IN 2012, after child advocates spent years trying to reduce punitive suspensions in schools, Massachusetts passed sweeping education reforms under Chapter 222, kickstarting a longstanding policy shift away from exclusionary discipline methods.

The law came as the nation moved away from the Zero-Tolerance policies of the 1990s and toward efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Chapter 222 established new due process and data reporting requirements for school districts regarding the discipline and exclusion of students. The underlying principle was to make exclusionary methods like suspension a last resort and require those who are removed from the classroom to continue receiving access to learning materials.

Around the time the law was passed, many out-of-school suspensions were for non-criminal, non-violent, non-drug-related offenses, and that broad, discretionary, catch-all category was where some of the greatest racial disparities existed. Students of color were removed from school for minor offenses at disproportionately higher rates than white students, as were students with disabilities compared to their peers.

In 2022, the state took it a step further by passing Chapter 177, requiring school districts to attempt alternative methods like restorative justice, counseling, and mediation before resorting to exclusionary discipline.

Nearly 15 years after that initial policy shift, out-of-school suspensions are falling. From 2018 to 2025, they dropped from nearly 28,500 statewide to less than 22,000, according to data reported by school districts and collected by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). In that same timeframe, the number of students receiving any form of disciplinary action in Massachusetts schools decreased by nearly 24 percent. In-school suspensions declined as well.

Yet, while only impacting a small percentage of students, emergency removals — a mechanism allowing school administrators to immediately remove a student from school due to severe behavior for up to two days before the child receives a legally-mandated hearing — have substantially increased, from nearly 1,500 in 2018 to more than 3,900 in 2025. The number of emergency removals dipped during the 2020-2021 school year but has increased every year since 2022.

The state’s 26 Gateway City school districts — which are responsible for educating some of the most disadvantaged student populations in Massachusetts — reported more than half of all emergency removals in 2025, despite making up just 28 percent of the state’s total public school population. In those districts alone, emergency removals collectively grew by 78 percent while suspensions decreased by 23 percent.

What’s behind the increase? The answer isn’t simple.

The trend has racial justice and education advocates sounding the alarm, suggesting that school districts may be circumventing suspensions (and the alternative discipline methods they are legally required to employ) and instead opting for emergency removals as a quick fix to behavioral issues. Those removals are amounting to lost learning that advocates say is ultimately contributing to the state’s staggering racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

“We’ve had all of these changes, but there’s not a lot of teeth,” said Jenny Chou, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, a legal services and advocacy group representing families and children. “The more you’re not in school, the worse off you are, and now we have this whole system where it’s seemingly justified to put you out.”

Teacher advocates and school officials say they haven’t been provided with the necessary level of resources or training to deploy alternative discipline methods, calling Chapter 177 an “unfunded mandate” amid a chronic shortage of special education professionals. Others say the increase can be at least partly attributed to an uptick in more violent, volatile classroom behavior due to youth mental health struggles brought about by the pandemic.

“The sad outcome of that is that schools are overusing emergency removals so they don’t have to comply with our harder out-of-school suspension laws, and also so they don’t have to use the alternatives that our state isn’t providing them funding or training for,” said Matthew Cregor, an education attorney at the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee, which offers legal representation to people with mental health challenges.

Research has long shown that exclusion from school is linked to poorer academic outcomes, higher risk of dropout, and increased contact with the criminal justice system. A 2018 study found that suspended youth were 40 percent more likely to be arrested within five years and 94 percent more likely to have been arrested as a minor. More recent studies have shown that these disciplinary practices negatively affect young people’s emotional and mental well-being.

The modest decline in out-of-school suspensions in Massachusetts has been celebrated by education advocates on all sides. But even though suspension rates have decreased for students of color and students with disabilities, both groups continue to be suspended at higher rates than their peers. In 2025, those with disabilities were suspended out of school at 2.5 times the rate of those without disabilities, according to data collected by DESE. Hispanic students were suspended 2.5 times as often as white students, while Black students were suspended nearly three times as much as white students.

The disparities persist when it comes to the use of emergency removals. Those with disabilities were removed at more than three times the rate of those without disabilities in 2025. Hispanic students experienced emergency removals nearly three times as much as white students, while Black students were removed more than four times as much as white students.

“If districts were meaningfully deploying approaches like restorative justice, mediation, and conflict resolution, they’d be able to act in a proactive manner to address student conflict and student misbehavior,” said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “They’d be able to get to the root of some of these behaviors, and they’d be able to de-escalate conflicts before they result in fights and things of that nature. In the absence of that, you have continuing behavior that, unfortunately, is still falling into exclusion.”

Jay Blitzman, a former juvenile court judge and former director of Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), said any kind of disciplinary exclusion contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline.

“This adversely affects public safety, quite candidly,” he said. “Educational continuity is essential. Doing everything we can to keep youth in school is obviously good for them, but it’s also part of being smart on crime.”

“It’s easy to react and blame kids, but we as adults have to assume some systemic accountability,” he added. “These problems are historic, and they aren’t going away.”

Chapter 222 required districts to provide students and families with notice and a hearing prior to an out-of-school suspension, except during emergency circumstances, in which the child can receive their hearing after being removed.

Emergency removals were established as an official disciplinary category in 2014. Districts may finally be reporting them with some accuracy, Cregor said, which could help explain the spike in removals.

But some advocates, including Jennifer White, an education attorney at MAC, suspect that school officials are utilizing informal removals that are not being officially reported as emergency removals to the state.

She told CommonWealth Beacon she has worked with parents that have received mid-day calls from school officials requesting that their child be picked up after one or more behavioral incidents. Yet some are allowed to return to school the next day without ever receiving the mandated hearing that is supposed to accompany an emergency removal.

Chou said she has seen similar cases. “As if that’s some time-out that they’re allowed to do,” she said.

Beccah Griffith, president of the Malden Education Association and a special education teacher, said many districts are reluctant to use formal discipline measures for students on Individualized Education Program (IEP) plans out of fear of invoking a manifestation determination — a legal meeting required by the ⁠Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to decide if a student’s misbehavior was caused by their disability or a failure to follow their education plan. It is triggered when a school plans to suspend a student with a disability. This could account for the uptick in the use of emergency removals, as well as the disproportionate use of removals against students with disabilities, Griffith said.

A 2025 Stanford research study published by a journal of the American Educational Research Association found evidence that schools in California, after being sanctioned for disproportionately suspending Black students, began using informal ways to remove students from learning, such as sending children home early or isolating them in hallways, often without recording the action as a form of discipline. Researchers found more broadly that these practices occur when mandates to reduce formal suspensions “are not paired with adequate resources for alternative restorative behavior management approaches.”

Because of the budget crunches around hiring ancillary service providers like social workers, behavior analysts, and speech therapists, many districts have only been able to hire staff for legally mandated services, like math and science teachers, rather than additional supports, Griffith said.

“There is resentment and dislike towards these alternative discipline strategies because they’re not being resourced properly,” she added “If we have the requisite, expertly trained staff and the time, space, and resources, it works. But I don’t know any educator in Massachusetts that has all of those things.”

In addition to staff and funding, advocates say implementing alternative discipline practices requires long-term training, programming, oversight, and technical assistance. DESE’s Rethinking Discipline Initiative, for example, coaches school districts on data reporting and assists in the reduction of disparate rates of suspension for students with disabilities and students of color.

“The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education continues to work with districts to develop the supports and practices that educators need to reduce the inappropriate or excessive use of emergency removal and other types of suspension,” a DESE spokesperson said in a statement provided to CommonWealth Beacon.

In 2025, there were 3,915 reported emergency removals in Massachusetts schools. Much like suspensions, 42 percent of those removals were for offenses labeled as non-drug, non-violent, and non-criminal — something advocates say is inherently contradictory.

Some say the problem lies in the language of the law, which allows an emergency removal when a student’s continued presence poses a danger to other people or property, “or materially and substantially disrupts the order of the school.” A principal may immediately remove a student if “there is no alternative available to alleviate the danger or disruption,” according to statute.

Advocates have questioned what constitutes a “disruption,” and whether there are circumstances in which a disruption warrants an emergency removal rather than a formal suspension process or another type of discipline. Since 2022, districts have increasingly cited the non-drug, non-violent, non-criminal offense category for emergency removals, rising from 37 percent of all emergency removals in 2022 to 42 percent in 2025. Because the behavior in this category is undefined, it is difficult to determine what students are doing to be removed from school on this basis.

“The pandemic and the tremendous toll it took on student mental health resulted in more disruption and dysregulation in schools, and as a result, we are seeing a swing back toward removing students from school,” Cregor said. “But I think there’s some reasonable fear that districts are calling things emergency removals that are not emergencies.”

Since the pandemic, teachers and administrators in Massachusetts and beyond have spoken out about an uptick in violent, explosive behavior in the classroom. Gerald Koocher, former president of the American Psychological Association, said this behavior can be linked to feelings of loneliness and disconnectedness that arose during the pandemic, which did not go away when students returned to school.

“It put them in social isolation, it put them under stress, and it weakened their connection with school,” Dr. Koocher said of the pandemic. “There has been a broader pattern of youth violence, which includes firearms, especially among teenagers, and particularly in urban areas.”

But the state’s disciplinary data shows that some of the most common violent offenses occurring in schools, including physical attack (battery), threat of physical attack, and physical fights, have either returned to their pre-covid levels or slightly decreased. But, when it comes to emergency removals, these categories have been increasingly cited as the offense type.

For instance, the number of reported emergency removals administered for offenses labeled “physical attack” increased from 387 instances in 2018 to 1,133 instances in 2025. Yet, the total number of reported physical attacks in schools across the state decreased slightly from 8,136 in 2018 to 7,991 in 2025.

Chelsea Public Schools superintendent Almi Abeyta said six years after the pandemic hit, educators and administrators are still grappling with students’ social and emotional issues.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want children to be out of school,” she said. “But we’re seeing more dysregulation with our younger children — pre-K through grade 5 — than what we’ve noticed in the past. We have little kids that will just destroy an entire classroom.”

In 2024, legislation that would have prohibited the use of suspensions and expulsions on pre-K through Grade 3 students advanced out of the education committee. While the move was celebrated by child and student advocates, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents opposed the bill, arguing that school administrators require flexibility when making disciplinary decisions. The bill ultimately died in the House, though there is a current version that is again awaiting legislative action after passing out of the Joint Committee on Education.

Abeyta said school staff do everything they can to intervene before suspending or removing a child. She said educators recognize the critical role that counselors, clinicians, and other behavioral support staff play. Yet budget cuts last year forced the district to reduce staff by more than 50 full-time employees.

“I left it up to the principals to decide, and none of them cut social workers or counselors,” Abeyta said.

Abeyta said emergency removals are mostly reserved for safety issues, though in 2025, nearly 44 percent of Chelsea’s emergency removals were for non-drug, non-violent, non-criminal offenses. In 2025, the district had the third highest emergency removal rate of the 26 Gateway City school districts, after Fitchburg and Holyoke. The number of removals in Chelsea grew from 20 in 2022 to 151 in 2025.

Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) president Matt Bach said the trend in emergency removals is a symptom of “deeper issues” regarding districts’ ability to provide the best services to students, adding that schools are facing both a funding and staffing crisis.

“Is [the trend] paralleling the reduction in education professionals across the board? Is it paralleling a reduction in public education investment? Is it paralleling substandard curriculum products, which are choking school budgets and intensifying student disengagement?” Bach said. “The ratio between professionals and students in these districts is what’s going to matter most for student outcomes and behaviors.”

He said the MTA has encouraged restorative practices like increased recess time and reduced screen time, which have been shown to benefit dysregulated students. The association has also pushed for Gov. Maura Healey’s recent proposal to direct an additional $100 million to public school districts across the state. The funding would help communities manage growing financial challenges ahead of the new school year. The proposal, which must be approved by the Legislature, would add to the more than $7 billion already appropriated for K-12 education in the fiscal 2027 state budget.

The hope, Bach said, is that some of that funding could be used by districts to rehire staff that might have been laid off in the spring due to budget shortfalls around the state. Educators like Griffith say that without an adequate number of behavioral support staff, districts won’t be able to reduce their exclusionary discipline rates.

“When there is one social worker for 75 to 100 students with complex emotional needs, you’re not able to be proactive in supporting them,” she said. “Educators want to be proactive to try to prevent a crisis that could result in emergency removal. That’s the way we’re trained, but it’s often not what we’re able to do.”