For his mother, when his son is suspended from school and sent back home, he has the impression that the school ignores his handicap. Shania says that ADHD makes the impulsive of Lvent – and contributes to many incidents that make it suspend.
“Why did he get into trouble for what ADHD looks like?” she asked.
In the files, the school staff said they did not believe that all the bad behavior of Lavent is linked to their disability.
At the national level, disabled students are suspended at much higher rates than their unabled peers.
The Lvent School is part of a charter network that stands out in Indiana: an NPR analysis of state data of 2024-25 revealed that the system, Paramount Schools of Excellence, has suspended the disabled students about three times more often than the average of the state.
Supporters of Paramount, including many parents, praised the network for calm classrooms and solid academic performance, especially among students from low -income families and colored students.
But several parents of current and old paramount have declared to NPR that some students – in particular those who have a disability – have trouble following the rules that promote these silent classrooms.
“It’s either you adapt to this mold or you don’t,” says Shania. “And if you don’t do it, then we will hang, hang, hang.”
“Calm” corridors and very high suspension rate
Paramount Schools of Excellence is a growing charter network in Indiana. As a system with Charter K-8, its campuses are managed in private but funded by the public and free to attend.
When the CEO of Paramount, Tommy Reddicks, describes his schools, one of the first words he uses is calm. The corridors are silent. In classrooms, students focus on school work. “We are really a calm and collected school environment rather than a kind of environment of cheerleader,” he says.
Federal data show that Indiana schools are based on an exclusion discipline such as the out -of -school suspension that schools in most other states. And paramount suspension rates exceed the average Indiana state among students with and without disability.
For 100 students of general education in the paramount system, there were approximately 45 suspensions, according to an NPR analysis of data from the school year 2024-25. The average state -of -scale average was 10.
For 100 children receiving special education services, there were about 73 suspensions. The average for the state scale was 22.
These data reflect the total number of suspensions, not the number of suspended students.
Reddicks attributes the high suspension rates of the network partly to its structured approach, which, according to him, protects the learning environment and finally benefits students, including those with disabilities.
“You know, many of our special education incidents generally involve the safety of others or the safety of the students in question,” explains Reddicks.
Reddicks says, and state data confirm that paramount schools have reduced suspensions among disabled students during the 2024-25 school year.
He says that the decline reflects both the maturation of the campuses which have opened in recent years and which have registered the students paramount for the first time, as well as the accent put by the network on the training of staff to reduce suspensions.
When the suspensions occur, Reddicks says that he does not believe that they retain the students.
“We know that, in our more structured system, students with suspensions still work very well and generally surpass state of state,” he said.
Reddicks shared data from two paramount schools. He showed that students who have been suspended make averages of outperformance on standardized means, but only in certain notes. He did not provide data for other network campuses, including Paramount Englewood.
Why some families of disabled students are attracted to primordial
For some parents, discipline policies that help promote Silent classrooms of Paramount are an argument of sale. This is one of the reasons why Nicol, who sent five children to a primordial school, continued to drive his family even after moving through the city.
“I like them to be strict,” says Nicol. “You enter Paramount, their children sit in the office. Their children do what should be done. ”
Even when his own children were suspended, Nicol saw certain advantages.
His 12 -year -old son Leon has autism and other handicaps. Last year, Leon’s behavior ramp after the death of his grandfather, said Nicol. He started doing objects and throwing objects in class. Nicol says that all the suspensions he received was not necessary, but that he should be suspended when he pushes or fights with other students.
“He must be held responsible,” she said. “Because I don’t want to say:” Oh, well, let (Léon) get out of it with that because he’s autism. “”
Overall, Nicol says that paramount educators worked hard to meet Leon’s needs. She partially trusts Paramount because she believes that her two older children have set them up to succeed in high school.
Missing school costs
Some experts say that when schools suspend students with disabilities, it is hardly more than a dressing that gives educators a break in bad behavior and a chance to think about how to respond.
“I would say that the suspension does not solve much,” explains Federico Waitoller, special education teacher at the University of Illinois Chicago. Waitoller says that suspensions do not help students with disabilities to learn and grow.
“You don’t teach anything, right?” said Waitoller, a former special educator. “You say:” Don’t do that. “But you don’t tell the student what to do, how to do it – and give him support to do it.”
Levent’s mother, Shania, says that she saw part of her difficult behavior at home and she would like him to learn to control her impulses – to stop the play of horses and to discuss when adults ask her to do something.
But Shania says that the suspensions do not do much to teach her son to behave. And the missed days of the school add up. The files show that the Lvent School suspended it for at least 10 days last year. Then, after Levent left the campus a few weeks before the end of the year, he had to spend most of the last days from school to home, where he received about an hour of distant instructions per day, according to the school archives.
All this missed school has wreaked havoc, says Shania.
“I don’t want him to go even further,” she says. “Because again, it’s a child who is late.”
