Sponsors (12)
The bill shifts K–12 discipline away from exclusionary, punitive practices toward data-driven transparency and funded mental-health and restorative supports—reducing disproportionate suspensions and improving protections for students—while imposing significant new administrative costs, privacy risks, and potential safety and local-control tradeoffs for schools and taxpayers.
Students — especially students of color, girls of color, and students with disabilities — would face fewer exclusionary suspensions and expulsions, reducing lost instructional time and lowering school pushout.
Students with trauma or behavioral-health needs will gain expanded mental-health, counseling, and restorative supports via grant-funded hires and evidence-based interventions, improving early intervention and school climate.
Parents, communities, and policymakers will get stronger public data and transparency (multilingual and accessible) on suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and referrals, enabling identification of discriminatory patterns and targeted reforms.
Schools, districts, and taxpayers — particularly small and rural LEAs — will incur substantial new administrative and compliance costs for expanded data collection, reporting, staff training, policy revision, and grant management, straining local budgets and capacity.
Students and staff may face reduced immediate options to manage severe behavior because the bill limits exclusionary discipline, restricts use of grant funds for school-based law enforcement and certain security measures, and bans some restraints, potentially raising safety and behavior-management challenges absent adequate alternatives.
Taxpayers and federal budgets face about $1 billion/year in new mandatory appropriations and open-ended authorizations, which create ongoing fiscal commitments and reduce federal budget flexibility.
Based on analysis of 7 sections of legislative text.
Requires federal data on exclusionary discipline, funds grants to end discriminatory suspensions/expulsions and restraints, creates a task force on pushout of girls of color, and authorizes $1B/year.
Introduced April 8, 2025 by Ayanna Pressley · Last progress April 8, 2025
Requires the Department of Education to collect detailed, disaggregated federal data on exclusionary school discipline (suspensions, expulsions, transfers, law-enforcement referrals, arrests, and placements) and to publish annual reports identifying patterns of overuse or discriminatory application. Creates a competitive grant program to replace exclusionary practices with trauma-informed, restorative approaches and bans many exclusionary practices (certain out-of-school suspensions/expulsions for young children and low-level behaviors, corporal punishment, seclusion, and most restraints except narrowly defined emergency uses). Establishes a joint Education/HHS Task Force to study and recommend actions to end the school pushout of girls of color. Authorizes $500 million per year for the grant and task-force activities and $500 million per year for the Office for Civil Rights to carry out the data collection and enforcement activities.