HB 2504 Disciplinary Mediator standards

HB 2504 VOTE: NO
Died In Committee
Status (overview) of bill: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Measures/Overview/HB2504
Committee assigned to bill: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Committees/HED/Overview

This bill directs school districts to identify at least one school employee for every 250 students to train and act as disciplinary mediator for compensation increasing workload and budget.

Personal Choice and Responsibility
A disguised way of evaluating racial disparity and forces schools to think about race and color versus equal and fair treatment of all students. This bill also gives students who are misbehaving even more resources than those who are not misbehaving, but may be struggling due to the antics of the misbehaving.

Fiscal Responsibility
Obligates the State School Fund with expenses that doesn’t improve overall education. This will be a costly endeavor for every school.

Limited Government
Requires school districts to appropriately train and compensate mediators and to provide mediation when out-of-school suspension or expulsion is proposed or upon request for other disciplinary incidents. Directs school districts to conduct annual evaluation on use of discipline in schools of school district for purposes of determining if there was racial disparity in use of discipline, establishing goals to reduce any racial disparity and developing plan to achieve goals.

Local Control
Mandates expensive and time-consuming tasks on schools that are already trying to function with limited resources. Each school can develop their own disciplinary goals to meet standards, but standards disrupts local control of discipline of students that will effect individual classrooms and teachers. This is without consideration of budget limitations of the individual schools.