As a school leader, your primary role above all others is to improve instruction and ensure that all students are making academic progress. Your daily tasks may include ensuring facilities are adequate, the curriculum is attainable, compliance boxes are checked, and teachers are equipped to deliver engaging lessons focused on social, emotional, and academic growth.
At the same time, educators are facing significant fiscal challenges—especially when supporting our most complex students. We are living in a time where federal budget cuts directly impact populations with the greatest needs, leaving schools with limited resources and fewer safety nets. The question many administrators are quietly asking is: What does this mean for our teachers and support staff who are struggling every day to maintain safe, functional classrooms?
The Tension No One Talks About
Working with students who exhibit extreme or persistent behavioral challenges is especially difficult when there is no clear system for evaluating student progress or responding to behavior consistently. Students with IEPs and 504 plans are rightfully protected from excessive restrictive practices. The law requires that schools examine the function of a student’s behavior before removing them from the educational setting. These checks and balances exist to protect students’ rights and ensure access to education.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: while we are legally and ethically obligated to protect students, many educators feel unprotected themselves.
Teachers and paraprofessionals are being asked to manage increasingly complex behaviors with fewer supports, larger class sizes, and less training. When safety concerns arise, administrators often feel trapped between compliance, compassion, and crisis management. Suspensions can feel like the only lever left to pull.
Mary Mangione, MA
Why Suspension Feels Powerful—But Isn’t
Suspension is often viewed as a decisive action. It removes the immediate problem, temporarily restores order, and sends a message that behavior has consequences. But in reality, suspension only buys time—and often at a high cost to the student and family.
When a student is suspended, instruction stops. Relationships fracture. The underlying cause of the behavior goes unaddressed. And when the student returns, they often come back dysregulated, behind academically, and more disconnected than before. The classroom may get a brief sense of relief, but the system itself hasn’t changed. You are back to square one.
Research and lived experience both tell us that repeated removal increases disengagement, worsens outcomes, and disproportionately impacts students with additional needs, students of color, and students already struggling to regulate their behavior. Suspension can actually reinforce the very behaviors we’re trying to eliminate by removing structure, predictability, and connection. Suspensions don’t teach replacement behaviors for our students with extreme behaviors. It allows schools to re-evaluate plans to ensure they return to school with a new plan.
Mary Mangione, MA
Cultivating Proactive Systems
Taking Back Control Without Defaulting to Separation
Using MTSS As A Guide, Not A Loophole
Rely on individualized plans and examine the function of behavior. Every behavior communicates a need—escape, attention, control, sensory regulation, or connection. If we don’t identify that need, we are guessing, and guessing leads to inconsistent responses that frustrate everyone involved.
A deep dive into student behavior requires data, not just anecdotes. Look at patterns across settings, times of day, staff interactions, and academic demands. Ask hard questions about whether the environment is asking students to do things they are not yet equipped to do.
Partnering With Families Early and Honesty
Families are not the enemy, even when conversations are difficult. Partnering with parents and guardians early builds trust and reduces the likelihood of conflict later. Transparency about concerns, data, and interventions helps families understand that the goal is not punishment—it’s growth.
When families feel respected and informed, they are more likely to collaborate on solutions, reinforce strategies at home, and work with the school instead of against it.
Making The Hard Call: When The Data Demands A Different Setting
Sometimes, the data will point to a difficult but necessary conclusion: a student may require a more restrictive environment to succeed. This decision is often misunderstood as a failure—of the student, the staff, or the system—but that framing is both inaccurate and harmful.
A more restrictive environment does not have to be permanent. In many cases, it is a temporary, strategic placement designed to teach skills that the student has not yet developed. When students are placed in settings with higher structure, smaller ratios, and targeted interventions, they are given the opportunity to learn regulation, communication, coping, and academic skills without the constant pressure of environments they are not yet ready to manage.
This is not giving up on students—it is meeting them where they are.
Placing a student in the right environment allows schools to provide the level of support necessary for growth while protecting the learning environment for others. When done thoughtfully, restrictive placements can increase a student’s confidence, reduce repeated failure, and help them experience success for the first time. Students who feel successful are far more likely to re-engage, build self-efficacy, and eventually transition back to less restrictive settings with stronger skills and greater independence.
Avoiding these decisions out of fear—fear of pushback, fear of optics, fear of being misunderstood—can unintentionally prolong the struggle for everyone involved: the student, their peers, and the adults supporting them.
Mary Mangione, MA
Leadership Means Making Hard Calls
School leadership is not about making popular decisions. It is about making the necessary ones.
There will be times when you implement systems, placements, or interventions that not everyone agrees with. That discomfort is often a sign that you are addressing real issues rather than avoiding them. Your responsibility is to create an effective, sustainable system where learning is the priority and safety—emotional and physical—is non-negotiable.
Suspensions alone cannot accomplish that. Neither can avoidance nor overextension of staff in the name of compliance.
Strong leaders build systems that are proactive, responsive, and honest about limits. They ensure that students receive what they need now, not what we hope will eventually work. When learning is protected, staff are supported, and students are placed in environments where they can truly succeed, schools move from crisis management to purposeful growth.
written by
Mary Mangione
Mary Mangione is a coach for school building leaders specializing in creating specialized programming, restorative practices, adversity-informed schools, school-based mental wellness interventions, and multi-tiered systems of support. She has been a private tutor for students with special needs, special education teacher for ED/BD/ASC, mentor for a social services organization, substance abuse case manager, and assistant principal and principal of specialized and public alternative schools. Outside of her professional work, she enjoys traveling, eating great food, providing taxi services for her two sons, binging Netflix, and is an active yogi. Mary is an Administrative Coach for Building Leaders with her Bachelors in Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Graphic Design and Painting, Master of Arts in Special Education, and Master of Arts in Principal Leadership.
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