Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Suspension Expulsion Policy topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Policy committee reviews suspension and expulsion changes, keeps prior-notice language for due process
Summary
The committee reviewed proposed edits to Policy 233 on suspension and expulsion, debated prior-notice and informal hearing timing, clarified suspension durations (1–10 days, and extensions up to 15 days in specific cases), and voted to move the draft to first read after minor wording fixes.
The Central York Policy Committee reviewed proposed revisions to Policy 233 on suspension, exclusion and expulsion and agreed to send the draft to first read after staff incorporates agreed edits, including restoration of a prior-notice sentence that committee members said safeguards student due process.
Committee discussion focused on definitions and procedures for suspension and expulsion, the distinction between short suspensions (up to three days) and suspensions that trigger an informal hearing (more than three days), and how long a district may exclude a student while awaiting a formal hearing. Members also asked staff to clarify several gendered pronouns and ordering issues in the existing text.
Under the proposed revisions, a principal or designee may suspend a student from one to 10 consecutive school days for disobedience or misconduct; if a formal hearing cannot be held within the district's first 10 school days, the district may extend exclusion up to a total of 15 school days. The committee asked staff to add a parent/guardian mutual-agreement clause for scheduling and to make the "15 total" phrasing explicit in the text.
Members strongly debated a deleted sentence from the existing policy that said "no student may be suspended until they have been notified of the reasons for the suspension and given an opportunity to be heard on their own behalf before the school official who holds authority to reinstate the student." Staff said Saxton & Stump had proposed removing that language because the informal-hearing provisions for suspensions longer than three days provide a later procedural opportunity; several committee members argued the initial-notice language should remain to make clear the district's due-process practice.
"I would strongly recommend we put that back in there from a due process perspective," a staff member said, and the committee agreed to retain the prior-notice sentence. Members clarified that, in practice, principals often gather evidence and witness statements before any exclusion begins and that an exclusion may begin immediately for health and safety reasons, with the informal hearing to follow.
The expulsion section prompted requests for copy edits and consolidation: members noted duplicated language that separates "in-school" and "out-of-school" occurrences even though responses were the same; staff said the separate paragraphs align to different circumstances but agreed to look for opportunities to combine repetitive text. The committee also asked staff to correct gendered pronouns ("his/her" to singular "their") and other minor stylistic errors.
Directives from the meeting included reinserting the prior-notice sentence for suspensions, clarifying timing language for the 15-day total exclusion, correcting pronouns and stylistic inconsistencies, and returning the cleaned draft for a first reading. After those edits, the committee voted by consensus to move Policy 233 to first read.
