As the Obama administration comes to a close, King and other top officials are calling on schools and nonprofits to make sure kids like him don’t fall through the proverbial cracks—getting suspended or even expelled when tough circumstances prompt them to act out—moving forward. It’s unclear how much of a priority the Trump administration will place on school-discipline reform, or the lens through which those officials will view the topic. (Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment.) For the Obama administration, that lens has been clear: School discipline is about making sure all kids have access to the same resources and opportunities. “At the core, in the department, we are a civil-rights agency with a responsibility to protect students’ civil rights,” King told me during our phone conversation when I asked him about his views on discipline.

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The previous week, King had met with educators and civil-rights advocates at the White House to thank them for their work over the last few years to change the way schools discipline kids, focusing less on reactionary punishment and more on addressing the root problems that cause kids to act out. Seated at the center of a large conference table in the Roosevelt Room just steps from the Oval Office, the secretary and other administration officials urged those in attendance to think about how to sustain that work in the coming years.

The meeting built off of several years of efforts at the federal level. In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder and then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan released national school-discipline guidelines for the first time in the country’s history, and urged districts to get on board in an effort to reduce racial disparities. The next year, the White House held a conference on school discipline, and this year, the Education and Justice departments published guidelines for districts that have police officers in schools.

In recent years, large school districts from Los Angeles to Baltimore have moved away from using suspensions and expulsions to address misbehavior, favoring ideas like restorative justice or what are known as Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), instead. Broadly, these approaches focus on the emotions and feelings that prompt misbehavior instead of on the behavior itself. Miami, for instance, began focusing on helping kids better manage their emotions and response to social situations, and developed a program to help kids who have been removed from school for a period of time transition back into their schools. The Bridgeport, Connecticut, school district—where 98 percent of students are low-income and almost all are black or Latino—partnered with Yale to put something called the RULER (Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions) approach, aimed at developing a healthy emotional climate, into practice. Denver collaborated with the University of Denver to highlight and scale discipline approaches that were working. While varied, these newer approaches tend to focus on helping children understand and process the feelings behind their misbehavior and mediate disputes with others, instead of sending children home without addressing the underlying issue.