Letters: When suspensions are good for students

Re “Struggling with suspensions,” Column, May 18

It is encouraging to read of efforts to reduce the number of suspensions in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But I do have a comment about what Sandy Banks calls “grumbling like that from parents and teachers, who imagine good kids held hostage by troublemakers.”

This is a real problem, not something imagined.

To those non-educators who criticize suspensions for “willful defiance,” when was the last time you faced 35 students with a planned lesson only to have it disrupted by a student? Would you stop the lesson and begin a counseling session?

Even the few minutes it may take to deal with a disruptive student robs the others of instruction time.

Marty Wilson

Whittier

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