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The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning

THE AFRO —
The post The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

Published

3 years ago

October 9, 2023

AFRO Staff

The candidates will continue to campaign for the vacant school board seat until the special election on Nov. 7. All Oakland District 5 voters will be sent ballots to cast their votes by mail.

Written by Carly Graf | The AFRO

The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning

It wasn’t the first time Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter had gotten into trouble at school. A seventh grader at a charter school in St. Louis, Missouri, she had a long history of disrupting her classes and getting into confrontations with teachers. Several times, the school issued a suspension and sent Curry’s granddaughter home.

In each instance, the school followed state law: The punishment was officially recorded and assigned a set length of time, Curry was formally notified and she and her granddaughter had a chance to appeal the decision.

But one day in February, after refusing to go into her classroom and allegedly cursing at her teachers, the seventh grader was sent home to learn online indefinitely. Curry said she wasn’t given any sense of when her granddaughter would be able to return to the classroom, just that the school and administrators would determine the best learning environment for her. In the meantime, the middle schooler would be left to keep up with her schoolwork on her own, on a district-issued tablet that Curry says would often lock her granddaughter out.

“They’d rather send her home than work on the issues she was going through,” Curry said. “She missed out on a lot of work, a whole lot. It makes me feel bad. It wasn’t fair at all, the way they were treating her.”

Lawyers and advocates across the country say that the practice of forcing a student out of the physical school building and into online learning has emerged as a troubling — and largely hidden — legacy of the pandemic’s shift to virtual learning. Critics charge that these punishments can deprive students and their families of due process rights. Students risk getting stuck in deficient online programs for weeks or even months without the support they need and falling behind in their academics. Sometimes, there is no system in place for tracking how many students are being punished this way or how many days of in-person classroom learning they are forced to miss.

“We are speaking about an equal right, an equal opportunity to access education,” said Sabrina Bernadel, legal counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “Instead of taking traditional or legal pathways,” she said, “there’s a pattern that the easiest solution is to remove a student rather than deal with the underlying issues.”

The Hechinger Report dives into how school districts across the US have begun punishing students by forcing them into online classes, sometimes indefinitely.

In 2020, nearly every school district in the nation was forced to come up with a way of providing education online. Later, as students returned to in-school learning, that infrastructure remained, making it easier than ever for districts to remove students from the classroom but say they were still educating them. The pandemic showed, however, that the quality of virtual instruction varies greatly and that online classes work best for only a minority of students; vast learning loss and student setbacks resulted.

Still, districts nationwide are now placing students in online learning in response to misbehavior, in a process referred to in certain circles as “virtualization.”

A young Black child sits at a computer terminal

Zachary Clingenpeel for The Hechinger Report

Some school districts consider virtual learning an alternative to discipline — not a form of discipline itself. Other districts embrace virtualization as a disciplinary measure and have started to develop official policies around using this punishment.

‘Virtualization’ has been employed in several school districts; its effects are a source of much debate

Photo: During the months that Rosalind Crawford’s sons were out of school, on virtual learning for disciplinary reasons, she tried her best to keep them on track academically but says they still fell behind in all their subjects.

In Clayton County School District, outside Atlanta, “misdeeds” committed by a student can lead to mandatory online learning until “behavior challenges are identified and mitigated,” according to a statement provided over email by Charles White, a district spokesperson. He said that virtual assignments are intended to be temporary and not to serve as in-school suspensions “or elimination of the expected learning experience.”

In Toppenish School District in Washington State, serving Yakima County, however, the transfer of a student to online learning for 10 to 20 school days is used as a top-tier disciplinary sanction, according to its student handbook. This action is considered a “long-term out-of-school suspension” and is to be used only after a number of other less drastic methods have failed to achieve behavior change, the handbook says. The district did not respond to requests for comment.

Paula Knight, superintendent of Jennings School District in Missouri, said students can be placed in online learning for anywhere from a few hours to a full semester as a punishment, calling the virtual option a “game changer” in how the district is able to deliver instruction.

An afternoon away from the classroom in virtual learning is “almost like a restoration practice, giving them an opportunity to cool down or cool off,” Knight said. For other students, virtualization has its “pluses and minuses,” she said. “It just depends. When the kids are academically on target, for example, you don’t want them to lose that momentum, and we allow as an option.”

Rosalind Crawford and her five sons hug each other in their Greater St. Louis area home on June 10, 2023. Zachary Clingenpeel for The Hechinger Report

Knight said that online learning has not yet been written into the district’s disciplinary code, but that there are plans to incorporate it more formally at some point. Currently, students are recommended for involuntary virtual learning by the principal, she said, and these placements are tracked aggregately along with suspensions, which makes identifying the particular impact of virtualization difficult.

The education provided via virtualization is inconsistent, and most schools using it are not able to track student progress or even how many students are subject to it

Photo: Rosalind Crawford and her five sons hug each other in their Greater St. Louis area home on June 10, 2023. The boys have shared the space since October for virtual learning after they were sent home indefinitely by their school district.

Rosalind Crawford moved her five young boys, all in elementary and middle school, to Jennings, just north of St. Louis, in the spring of 2022. A single mom, Crawford left her longtime home of Memphis to get her family away from gun violence near their home. She enrolled her boys in the local schools that April.

It wasn’t long before she started hearing about two of the boys getting into trouble. Crawford said she could see that they were dealing with trauma and struggling to behave in school as a result. She also believes they were being bullied. She says she met with administrators several times to raise concerns about her kids’ relationships with their peers and their performance in school.

After a fight broke out involving two of her children and other classmates in October 2022, Crawford and her lawyers say all five of her kids were placed on virtual learning.

Jennings School District officials did not respond to follow-up questions about Crawford’s case, but a letter addressed to the family said that the boys were transferred to home-school learning at Crawford’s request. She denies making this request and says she sought legal help to get them back into school.

In the meantime, Crawford said, the boys were provided with laptops and Google Classroom access.

For the better part of the school year, they tried to learn from home. Crawford says that sometimes they only received two lessons per week and that there was no teacher instruction, which made it hard for them to learn. She watched as they fell behind in everything from academic courses to physical education. Her sixth grader soon was at risk of being unable to move up to seventh grade in fall 2023.

“I feel like a failure. How do you tell your kids — when you see the devastation — that this isn’t their fault?” Crawford said. “Virtual learning is basically putting the kids somewhere have to deal with them.”

Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter was also in danger of falling behind due to the amount of schoolwork she missed while learning virtually, her grandmother said. In all, she missed nearly a month of school.

“They never gave her homework. I was calling every day asking if they could give me a package of her work,” she said. “They were telling me she might have to repeat the same grade.”

The school did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The stakes of such discipline playing out in schools across the country “are fairly enormous,” said Sara Zier from TeamChild, a youth advocacy organization in Washington State that also provides legal services. Lost classroom time reduces social and emotional skills, hinders academic progress and can decrease a student’s likelihood of graduating; lower levels of education can lead to lower employment and financial prospects in adulthood. “It’s not something we can solve by representing one kid at a time,” she said. “It’s a much bigger challenge.”

Yet because many schools don’t separate virtualization from other suspensions or, in some cases, even record it as a removal from the classroom, it’s almost impossible to know how often it’s happening and to whom.

For example, although Clayton County uses virtual learning as a disciplinary tool, the district has no records of how many students have been put into online programs involuntarily.

Hopey Fink, a lawyer at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, said, “We suspect that there is an attempt to obscure and euphemize the suspension data that’s kind of embedded in part of this” in order to evade accountability. Without data, advocates like Fink worry that disproportionate disciplinary measures against already marginalized groups could be hiding in plain sight.

Typically, discipline overwhelmingly and disproportionately affects students of color and students with disabilities. Research from the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies, using data from the 2015-16 school year, concluded that Black students lost 103 days of learning per 100 students, 82 more days than their white peers. Another study found that Latino students were more likely to receive disciplinary action than white students. U.S. Department of Education data from the 2017-18 school year shows that students with disabilities accounted for 16 percent of total enrollment but received 25 percent of in-school suspensions and 28 percent of out-of-school suspensions. Disparities for Black students with disabilities were even worse.

Rosalind Crawford holds two worksheets she printed off for her sons to supplement their education after all five were indefinitely sent home for virtual learning by their school district.

“We can only extrapolate” that disparities are comparable in other newer forms of discipline, such as virtualization, said Bernadel of the National Women’s Law Center. “Without formal data, we can’t speak to that directly and address that problem, and it’s a huge issue.”

The return to in-class learning after virtualization presents an additional burden on students already struggling to keep up

Photo: Rosalind Crawford holds two worksheets she printed off for her sons to supplement their education after all five were indefinitely sent home for virtual learning by their school district.

Getting back into the classroom after being placed on virtual learning can be more difficult than returning after a suspension. Lawyers in Washington State say clients have been required to make behavioral and academic improvement in a virtual setting before returning to the classroom, and when students do return, they’re typically saddled with cumbersome and alienating rules.

Documents show a laundry list of requirements that a middle-schooler in Washington’s Toppenish School District would need to re-enroll in brick-and-mortar classes: pick-up and drop-off in the main office; random student searches; escorted transition times five minutes before class is over; and chaperoned bathroom trips with a staff member, among others.

For Crawford’s children to return to the classroom in the Jennings School District, she and two of her sons were required to participate in a conflict resolution program through the St. Louis County Juvenile Courts, according to a November 7, 2022, letter from the Jennings School District superintendent and security director. Failure to do so risked “further disciplinary action” that could result in “virtual learning for the remainder of the 2022-2023 school year.”

In all, it took nearly five months and a lawyer’s involvement for Crawford to get her kids reenrolled. The boys also needed to sign a behavior contract, but were ultimately admitted back into the classroom in March.

Indeed, family and student advocates say that the legal credibility of this practice of virtualization is fragile. If families are able to get legal support, school districts tend to quickly allow the student to re-enroll, said Maggie Probert from Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. But even free legal aid can be difficult for already-vulnerable families to access.

Probert worked with Curry to get her granddaughter back into her regular classes after more than three weeks of online learning.

“I have worked on a lot of cases where the attorney gets involved, and suddenly the school lets the kids back in, no questions asked,” Probert said. “They aren’t making any arguments as to why the child should be out of school — because they have none.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.

The post The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers .

The post The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning first appeared on BlackPressUSA.

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The hidden risks of poor water management in residential properties

Poor water management in residential properties can result in structural damage, health risks, and long-term financial strain. Water is the most important resource for any country, and having access to clean drinking water should be a right that needs to be preserved. Unfortunately, we are noticing a trend in the US right now where poor water […]

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6 days ago

April 17, 2026

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Poor water management in residential properties can result in structural damage, health risks, and long-term financial strain.

Water is the most important resource for any country, and having access to clean drinking water should be a right that needs to be preserved. Unfortunately, we are noticing a trend in the US right now where poor water management in residential properties is becoming more common.

It’s not even just access to water that gets affected when residential water management isn’t made a priority. It can result in issues with major leaks and flooding events, which affect the health and safety of residents.

Gradual Structural Damage

The worst thing about flooding or water leaks is the gradual structural damage that real estate investors have to deal with. Water can seep into materials like:

Wood
Drywall
Concrete

It can do so over time, drop by drop, and eventually cause significant damage to these structures.

A slow leak behind a wall or under a floor may go unnoticed for months, gradually compromising the integrity of the structure. Over time, this can lead to:

Warped floors
Cracked foundations
Weakened support beams

If you aren’t interested in spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to repair your residential properties, then it’s important to focus on water management in your annual plan.

Mold and Indoor Air Quality Issues

Excess moisture creates the perfect growing environment for mold. Within 24 to 48 hours, mold can start developing in damp conditions, and it often does so in hidden places like:

Behind walls
Under carpets
Poorly ventilated areas

Mold is a health hazard, especially for the very young and very old, and those who have a compromised immune system. Indoor air quality starts degrading very fast when mold growth happens, which can result in allergies, asthma, and other respiratory conditions.

Addressing mold problems can be both complicated and expensive, often requiring professional remediation to fully eliminate the issue.

Increased Utility Costs

If you notice that your utility bills have gone up in recent weeks or months, without any corresponding difference in tenants or temperature, it could be due to a water leak. Malfunctioning fixtures can also cause an increase in utility costs.

Even small, continuous leaks can add up to substantial water loss, making regular inspections and maintenance essential. That’s why paying attention to water management is so crucial for any real estate investor.

Foundation and Drainage Problems

Proper drainage is crucial to protecting a home’s foundation. Water needs to be directed away from the property, and if not done so, then it can accumulate around the base of a structure. This can lead to soil erosion, foundation cracks, and even basement flooding.

Clogged gutters, improper grading, and inadequate drainage systems are common contributors to these issues. All of these have to be addressed to prevent long-term damage to your foundation and prevent expensive repair bills that eat away at your budget.

Professional eavestrough installers are necessary to ensure rainwater stays away from your foundation and moves away from the property properly.

Pest Infestations

No homeowner or investor wants pests in their residential properties. It’s not good for the health of the residents, nor is it good for the reputation of the properties in attracting future tenants.

Moist environments often attract pests such as:

Termites
Rodents
Insects

Standing water or damp areas provide ideal conditions for these unwanted guests to thrive.

Once pests are established in your property, they will start causing further damage by eating away at certain structures. To get rid of them requires expensive pest control services and takes time.

Insurance and Financial Implications

Even though insurance does cover certain types of water damage, it doesn’t cover all forms of water damage, and thus, you might end up paying out of pocket in certain cases.

Damage resulting from neglect or lack of maintenance is often excluded from coverage. That’s why it’s so important to apply water management strategies to all of your residential properties.

If you wish to sell your property later, then it’s important to be very cognizant of water damage, as buyers will conduct inspections that could alert them to such water damage and prevent your home from selling in the future.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Are Some Preventive Measures for Water Management?

There are many home safety tips you can follow to ensure your home stays safe from water damage.

Regularly inspecting plumbing systems, cleaning gutters, and ensuring proper drainage can help identify problems early. Installing moisture detectors, maintaining appliances, and addressing leaks promptly are also effective strategies.

You can also hire a water damage specialist and have them take a look at your home to ensure nothing untoward is going on, especially if you notice a major change in your utility bills.

How Does Water Damage Interior Spaces?

Water damage can occur without the home dwellers noticing it. In some cases, the water damage to interior spaces is very apparent, as when the ceilings start sagging or the walls and ceilings develop water stains.

You might also notice the floors rotting or warping.

In addition to structural concerns, water damage can ruin personal belongings such as:

Furniture
Electronics
Important documents

The emotional and financial cost of replacing these items can be significant.

Nothing good comes out of water damage, but it’s highly preventable if you only take the steps mentioned above. Do not become lazy or complacent in this situation. It could be the difference between saving hundreds of dollars in water damage bills and not.

Protect Yourself From the Risks of Water Damage

Not everyone places such a priority on water management, and that’s a shame. It’s truly when you are dealing with water damage that you regret this decision.

Residential water management can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars in bills in the future. It’s worth the time and resources you place upon it.

By staying vigilant and adopting proactive maintenance habits, homeowners can protect their properties and protect their investment from degrading into a money-sucking pile of stones.

Please check out related articles on our website for more interesting articles on a wide variety of subjects.

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Black Micro-Schools Deserve Recognition: NABML Creates National Standards and Resources

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE: Black families are the fastest-growing demographic in alternative education. Discover how the National Association of Black Micro School Leaders is providing educators with resources, training, and certification to launch thriving microschools.

Published

7 days ago

April 16, 2026

Oakland Post

by Dawn Montgomery
BlackPressUSA Contributor

Public school advocates and politicians typically spearhead the attack on microschools, focusing on their perceived “lack of oversight and public accountability.” Yet Black families are the fastest-growing demographic in alternative education. This shift is driven by the recognition that traditional public education cannot change quickly enough to serve its children’s needs. The National Association of Black Micro-School Leaders is an organization working to counter this narrative and fill a critical gap. Nicole Stewart, the founder, told The Carolinian that “Black families are the fastest-growing group in alternative education, but Black microschool founders have had no national home, no unified voice, no shared resources, and no collective power.”

Nicole Stewart, a former educator with nearly 20 years of experience in public education, retired to start her education consulting company and later opened her own school. That experience led her to discover microschools. Stewart advocates for a balance between joy and rigor in education, designing learning experiences that honor identity, strength, and purpose. She understands that microschools can be tailored to address the specific needs of the families and communities they serve.

The oversight criticism is legitimate. This concern is precisely why NABML is establishing the national benchmark for community-led education. NABML’s certification is that seal of approval, signaling to families, funders, and policymakers that a school is not merely functioning but is outstanding. Additionally, the organization emphasizes the importance of legal structures, fiscal stewardship frameworks, and community involvement as foundational to sustainability and accountability.

NABML realizes this vision via four main support systems:

Community Design Day: NABML facilitates a process in which the neighborhood tells us what its children deserve. You get to explore new learning approaches and define educational priorities for your community. A community task force is then formed to implement these ideas, and NABML supports you along the way. This creates a space where you can be a part of the process as a founding member of a microschool.

Founders Launch Lab: This professional development experience equips Black microschool founders and educational leaders with the training, operational, and strategic skills to launch and sustain thriving schools. Participants gain the business acumen and pedagogical frameworks necessary to navigate the transition from traditional educator roles to entrepreneurial school leaders.

Membership (The Vault): Members gain instant, 24/7 access to proprietary legal templates, student handbook builders, fiscal stewardship frameworks, and zoning blueprints designed specifically for the microschool model. They also join a curated community of mission-aligned founders through monthly “Brilliance Circles” and a private digital forum. Membership unlocks the NABML Fund, a curated capital pool designed specifically for the network, removing a major barrier to school launch and sustainability.

Certification: This is the seal of approval that tells families, funders, and policymakers that your school isn’t just operating; it is also excelling. NABML is currently developing the national benchmark for community-led education, making sure that certified schools meet rigorous standards for student outcomes, community engagement, and fiscal responsibility.

Whether you’re a parent seeking educational alternatives, an educator ready to launch a microschool, or a policymaker committed to expanding equitable education options, NABML invites you to be part of this transformation.

Ready to start or support a microschool? Visit https://nabml.org/ to learn more, access resources, or join the Founders Launch Lab.

Want to invest in Black educational futures? Make a donation at https://secure.qgiv.com/for/naobml/ to support founders in building schools that serve their communities.

Every microschool launched is a community transformed. Every founder supported is a generation of Black children empowered to thrive.

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IN MEMORIAM: Rest in Power — Minnesota Loses a True Warrior in Yusef Mgeni

MINNESOTA SPOKESMAN RECORDER — Yusef Mgeni, a brilliant historian, community organizer, former St. Paul educator and fierce advocate for Black people, died on April 7, 2026, leaving behind a legacy that will echo through generations of Black Minnesota history and community building.

Published

1 week ago

April 15, 2026

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By MSR News Online

Minnesota and the world lost a powerful voice and a true warrior on April 7, 2026. Yusef Mgeni is gone, but his legacy will echo for generations.

Yusef was a brilliant historian, a community organizer, a former St. Paul educator, and a fierce advocate for Black people. He carried with him an extraordinary archive of speeches, books, articles, and photographs documenting the work of countless Black scholars and leaders. His knowledge was not just deep. It was generational. Talk to him about any subject concerning Black history, and he would give you a dissertation.

His roots in this community ran deeper than most people knew. Yusef was the grandnephew of Fredrick McGhee, the pioneering 20th-century civil rights activist and attorney who made his mark in St. Paul at the turn of the century. That lineage was not lost on Yusef. He carried it forward with pride and purpose, spending decades making sure the stories of Black Minnesotans were told, preserved, and passed on.

As a journalist, Yusef called NAACP leaders and community figures to identify the issues that mattered most to Black people and wrote about them in local newspapers. He was a contributor to the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, a platform he understood and respected deeply. As a former St. Paul NAACP vice president, he remained active and engaged well into his retirement, answering emails and voicemails for residents who were at their wits’ end, helping them navigate evictions, legal challenges, and systemic barriers.

“Generally, they contact us when they are at their wits’ end,” he once said. “They are going to get evicted; their car is getting repossessed. We assist in navigating the system.”

His work was always about access. Under his leadership and alongside other NAACP leaders, the St. Paul chapter helped establish a landmark covenant between the police and the St. Paul community in 2001, a model that contributed to dramatically lower excessive-force costs than in Minneapolis in the decade that followed.

Yusef was also a passionate champion of ethnic studies in Minnesota’s schools, understanding that education rooted in Black and Brown history was not a supplement to American history but central to it.

“Ethnic studies is also American history,” he said. “The fact that the legislature and the MDE have both endorsed ethnic studies requirements in schools is a real plus for giving people the opportunity to explore and learn more about American history, and more importantly, to see themselves reflected in that learning.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, Yusef worked alongside Mrs. Clarissa Walker at the Sabathani Community Center, where they poured their energy into uplifting and empowering the community. Their work helped shape the cultural and political landscape of South Minneapolis during a critical era. They were part of a generation that built institutions, nurtured young people, and fought for justice with unwavering commitment.

Yusef also played a key role in the early development of KMOJ Radio, helping to establish a platform that amplified Black voices long before it was common or convenient. His activism extended through education, the St. Paul NAACP, the Million Man March, and the Urban Coalition, always rooted in a deep and abiding love for his people.

He was also an interviewee in the Rondo neighborhood oral history project preserved by the Minnesota Historical Society, ensuring that the voices and stories of that community would never be lost.

Not long ago, a colleague was blessed to sit with Yusef at his home, where he reflected on his life and his legacy. He talked about his work in education, his activism, and his years of service to the community. But what stood out just as much was how he spoke about his family and his people, with warmth, with pride, and with purpose.

Today, we honor him not only for what he accomplished but for the spirit with which he did it.

A scholar. A builder. A warrior. A keeper of our stories.

Thank you, Yusef, for everything you gave and everything you sacrificed on behalf of Black people. Your legacy stands tall, and our community is better because of you.

Rest in Power, Yusef Mgeni.