A Data-Centric approach to School Discipline

School violence is a major concern for school administrators and policymakers since it has a significant impact on the academic success of students and their mental well-being. This has led to the increased collection of applicable data for better decision making. Unfortunately, this collected data may not always be utilized fully. We take a "Business Analytics" approach to analyze data collected from schools and develop a suitable dashboard. We first propose a unique performance metric that can be easily tracked and on which predictions can be made so administrators can be proactive rather than reactive. Such predictions can also be used for more long term planning such as the determination of the number of security personnel needed at a particular school. In particular, we analyze data collected from schools about student suspensions (both severity and frequency). We also compare our approach with that presently used and illustrate the benefits of our approach.