Inside USD 259: Restraints Are Down. The Harder Question Is Whether Discipline Is Fair.
Most parents will never read a federal civil-rights settlement agreement. They should not have to become attorneys just to understand what can happen when their child is sent out of class, restrained, suspended, referred to police—or simply labeled “disruptive.”
But those details matter. And after sitting down with Wichita Public Schools leaders on September 3, 2026, one thing became clear: USD 259 has made real changes since its 2024 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The harder question is whether those changes are producing fairer outcomes for the students who were most affected.
Progress and accountability are not opposites. A community should be able to recognize what is improving and still ask for proof that the system is becoming fairer.
Why we were in the room
The meeting was requested by longtime justice advocate Mary Dean after hearing from parents who believed their children had been disciplined unfairly. Bishop Wade Moore joined the conversation, and RRCBA participated in support of the broader community concern.
Across the table were Deputy Superintendent Gil Alvarez; Melissa Zimmerman, Senior Executive Director of the Office of Behavior Management, Support and Oversight; and Corinthian Kelly, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Community Impact.
The conversation moved well beyond a single complaint. We discussed the Department of Justice settlement, restraint and seclusion, fighting in middle and high schools, foster youth, mentoring, Black girls, community partnerships, and something that sounds simple but matters a great deal: whether families actually know where to go when something goes wrong.
Three numbers that stopped the room
More than 1,500 → 646 → 623
District staff said USD 259 recorded more than 1,500 restraints before the settlement, 646 in the first year under the agreement, and 623 in the second year. That is a substantial decline.
There is an important caveat. The district explained that the older data primarily tracked restraints and seclusions involving special-education students, while the newer system tracks both general-education and special-education students. In other words, this is not a perfectly clean apples-to-apples trend line. The direction is encouraging, but the underlying data deserves careful interpretation.
The presentation we saw also initially showed zero seclusions for 2025–26. Zimmerman corrected that in the room: there was one seclusion late in the school year at a day school. That distinction matters because transparency is strongest when the record is corrected in real time—not after the fact.
First, give the progress its due
Seclusion rooms—the small rooms with heavy doors that were once used to isolate students—are no longer permitted. USD 259 says it has built Crisis Prevention Teams in every school, expanded de-escalation training, required principals and security personnel to participate, and changed how staff are trained to respond before going hands-on with a child.
The district’s current public guidance says seclusion is prohibited and physical restraint may be used only when a student poses an immediate danger of substantial physical harm and less restrictive interventions or de-escalation techniques have not worked.
That is meaningful change. A system that once relied far more heavily on physical intervention is being pushed toward prevention, de-escalation and documentation.
Now the part we cannot sanitize
The 2024 DOJ settlement did not happen because of a vague concern about school climate. It followed a federal civil-rights investigation into race and disability discrimination in Wichita Public Schools.
The Justice Department found that Black students were disciplined more frequently and more severely than white students who engaged in similar conduct and had similar disciplinary histories. At one Wichita high school, Black students were five times as likely to receive a disciplinary referral and five times as likely to be suspended after a referral. At that same school, Black students received referrals for subjective offenses at nearly nine times the rate of white students.
Those words—subjective offenses—deserve attention. “Insubordination.” “Disruptive.” “Disrespectful.” Unlike bringing a weapon to school, those labels often depend on an adult’s interpretation of tone, body language, context and intent. That is exactly where inconsistency and bias can enter a system even when nobody writes discriminatory language into a policy.
Black girls were not a side note in the federal findings
The DOJ found especially pronounced disparities involving Black girls. At one middle school, Black girls were referred for insubordination at more than 4.5 times the rate of white girls. The federal review also found that, in incident reports involving insubordination, Black girls were 3.5 times as likely as white girls to be described with stereotypical terms such as “attitude” or “drama.”
That history makes something we heard in today’s meeting particularly important. District staff said African American girls remain a major part of the fighting and discipline challenge at some middle schools, and the district is actively looking for more African American female mentors to work with them.
That deserves more than a mentoring recruitment campaign. It deserves school-level data: what behaviors are being referred, who is making the referrals, what interventions happen first, what consequences follow, and whether comparable behavior produces comparable outcomes across race and gender.
Know the Code: what Level 1 actually means
One of the most useful pieces of information we received was USD 259’s three-level Student Code of Conduct framework.
LEVEL 1 — Low-impact behaviors that do not threaten safety or substantially disrupt school operations and can usually be addressed quickly through intervention, reteaching, de-escalation, conflict resolution, family communication or restorative practices.
LEVEL 2 — Significant disruptions that substantially interfere with classroom or school activity and cannot be remedied quickly and safely through the initial interventions.
LEVEL 3 — Serious safety concerns that pose a threat to safety and cannot be remedied quickly and safely through de-escalation or other district interventions.
Here is the part every parent should know: the federal settlement specifically requires dress-code violations, disrespect, disruptive behavior, insubordination, failure to display school identification, and skipping class or school to be treated as Level 1 offenses.
The agreement also prohibits exclusionary discipline for Level 1 offenses and allows school removal only for Level 3 offenses. It further says district Safety Services Officers are not to be used to respond to Level 1 conduct. School Resource Officer involvement is supposed to be reserved for significant safety risks, substantial threats of physical harm, or offenses for which police would ordinarily be called even if no SRO were present.
That matters because several of the very behaviors that produced some of the largest racial disparities in the DOJ investigation are now explicitly placed in the lowest disciplinary tier.
The real equity test is not the rulebook. It is the classification.
A written policy can look fair and still produce unequal outcomes if similar behavior is labeled differently from classroom to classroom or school to school.
The question is not only, “How many Black students were disciplined?” A stronger question is: For comparable behavior, are Black students more likely to be classified at Level 2 or Level 3, suspended, restrained, referred to a disciplinary hearing or referred to law enforcement?
The federal agreement already anticipates this problem. It requires schools to review their discipline data at least once per semester for disparities and outliers—including by race, disability, sex, offense, person making the referral and administrator assigning the consequence.
So the next transparency question is straightforward: can families and community partners see the aggregate results of those required discipline reviews?
Fighting, social media and the restraint question
District leaders told us that a large share of current restraints at the middle- and high-school level occur while adults are breaking up fights. They described social media as a major precursor: conflicts are discussed, promoted and sometimes effectively scheduled online before students ever enter the building.
That prompted another question in the room: if restraints are falling, are fights also falling—or are adults simply responding differently to the same level of fighting? The district could not answer that from the historical data available.
That is not a minor technical question. If fights are down, that points toward prevention working. If fights are flat but restraints are down, that may point toward better de-escalation and intervention. Both can be positive, but they tell us very different things about what is changing.
What about the students who were harmed before the reforms?
Under the settlement, students affected by previous seclusion practices were offered compensatory services such as tutoring or counseling to make up for instructional time and other impacts. In today’s meeting, district staff estimated that only about one-quarter of eligible students participated.
The reasons discussed included mobility, foster-care placement changes and difficulty locating or keeping students connected long enough to receive services. That explanation points toward another vulnerable group that deserves closer attention.
Foster youth: when instability follows a child into the classroom
District staff described foster youth moving between placements and schools, sometimes arriving without complete records or even the IEP information needed to implement existing supports. They also acknowledged the challenge of students entering the district after the state enrollment-count date, when the district may have responsibility to educate them without receiving the same funding tied to that year’s count.
Behind the administrative language is a child who may have changed homes, schools, adults, routines and expectations repeatedly—and then is expected to walk into a classroom and regulate perfectly.
That does not erase accountability for behavior. It does mean the intervention cannot be designed as if every student arrives at school carrying the same stability, information and support system.
If something goes wrong, do not get lost in the maze
USD 259 also gave us a “Lines of Communication” guide. For behavior and discipline concerns, the escalation path is designed to move in six steps:
1. Teacher 2. School Administration 3. Parent & Community Support 4. Office of School Leadership 5. Office of Superintendent 6. Board of Education
For parents, the practical lesson is simple: document the date, the incident, who you spoke with, what level of the Code of Conduct was assigned, what intervention was attempted, what consequence was imposed, and what explanation you received. If the issue is not resolved, move to the next level instead of starting the story over from scratch every time.
RRCBA’s goal should be to make this pathway even easier to use—so a parent does not need to know the district’s organizational chart to advocate effectively for their child.
A door opened today: the African American Advisory Committee
One of the most important moments in the meeting had nothing to do with a statistic. District leaders acknowledged that communication around the African American Advisory Committee had not reached enough of the broader community.
The committee is expected to restart in October. District representatives said they intend to distribute meeting dates farther in advance, welcome additional community members, and explore Microsoft Teams or another remote-access option so participation is not limited to people who can physically attend an evening meeting.
They also described the committee’s prior work as increasingly data-driven—drilling from district-wide numbers down toward individual schools and asking which community organizations might help where behavior incidents are concentrated.
An open meeting is only truly open if people know it exists, can access it and can understand the information being presented.
There is another opportunity hiding in plain sight
Corinthian Kelly described the district’s Engaging Congregations strategy: participating faith communities receive aggregate indicators around student attendance, behavior and GPA so adults outside the school building can reinforce student success.
He also said the concept should not stop with churches. Sports teams, nonprofits and other organizations where young people already gather can play the same role.
That is an important idea for RRCBA and the broader community. Schools cannot—and should not—be expected to solve every behavioral, social and family challenge alone. But community organizations should not be asked to simply absorb responsibilities either. The stronger model is a defined partnership: clear roles, appropriate data, measurable objectives and resources proportional to the work.
What we still want to know
We left the meeting encouraged by the openness of the conversation. We also left with questions that deserve answers:
• For comparable behavior, are Black students still more likely to reach Level 2 or Level 3? • Which schools have the largest discipline disparities—and which schools are producing the strongest improvements? • Are fights declining alongside restraints, or are intervention practices changing? • What happened to students who were eligible for compensatory services but never received them? • Can the public see aggregate results from the discipline reviews already required by the DOJ agreement? • Will remote access to the African American Advisory Committee become a permanent part of the process?
The standard should be simple
Two children who engage in the same behavior should receive the same opportunity to learn from it, recover from it and remain connected to their education—regardless of race, gender, disability or ZIP code.
That does not mean every student receives the exact same consequence in every situation. Context matters. Safety matters. Disability-related needs matter. Repeated behavior matters. What equity requires is that those differences be based on legitimate, documented factors—not on whose tone was perceived as threatening, whose frustration was interpreted as an “attitude,” or which school a child happened to attend.
USD 259 has made changes that deserve recognition. The district also remains under a federal agreement because serious problems were documented. Both facts can be true at the same time.
The community’s role now is not to cheer from the sidelines or attack from the parking lot. It is to understand the system, use the pathways available, demand usable data, participate where decisions are being shaped and help build the support infrastructure our children need.
Go to the source
We encourage residents to read the underlying documents for themselves. The links below go directly to Wichita Public Schools and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Choose a lane
RRCBA exists to turn information into organized community voice. If education, youth opportunity, safety, communication or institutional accountability matters to you, there is a place to plug in.
Better information. Better questions. Better accountability. No more silos.
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