As millions of young people begin a new school year, many parents and adults are no doubt worried about how well they’ll fare. From concerns about screen time to college and career readiness, there are plenty of headlines that fret over the well-being of young people.

A preponderance of research shows that suspensions and expulsions do little to change behavior and can push students out of school altogether. For instance, being suspended just one time in the ninth grade is related to an increased risk of dropping out. Suspension can increase the chance of leaving school prior to graduation from 16 percent to a 32 percent.

As a first-generation college student, I found myself doing everything on my own, without any family support and knowing very little of what was entailed in both applying and getting into college.

My main goal in life is to make my generation better and healthier. And for change to happen, we young people have to voice our opinions and make ourselves heard.

For youth to succeed in education, we need a shelter over our heads, we need food in our bodies, and we need a community. So make sure a student’s basic needs are met before you send them to detention or punish them.

For centuries, religion and science have regularly found themselves at odds in defining the essential truths of our world—a debate that, of course, continues today. So, we should take note when distinguished leaders in those two, often-conflicting domains find themselves arriving at the same conclusion about a fundamental question: how do we out more struggling young people on a path toward success?

Students began listing the names of teachers who had left in the middle of the year, all of them white. Ninety-eight percent of students were children of color, mostly Latino, and 86 percent qualified for free or reduced-priced lunch. It had not escaped them that the majority of teachers who had quit did not look like them.

Harsh discipline practices focus on assigning guilt, but restorative justice works to identify why something happened and what the student and the community needs in order to move forward. It allows young people to be viewed as the holistic individuals they are, and it builds a better foundation to start conversations around relationship-building.

It took one of my kindergarten students, Andrew, to help me figure out how to handle my toughest teaching challenge.

If you want to know what young people need to succeed, it turns out you should just ask them. They’ll tell you. And they’ll make it clear that neither miracles nor miracle workers are required to help more students graduate from high school and be prepared for the future.

I first experienced homelessness with my family, then on my own. I was born to a single mother and a father who was absent because of post-traumatic stress disorder he developed after the war. Throughout my childhood, my mother, two sisters and I moved from home to home, sometimes not having one at all.

This public charter school in Chicago encourages students to do two things to increase their odds of graduating from college: Raise their GPAs and attend colleges with 50 percent or higher graduation rates for underrepresented minorities.