Portland public school teachers will now take gender identity and race into account before disciplining students, according to an agreement between the school district and its teachers union.
The requirement appears in a collective bargaining agreement between Portland Public Schools and its unionized teachers, which ended a nearly month-long strike late last month.
The agreement with the Portland Association of Teachers was ratified on Tuesday.
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According to the agreement, students engaged in “continuous disruptive behavior” will be given a “support plan” by teachers that “take into consideration the impact of issues related to the student’s trauma, race, gender identity/presentation, sexual orientation … and restorative justice as appropriate for the student.”
Char Hutson, the program manager for restorative justice for the school department said, “So that we’re really shifting from this punitive way of how we respond, to either discipline, or how we respond to our students who do get suspended or expelled and need to reenter.”
“However, after the pandemic, the district saw a spike in requests for the district’s restorative justice services, seeing up to 60 requests in the fall, 2021 semester compared to just 40 requests for the entire previous school year,” he continued.
Failing discipline policies were one of the concerns among conservative parents in other parts of the country who ran for school board after the pandemic.
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