Should Schools Replace Exclusionary Punishments With Therapy? Gender, Race, and Class Inequalities and School-Based Mental Health Services

Since 2000, researchers have found that school punishments in the U.S. have disproportionately disadvantaged poor and working-class girls and boys of color. To mitigate the gender, race, and class disparities within exclusionary discipline, some scholars have recommended turning to inclusionary strategies, such as school-based mental health (SBMH) services, to solve problems among students. From 2007 to 2019, I observed a SBMH program at a public high school in Hawai‘i, conducting interviews with 56 students and seven SBMH counselors. Findings reveal that the SBMH program was complex, simultaneously reinforcing and allowing students to resist controlling discourses deployed against them.