Denver Public Schools has revised its discipline matrix, which was criticized after last year’s shooting at East High School, but the district stopped short of making significant changes to its guidance on when students should be expelled or suspended, according to a presentation Superintendent Alex Marrero gave the Board of Education on Thursday.
District officials began reviewing the matrix, which is a guide for school administrators to use when deciding how to discipline a student, last year before the East shooting, but did further revisions following the incident. Thursday’s presentation is the first look at the changes that will be implemented during the 2024-25 academic year.
“People believe what happened at East is a direct result of the discipline matrix and it is not,” said Deborah Staten, the district’s deputy chief of staff.
“Our goal is not to have kids out of school,” she said. “Our goal is to have kids in school.”
A copy of the new discipline matrix has not been made public, but the superintendent’s presentation showed that changes to the guidelines include seven levels of behavior and discipline severity rather than the previous six levels as well as new conduct categories and a new layout. DPS has added 12 new student conduct categories, including for homicide, unethical use of technology and nicotine offenses, according to the presentation.
The new seventh level of the matrix states that if students bring a gun to campus then they are almost always expelled, Staten said.
Under the change, the dangerous weapons category — excluding guns — is now split among levels five and six, depending on whether a weapon was found or used. The levels rank student conduct by severity and the recommended discipline, including whether expulsion or suspension should be considered.
The district received feedback that officials needed to make the previous matrix more clear when it comes to where certain behaviors fall on the matrix, Staten said.
A committee made up of educators, administrators and community members met eight times between October and April to recommend changes to the previous matrix, according to the presentation. The last time a new discipline matrix was released was in 2021.
Last year, parents and educators criticized DPS’s discipline policies as being too lenient following the East shooting, saying that administrators are too hesitant to expel students. During the shooting, a teen shot and wounded two administrators while being searched. The student, who died by suicide, had previously been expelled by the Cherry Creek School District and was on probation for a prior weapons charge.
Collinus Newsome, a sister of Wayne Mason, one of the deans shot at East, said the district’s changes to the discipline matrix will cause more confusion, including with the addition of a seventh tier, for both educators and parents.
“It actually isn’t making sense in how things are different,” she said, adding that she is speaking for herself and not her brother. “They took a process that could have been more simple and made it more complicated.”
Expulsions have been declining at DPS for about a decade, with district officials saying they have sought to reduce how often children are expelled, especially students of color. DPS officials have previously said they have a “moral obligation” to provide education to all students.
DPS issued eight expulsions for firearms and another four expulsions for dangerous weapons during the 2023-24 academic year. That’s up from seven expulsions for firearms and zero expulsions for dangerous weapons during the 2022-23 academic year, according to the district’s presentation.
While expulsions have dropped, out-of-school suspensions in DPS rose almost 13% during the five years between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 academic years, according to the most recent data available from the Colorado Department of Education.
DPS issued 3,429 out-of-school suspensions during the 2022-23 academic year, up from 3,046 five years earlier, according to state data.
The increase in out-of-school suspensions at DPS matches a trend that is occurring statewide as overall suspensions hit a 10-year high during the 2022-23 academic year, according to state data.