Daily beat coverage paves the way for deeper dive on post-pandemic school suspensions in Colorado

I became The Denver Post’s K-12 education reporter in the fall of 2021, after previously covering the health beat. In my former role, much of my reporting focused on the mental health and wellbeing of children and teens. While that made my move to the education beat a natural fit, the world still was in the middle of a pandemic — a crisis that left its mark not just on school systems, but the students they teach. 

In the first several months of my new beat, I began meeting with sources — both new and old — so that I could hear how Colorado children were adjusting to the return to in-person learning. During these conversations, I began hearing concerns that not only were school administrators using suspensions and expulsions more frequently than before the pandemic, but they were doing so for behaviors that previously had been handled in school. At the same time, I also began hearing that children’s behavior looked different than before.

But as full in-person learning had only really kicked off again in the fall of 2021, I didn’t yet have the data I needed to really examine what was happening with school discipline in Colorado schools. So in the meantime, I focused on familiarizing myself with my beat while keeping the idea for a deep dive into school discipline after the pandemic lockdown in my back pocket.

In focusing on my daily beat coverage for the next year and a half, I began reporting out stories that would eventually help form the basis of my project. This included covering staffing shortages that shut down classes across the Denver metro region, and interviewing children and teens about what it was like to return to in-person learning. Educators told me how overwhelmed they were by the shortages, often having to cover their colleagues’ classes and facing pressures to catch students up academically. Children and teens told me about how they enjoyed being back in school, but struggled with perfectionism and faced heavy workloads from teachers trying to accelerate their learning. For adolescents, things that once were normal — such as using a pencil (versus a computer) or sitting in a chair for an entire lesson — were now skills they had to relearn after months of remote learning. 

Still, I had my eye out for any lead or source that might eventually help me investigate schools’ use of discipline post-pandemic. In 2023, the Colorado Department of Education was expected to release a new batch of discipline data. With that data, I would have two years of data after 2020, meaning I could look at a total of five years and compare the two years before schools moved into lockdown to the two years after students returned in person. (The state released data for the 2023-24 academic year right before I published my project, so I ended up looking at six years of data instead of the original five.) 

This is also when I decided to apply for the Data Fellowship at the Center for Health Journalism. I knew I would be handling a decent-sized data set and wanted to make sure I could get the most out of my analysis as possible. 

I knew that for my project I wanted to look at disparities that might exist among students of color and children with disabilities. But first, I wanted to really answer a question that I had been wondering about since 2021: Were schools using suspensions and expulsions more frequently post-lockdown? And were they using such practices for less-severe behaviors that normally would have been handled in school? 

The state education department collects behavior data that indicates why districts issued suspensions or expulsions. But one of the first challenges I ran into was the fact that expulsion data was heavily suppressed at the district level, making it difficult for me to know how often school administrators expelled students for certain behaviors. For this reason, my editor and I decided early on that my project would just focus on suspensions. This decision also made sense because suspensions are more frequently used than expulsions — potentially affecting more students — and in the 2022-23 academic year, overall suspensions hit a 10-year-high, a clear sign that something had changed since the pandemic. I just had to figure out why the suspensions were increasing. 

Since the education department tracked the behaviors that led to suspensions, I was able to group them by severity, using a guide from the agency. I grouped things such as disobedience, substance use and property destruction as “less severe behaviors.” I then grouped things like weapons and assault as “more severe behaviors.” 

But one of the challenges I faced is that certain behaviors, such as disobedience and detrimental behavior, are considered by both advocates and educators to be subjective. This means that the behavior labeled as disobedience can look different from student to student and educator to educator. But this is why it was also important to interview students, teachers, lawyers and mental health workers about what was happening in the classroom.

Ultimately, my analysis found that Colorado school districts dramatically increased their use of out-of-school suspensions amid widespread staffing shortages post-lockdown. I also found that schools issued suspensions mostly for less severe, nonviolent infractions, which increased 16% between 2018-19 and 2022-23. Suspensions for nonviolent behaviors were issued at almost 10 times the rate as severe behaviors, which also jumped during the period I looked at in my analysis. 

I am digging into the data further for follow-up stories. But I think the biggest lesson from the project so far is that daily reporting — which often gets overlooked — can help fuel larger projects, as my reporting on staffing shortages and children’s mental health did with this story.