suspension

On Tuesday night, President Brack Obama called for compulsory school attendance across the nation. But simply making school attendance mandatory is to overlook a real blight on our system of secondary education.

In Massachusetts, where I practice law, a child who is expelled from her school is denied the ability to attend any school in the entire state. Ever.  It seems draconian, shocking, and unbelievable.

But it's true.

In an earlier blog post, I stated that the Supreme Court held that a warrant is required to put a GPS device on someone's car.  I was wrong.  Turns out, however, I was in the company of many people talking about the decision.

School exclusions are on the rise. There has been an increasing tendency to handle school offenses in the courts, to exclude a child from school for picking up a court case, and to institute zero-tolerance policies that result in school exclusions as the preferred form of discipline.