Finding ways to better help young people succeed in life is a constant pursuit for communities, practitioners, and policymakers, and one that requires us all to take what we at the Center for Promise call a youth systems approach.

[Some] students report they are still being removed from their classes, even if those removals are no longer being called suspensions. By simply eliminating suspension without providing anything in its place, students aren’t given access to any additional support or resources, and teachers lose autonomy and control over their own classrooms.

Why does being suspended or expelled increase the odds that a student will drop out of school? A few months ago, my research team and I at the Center for Promise published a report about the impact exclusionary discipline policies have on students, which helped us answer this question.

Over the past few months, there have been a series of articles, books, and materials by thought-leaders both in and outside of the youth development sector that help underscore the centrality of relationships in a young person’s life.

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.