example. In other words, schools with more black students lean toward punishment; schools with fewer black students lean toward rehab.

"The decreased use of mental health services [in black schools], that's been something that you hear about from people in the field and a claim made by advocates," said Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University and the director of the Equity Project, which studies school discipline trends, "but this would be among the first studies to document it."

 

The new study, "The Social Structure of Criminalized and Medicalized School Discipline," by David Ramey, a sociologist at Penn State University, was published online May 28, 2015, in the journal Sociology of Education.

 

[For more of this story go to http://www.usnews.com/news/art...ntal-health-services]

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