OSPI publishes a discipline rate for every public school: the share of enrolled students who received at least one short-term suspension, long-term suspension, expulsion, or emergency expulsion during the year. The statewide enrollment-weighted rate in 2023-24 was 4.5% — about one student in 22 — but that number averages over a wide variance both between schools and between student groups.
The statewide picture by race
| Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander | 13.9% | |
| American Indian / Alaska Native | 11.6% | |
| Black | 11.3% | |
| Two or More Races | 8.5% | |
| Hispanic / Latino | 6.3% | |
| All students | 4.5% | |
| White | 4.2% | |
| Asian | 2.8% |
Computed directly from OSPI's school-level discipline file (data.wa.gov dataset sm68-769y), rolled up across all schools' published Black/White/etc. denominators and numerators. Suppressed cells (denominator <10) are excluded.
On the same OSPI source we use for school-level rates, Black students are disciplined at 2.7 times the rate of White students; Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students at 3.3 times; AI/AN at 2.7 times; Hispanic at about 1.5 times. Asian students are disciplined at about two-thirds the White rate.
But the within-school gap is what reporters want
The state-aggregate gap can be largely explained by which schools each group disproportionately attends — Black and Hispanic students are concentrated in higher-poverty schools, which have higher overall discipline rates regardless of race. The sharper question is whether students at the same school get disciplined at different rates by race. OSPI's school-level discipline file publishes per-race rates per building, with cells suppressed where a subgroup is fewer than 10 students. We pulled all schools where both the Black and the White discipline rate are non-suppressed and the denominator for each is at least 20 — a sample of 217 schools statewide.
Eight percent of the 217 schools have Black students disciplined at a lower rate than White students — a real but small minority. At the other end, more than a quarter of the 217 schools show a Black-White gap of 10 percentage points or more, and a substantial chunk of those are middle schools.
| Green Hill Academic (Chehalis SD)* | +37.7 pp | |
| Oakland HS (Tacoma SD) | +31.2 pp | |
| Shaw Middle School (Spokane SD) | +29.3 pp | |
| Hilltop Heritage Middle (Tacoma SD) | +24.8 pp | |
| Kilo Middle School (Federal Way SD) | +22.1 pp | |
| Truman Middle School (Tacoma SD) | +21.7 pp | |
| Hudtloff Middle (Clover Park SD) | +20.7 pp | |
| Edmonds S. Meany Middle (Seattle SD) | +20.7 pp | |
| Gray Middle School (Tacoma SD) | +20.4 pp | |
| Cascade Middle (Evergreen SD) | +18.1 pp |
Computed from OSPI's school-level discipline file (sm68-769y). *Green Hill is a juvenile rehabilitation facility school, where the population is itself selected for prior discipline history; we include it for transparency but the comparison isn't a fair read on a typical school. Three of the top ten are Tacoma SD middle schools, which is a real pattern worth investigating.
Tacoma School District has four middle schools in the top ten by within-school Black-White gap (Oakland HS, Hilltop Heritage, Truman, Gray). That's not statewide cherry-picking — those four schools together produced about 18% of the schools-in-the-top-25, despite Tacoma SD being about 2% of Washington schools by count. Federal Way SD, Clover Park SD, and Spokane SD each show up too. The geography is south Sound + a single Spokane site; the level is overwhelmingly middle school.
And the poverty gradient
WA K12 Academic Atlas; quartiles defined on each school's low-income share of enrollment.
Schools in the highest-poverty quartile have median discipline rates roughly double those in the lowest-poverty quartile (4.0% vs 1.9%; Pearson r = +0.27 between low-income share and discipline rate). 129 Washington public schools discipline more than one in ten of their students; 11 schools discipline more than one in five. Many of the highest-rate schools are alternative or option placements where students were sent because of behavior history, so the rate isn't directly comparable to a comprehensive school's; we flag this rather than mix them.