‘From Chaos to Calm’ PD

A regional Arkansas education cooperative is offering summer training for teachers who want other ways to handle student behavior besides sending kids out of class. (dmesc.org) DeQueen-Mena Education Service Cooperative serves school districts from its office in Gillham, Arkansas, and runs a year-round calendar of teacher workshops and other support programs. Its website lists summer professional development alongside mentoring, career and technical education, and early-childhood programs. (dmesc.org; files-backend.assets.thrillshare.com) The course framing tracks a broader shift in school discipline language: “exclusionary disciplinary actions” in Arkansas means out-of-school suspension and expulsion, and state discipline dashboards report those actions separately from in-school suspension. Arkansas’s statewide report currently shows 54,413 exclusionary disciplinary actions, including 53,556 out-of-school suspensions and 857 expulsions. (myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov; findlaw.com) The same Arkansas dashboard shows discipline rates are not even across student groups. Foster students had 19 exclusionary disciplinary actions per 100 students, compared with 7 per 100 for all students statewide, and students in special education were at 10 per 100. (myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov) Federal education guidance has pushed schools toward “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” discipline systems and away from harsh exclusion when other supports can work. The U.S. Department of Education’s school-climate resources highlight evidence-based programs meant to keep students in school and learning. (ed.gov; ed.gov) That has created a market for practical teacher training, not just policy memos. A January 2025 handout from the Institute of Education Sciences’ Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest lists restorative practices, trauma-informed approaches, social-emotional learning, and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports as alternatives to exclusionary discipline. (ies.ed.gov) Arkansas has already been part of that policy movement in early childhood. A 2024 study on the state’s expulsion-prevention effort said Arkansas adopted a “multipronged approach” to help teachers address challenging behavior and reduce exclusionary discipline in early care and education settings. (sciencedirect.com; colab.ws) The immediate pitch to teachers is simpler than the policy debate: learn classroom strategies that can de-escalate behavior before it turns into removal from class. For a cooperative built around staff development, that puts behavior support in the same summer-training pipeline as math, science, and career education. (dmesc.org; files-backend.assets.thrillshare.com)