When You Can't Suspend, You Have to Support: What Changes After the Willful Defiance Ban

For a long time the answer to a student who would not stop was the office. Not a good answer, and everyone knew it, but a real one: a referral, a suspension for "willful defiance," a day or three of quiet. That option has been closing for a decade, and in California it closed for every grade in July 2024.

This post is for the teachers and teams on the other side of that change. It covers what the law did, what the national discipline data shows, what the evidence-based replacement can and cannot promise, and what documented, proactive support looks like on an ordinary Wednesday when the office is not the plan.

What SB 274 changed

California's Senate Bill 274, the "Keep Kids in School" act, was signed on October 8, 2023 and took effect July 1, 2024. It prohibits suspending students in any grade, kindergarten through twelfth, from school for willful defiance or disruption. It builds on a 2013 law that ended those suspensions in grades K through 3 and on SB 419 (2019), which extended the ban through grade 8. The high school provision sunsets in 2029 unless renewed.

Two details matter for classrooms. Teachers can still suspend a student from their own class for defiance; the law removes suspension from school. And the law authorizes staff to refer a student to administrators for in-school intervention or support, and requires that referral to be documented and placed in the student's record within five business days.

Willful defiance was a large category. The UCLA Civil Rights Project has estimated it accounted for roughly a third of California's out-of-school suspensions, with the exact share varying by grade band and student group, and the legislative record for SB 274 cited disproportionate rates for Black students.

The national picture

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, in its 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection covering nearly every public school in the country, found Black students were nearly four times as likely to be suspended as white students, and students with disabilities were more than twice as likely to be suspended as students without them. Students with disabilities were about 12 percent of enrollment and roughly a quarter of students suspended. A 2018 Government Accountability Office review of later data found the same pattern.

Those disparities are why the laws changed. They are also why the replacement has to be something other than a quieter version of the same thing.

What PBIS can promise, and what it cannot

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports is the framework most states point to as the replacement, and it is in more than 25,000 schools. The evidence for it is real and has limits, and a team that overstates it will lose the room.

What the evidence supports: schools that implement PBIS with fidelity show fewer office discipline referrals and fewer suspensions, and higher-fidelity schools tend to show better academic outcomes as well (a nine-year evaluation in Educational Research and Evaluation, 2016, is one example). The fidelity condition is doing the work in those findings.

What it does not yet support: a meta-analysis using What Works Clearinghouse procedures found no significant overall effect on office referrals across the few rigorous group-design randomized trials. Restorative practices, often paired with PBIS, have mixed trial evidence; Augustine and colleagues' cluster randomized trial found no reduction in suspensions after the first year.

The accurate summary for a staff meeting: widely adopted, strongly supported by fidelity-linked studies, still building its randomized-trial base. Our complete guide to PBIS behavior charts covers the Tier 1 and Tier 2 mechanics.

What proactive support looks like on a Wednesday

The law removes an option; it does not hand teachers a replacement. Here is what the replacement is, built from the parts of the research that hold up.

1. A daily check-in with a consistent adult. The largest syntheses on teacher-student relationships find the link to engagement is strongest in the higher grades, and the structured version, Check-In/Check-Out, has meta-analytic effects from medium to large. We covered both in why checking in matters more in high school.
2. One to three observable goals on a daily chart. Not a point economy, not a public display. Goals a substitute could rate. The daily check-in chart starter covers picking them; for older students, the self-monitoring version fits better.
3. A dated note about the pattern, not the label. "Left the room twice during independent writing, both times after a task was assigned" is useful. "Defiant" is not. Notes about what happened before and after the behavior are the start of understanding its function, which is what a support plan is built on. ABC data teachers keep up with shows the format.
4. A family update that is not a verdict. The conversation changes when a family sees a week of goal ratings instead of a call about a bad day. Writing the family update about a hard day works through the wording.
5. A record that travels to the team. The referral clause in SB 274 is a documentation clause: a student referred for support gets a written record within five days. Whether your state has the clause or not, an MTSS or student-study team makes better decisions from six weeks of dated notes than from a description of last Tuesday. The MTSS tier documentation checklist lists what the team will ask for.

Notice that none of these is new. What is new is that they are no longer optional. With exclusion off the table, dated, proactive support is the constructive lever left, and it is the one that was always more effective.

Keeping it from becoming a discipline file

There is a way to do all of this that reproduces the harm the laws were meant to end: a digital record that reads like a rap sheet, visible to every adult in the building, following the student from grade to grade. A support record is different from a discipline file in three ways.

• It records goals and patterns, not offenses. The unit is "started work within two minutes: met" and "left the room after a task was assigned," not "defiance: 3."
• Visibility is limited. The classroom teacher, the case manager, and the support team see what they need for their roles; the family sees the goal chart in plain language. What teachers should see versus the support team covers where to draw the lines.
• It exists to change the plan. The point of the record is to answer "is this working, and what do we change," on a schedule, with the student's growth visible when it happens.

That is the record Evident is built to keep: goals rather than points, no leaderboard, every mark a dated data point, and behavior notes that stay with the support team. Our behavior documentation page describes how it works without stigmatizing the student it is about.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can California teachers still suspend a student for willful defiance?

Teachers can still suspend a student from their own class. As of July 1, 2024, SB 274 prohibits suspending students in any grade from school for willful defiance or disruption. Staff can refer the student to administrators for in-school intervention, and that referral must be documented in the student's record within five business days.

What percentage of suspensions were for willful defiance?

Estimates vary by grade band and student group. The UCLA Civil Rights Project has put willful defiance at roughly a third of California's out-of-school suspensions. Use a sourced range rather than a single figure.

Is PBIS proven to reduce suspensions?

Schools implementing PBIS with fidelity show fewer office referrals and suspensions in many studies, but a meta-analysis using What Works Clearinghouse procedures found no significant overall effect across the small number of rigorous randomized trials. Describe PBIS as widely adopted and fidelity-linked rather than as proven by randomized trials.

What should a teacher document instead of a referral?

The observable behavior, when it happened, what came before and after, the goal the student is working on, and how the day rated against it. Dated, factual notes about patterns give a support team something to act on and keep the record from becoming a label.

Does the ban apply outside California?

SB 274 is California law. Many other states and districts have narrowed the grounds for suspension in the early grades over the past decade, and several limit suspension for minor or subjective infractions. Check your state's education code and district policy.