In-School and Out-of-School Suspension

What is the actual difference?

An in-school suspension removes a student from their timetable but not from the building. In most districts that means a supervised room, work sent down from teachers, and a day that looks like school with everything social stripped out of it.

An out-of-school suspension removes the student from the premises. They are not allowed on site, usually not at school events either, for the number of days stated.

Both are exclusions from ordinary instruction. That is the sentence that gets lost when people talk about in-school suspension as though it were a detention. It is a disciplinary exclusion and it is recorded as one.

Beyond that, the definitions are district definitions. What counts as in-school suspension in one district is a “reset room” or a “reflection room” in the next one, sometimes with materially different rules about work and grading. This is why a confident national answer should make you suspicious.

How common is each one?

Both are common enough that the federal government counts them separately every collection.

These figures are from the 2021-22 school year, published by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection: A First Look. That collection covered 51.4 million K-12 students, 17,704 school districts and 98,010 public schools.

Measure, 2021-22 school year	In-school suspension	Out-of-school suspension
Students receiving one or more	About 2.3 million	About 2.4 million
Share of K-12 public school enrollment	5 percent	5 percent

The two are close to each other in scale, which is worth knowing if you have been told that in-school suspension is the mild everyday thing and out-of-school suspension is the serious rare one. In the national numbers they are about the same size.

Who receives them is not evenly distributed

The same collection reports group shares against enrollment shares, and the gaps are large enough that a parent should see them rather than have them summarised away. All figures are 2021-22, quoted from the same report.

• Black boys were 8 percent of K-12 enrollment and 18 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions, 22 percent of those who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 21 percent of those expelled.
• Black girls were 7 percent of enrollment and 11 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions, 13 percent of those who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 13 percent of those expelled.
• White boys were 23 percent of enrollment and 27 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions.
• Students with disabilities were 17 percent of enrollment and 27 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions, 29 percent of those who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 24 percent of those expelled.

One caution on that last line, because the report uses two different populations in adjacent passages. The 17 percent is all students with disabilities. Where the report discusses referrals to law enforcement it uses students served under IDEA specifically, who were 14 percent of enrollment. Those are different denominators and they should not be mixed.

What changes in practice for your household?

Six things, and they are worth asking about individually rather than assuming.

• Schoolwork. Is work provided, is it collected, and is it graded, or is the day marked as missed work? The answer differs by district and sometimes by teacher.
• Assessments. What happens to a test or a deadline that falls on an excluded day.
• Attendance. How the day is recorded in the attendance system. Ask rather than assume; districts do this differently and it can matter for other things.
• Supervision. With an out-of-school suspension, someone has to be responsible for a teenager during working hours. That is a household logistics problem and it is a real one.
• Re-entry. Whether there is a return meeting, who attends it, and whether anything is expected of your child at it.
• The day count. How many days this adds to any running total the school keeps, and what totals trigger anything.

That last one is the least obvious and the most useful. Ask what the accumulated day count is, not just how many days this incident carries. Codes of conduct and federal special education rules both turn on totals.

What can I actually ask for?

Ask in writing, and ask for a written reply. A short email with numbered questions gets a better answer than a phone call, because the person answering has to look things up.

Reasonable requests that schools answer routinely:

• The specific provision of the code of conduct that was cited, by number.
• Whether this is recorded as in-school or out-of-school suspension.
• What work will be provided, and how it will be graded.
• How the day or days are recorded for attendance.
• The running total of excluded days this school year.
• The appeal route and its deadline.
• If your child has an IEP or a Section 504 plan, whether these days are being counted as removals for the purposes of the federal special education rules.

None of that is adversarial. All of it is information the school already holds.

What did this look like for one family?

Piet is fourteen and was given two days of in-school suspension after shoving another student in a stairwell. His mother’s honest first reaction was relief, because in-school sounded like a detention with a longer name.

What she asked, and it took one email, was whether work would be sent down and graded, what happened to the biology test on the second day, and what the year’s running total of excluded days now stood at. The first two answers were straightforward. The third one was the useful one: this was not the first incident, and the total was higher than she had realised.

That number changed what she did next, which was to ask for a meeting rather than to let the matter close. Nothing about the two days changed. What changed was that she was no longer looking at a single incident in isolation.

This example is illustrative rather than a real family. The running total is the part most people never think to ask for.

What this page cannot tell you

Which of the two your district will use, how it defines them, what it records, or what any of it triggers locally. Those are district and state matters and this site does not restate state law or give legal advice.

If a fight was involved and the incident is fresh, the first two days have their own order of operations, set out in suspended for fighting. If you want every question on this page in a form you can print and take into a meeting, use questions to ask the school.