When Josh Marte brought a gun to his charter high school in Harlem halfway through the 10th grade, he wasn’t thinking of the consequences. Originally, he said, he planned to show it off to a few friends. But when he heard that some other students were planning to fight him, he decided to show them the gun in his backpack as a way to scare them off.
He still remembers the look on the school security guard’s face when he discovered the gun.
“That look on his face of disappointment was like, ‘wow, we’re about to lose a young man for something stupid,’” Marte recalled.
After the incident, which occurred in 2008, Marte was arrested and expelled from the school. His charges were dismissed in exchange for community service and a year of good behavior. He spent the rest of the year at an alternative school, before dropping out entirely after the summer break. With his days unstructured, he got more involved in illegal activity in his neighborhood, and began selling drugs. By the age of 22, he was arrested again.
“Not being in school … you become a target for people who are doing illegal, criminal activities. [They] say, ‘since you’re not doing anything, or [since] you’re available, here, sell this,’” he explained.
Marte’s story is a familiar one in neighborhoods with high rates of violence, where illegal gun carrying is common among some youth as a strategy for protection. But schools’ response to students possessing a firearm at school (without aiming or firing it) is often criminalization and exclusion.
This two-part series examines the impact of schools’ zero-tolerance response to students carrying guns on campus, and the search for alternative responses that can ensure safe environments while avoiding the harms of exclusionary discipline.
Why students carry guns
Marte says he got the gun that he brought to school from family members in Pennsylvania and began carrying it in his neighborhood in Harlem as a way to protect himself and intimidate others. At the time, he was skipping certain classes at school in order to avoid interactions with kids from outside of his neighborhood.
“Where I lived, there was up the hill and down the hill, and there’s always rival gangs that existed even [before] I was there. So if you went outside, you would be addressed by gang members, whether it was from where you lived, or from [the] opposite [side],” he explained.
Carrying a gun gave Marte not just a feeling of safety, but of respect.
“People know you as a ‘gun boy.’ So they don’t approach you the same, they don’t deal with you the same… that’s the kind of respect I think we just wanted. And it’s kind of silly, when you look back at it now. But as a kid, teenager, you really fall into that mindset,” he said.
A.T. Mitchell, CEO of the Brooklyn-based gun violence prevention nonprofit Man Up! Inc, has seen young people act similarly.
Recently, two students at schools in East New York were caught with a gun. A 14-year-old high school student was caught with a gun in the school bathroom, and an 8-year-old was found with an unloaded gun at his elementary school.
In both situations, Mitchell said, the students were showing off the gun as a way to make people afraid of them.
“They don’t want to use it on anybody, it’s not like they have intent to commit any harm or kill anybody, they just want people to probably be afraid of them so that they leave them alone,” he explained.
Feeling unsafe at school or in one’s neighborhood is a common reason for youth gun carrying, according to academics who have studied the issue. A new study based on a survey of 348 recent high school graduates found that participants who carried a gun in their neighborhood were more likely to bring a gun to school, and that feeling unsafe at school or feeling the need to avoid certain places within campus were other significant predictors for gun carrying.
“If students had places in their school that they felt like they had to avoid, because they were uncomfortable going [there], or they were worried about an interaction, that increased their likelihood of carrying a gun. On the other side of the findings, if students felt safe in their school, they rarely carried a gun,” explained Sarah Britto, study co-author and a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
In addition to feeling unsafe, research shows that youth who are members of street groups, or who are involved in selling drugs, might carry a gun to school to bolster their reputation or to protect themselves.
“As our study indicates, there are multiple reasons for students carrying guns, so we shouldn’t expect a simple solution to solve the problem,” Britto said.
Yet for years, the response to student gun carrying has been premised on the idea of a simple solution: zero-tolerance policies. In 1994, the federal government passed the Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA), which mandated that states pass legislation requiring local education agencies (in New York, this includes both traditional public schools and charter schools) to suspend students for at least one year for having a firearm on campus, and refer those students to law enforcement. Although administrators have the option to modify this suspension when handling individual cases, many adopted a zero-tolerance approach following the law’s passage, making a year-long suspension the norm across the country.
The passage of the GFSA coincided with the wave of “tough on crime” policies under President Bill Clinton. As fear of violence and crime spread, with politicians and the media fueling panic about the upcoming generation of so-called “superpredators,” lawmakers designed policies that used incarceration to remove those deemed threatening. These policies often targeted poor, Black, and Brown Americans.
Decoteau Irby, a professor at University of Illinois Chicago, co-authored a study that examined the political context that led to the GFSA’s passage, as well as its long-term impacts.
“All of these mostly anti-gang type measures, War on Drugs-type measures eventually crept into and found their way into, first, around schools, and then actually into school settings,” he explained.
Although the GFSA’s stated purpose was to reduce school gun violence, there is little evidence that the law has had any deterrent effect. In fact, the number of gun violence incidents at schools has increased in recent years. In addition, the GFSA encouraged schools to adopt zero-tolerance policies for more minor infractions, leading to a steep increase in school suspension rates, even as juvenile violent crime rates declined sharply after 1994. By 2015, the suspension rate across the country had doubled from the 1970s, and Black students were three times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled.
At the same time, the number of police officers in schools increased, meaning more students who misbehaved came into contact with the criminal legal system. Studies have shown that increasing visible signs of security, like adding metal detectors or increasing police presence, has not had an effect on crime at school.
The harm caused by exclusionary discipline
Mitchell expressed his concerns about the effectiveness of a one-year suspension as a response to firearm possession at school.
“I know this is looked at from a case-by-case basis, but it’s excessive to me,” he said. “I can understand that there’s certain parents who may be fearful, because… they may not want their kids to be in danger. [But] I just think that [it’s] a cry for help.”
“It’s catastrophic,” agreed Johanna Miller, director of the Education Policy Center at the NYCLU. “If a student is a danger to themselves or someone else, you need to get that kid some help and make sure they can’t hurt anybody. But that’s more like an emergency response than a yearlong suspension, which is much past when the emergency has happened.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she feels the GFSA should be revisited, explaining that “a suspension for a year outside of school is not an appropriate suspension anyway, because it means that we’re saying that the kid is never coming back to school.”
But she emphasized that “there has to be consequences to behavior like having a gun in school. And what we need to do is make sure that there are alternatives that will long-term help kids.”
Recent research has confirmed the adverse consequences of exclusionary discipline. Studies have shown that the use of suspension increases students’ likelihood of future suspension, and is also linked to lower graduation rates and an increased likelihood of contact with the criminal legal system. This phenomenon is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
“Schools and the exclusionary discipline process sort of serves as a launchpoint for youth eventually entering and making their way into the criminal justice system,” said Luis Rodriguez, a professor at New York University who studies school discipline.
In addition, there is a lack of evidence that suspensions accomplish the stated goals of deterring students from engaging in certain behavior, or improving the learning environment for other students.
“All of the ideas about how suspensions are going to change behavior or act as a deterrent are grounded in outdated ideas about how adolescents and teenagers make decisions and how their brains work. I’m very skeptical that they can be effective in any way, both as a deterrent and changing behavior,” said Rachel Perera, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies school discipline.
NYPD School Safety Officers in the Bronx on Feb. 13 2025 (Photo by Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via AP)
In fact, reports from the U.S. Department of Education indicate that in recent years, some school districts have been using more discretion when responding to students caught with a firearm.
The Department of Education suggested in their reports that this shift, which they began noting in their report on the 2017–18 school year, is in line with a trend of schools seeking alternatives to exclusionary discipline due to growing evidence about the harms of suspension and racial inequities in their application.
It is unclear how this trend has impacted the response to firearm possession at New York City’s schools.
Both the New York State Department of Education and New York City Department of Education (DOE) emphasized that they treat every incident of firearm possession on a case-by-case basis.
“While that is the expectation that a student with ill intent in possession of a firearm is subject to a one year suspension, each and every one of our cases are looked at as an individual case and we treat them as such,” said Mark Rampersant, Chief of Safety and Prevention Partnerships at New York City’s Department of Education (DOE).
New York City’s DOE does not report data on the number of students caught with a firearm at school who receive a modified suspension. But the DOE’s annual suspension reports shows that the number of students receiving a long-term suspension for “possessing or using a firearm, bomb, or other explosive” was 41 in the 2021-22 school year, 35 in 2022-23, and 63 in 2023-24 (these totals don’t include charter schools).
Even as Rampersant acknowledged that “there is no evidence that suspensions work, for anything,” he defended the one-year suspensions the DOE does give out for firearm possession.
“We would like to think that a one-year suspension is a deterrent to carrying a firearm or possessing a firearm on school property… [So] we agree that it interrupts the educational process, but so does a firearm in a school,” he said.
The impact of suspensions on students
Students in New York City who are serving long-term suspensions are still entitled to an education, in accordance with New York state law. Where that education takes place depends on each student’s individual situation.
A student who is arrested and determined to have been in possession of a firearm may be incarcerated at a juvenile detention center or Rikers Island, depending on their age. They may also be released on probation or under certain conditions. Students who are suspended but not incarcerated after their initial arrest are assigned to one of the city’s long-term Alternate Learning Centers. Those who remain in detention continue their education at juvenile detention facilities.
Abby Levites worked as a social worker at Passages Academy, the school that is based in juvenile detention centers. There, she encountered multiple students who were incarcerated because they had brought a weapon to school. What she saw were students that needed more support, not further punishment.
“Working with these kids, I’ve never once been like, ‘I’m in danger, this kid is bad.’ They’re kids, they’re young people, they’re dealing with things that people don’t understand and may never have gone through in their lives. And if they’ve brought a weapon to school, there might be a reason for it, whether it was well thought out or not. And this whole idea of how much we criminalize these young people is just devastating,” she said.
This punitive response can also result in students falling behind due to the academic disruption. Students and advocates have criticized the quality of education provided at some of these Alternate Learning Centers.
“They’re a mixed bag,” Johanna Miller of the NYCLU explained. “Some of them are really interesting places where I think the educators are trying to do a really good job of helping get the kids back into their classroom, and helping them get back sooner. But for the most part, in many cases, they’re a little bit like purgatory for kids, where you don’t really make much progress.”
Marte said his alternative school felt like “preparation for jail.”
“You couldn’t come in with your own pencils or pens. Couldn’t wear certain belts… You almost weren’t expected to do homework, because they didn’t want you to take books and other items in or outside the school,” he said.
He also felt that concentrating students with histories of misbehavior in one place led to that behavior being reinforced.
“It was one big macho challenge, like who was the baddest kid in the school. Everybody was trying to top each other with disrespect towards teachers, top each other with disrespect towards each other,” he recalled.
After the year ended, Marte decided to drop out, because he didn’t want to go back into that type of environment.
Miller said that dropping out rather than attending an alternative school is a common response.
“I think when a kid makes a big big mistake like that, very often the systems just kind of give up on them. And in fact, those are the kids that you probably need to put the most into to bring them back and make sure that they don’t end up in the criminal legal system as an adult. Once you’re in the juvenile justice system, it’s sadly almost inevitable that you will end up in the adult criminal justice system exactly for that reason — because we sort of give up on those kids,” Miller said.
Mark Rampersant of the NYC Department of Education defended the learning centers, arguing that it is a student’s responsibility to make the most of their time there.
“It is incumbent upon the student to really put the investment in. The adults are there to provide the supports. All you have to do is show up and be willing and ready to learn…For other young people who are not taking the suspension process seriously, you’ll hear some of [those criticisms],” he said.
He also noted that students can have their suspension length reduced if they are on track with their attendance and academic performance.
Still, research has shown that New York City students who are suspended for more than 21 days were less likely than peers with shorter suspensions to earn credits in math and English classes, and were less likely to graduate on time.
“It really sets you back a full year, because there’s just no way to compare the education you would receive at your home school versus the education you’re receiving at an alternative learning center,” said Michaela Shuchman, a Skadden legal fellow at Bronx Legal Services working to reform and replace exclusionary discipline practices in NYC schools.
Students who do choose to continue their education after serving a suspension rarely go back to their original school, Levites said.
“When a kid makes a big big mistake like that, very often the systems just kind of give up on them.“
Johanna Miller, NYCLU Director of Education Policy Center
“The majority of these kids don’t want to go back to their home schools because that’s where stuff was happening. They might have gotten arrested in front of everybody, there might be beef still, they might hate their teachers. I’ve called [some schools], and the administration has been like, ‘we don’t want that kid back here,’” she explained.
Instead, these students may choose to attend one of the DOE’s 56 transfer schools, which are designed for students who need to make up credits.
Levites now works at one of these transfer schools, Judith S. Kaye School, which she says gives more support to struggling students.
“It’s just a whole different kind of experience that really every high school should be. Smaller classes, [and] more supportive staff,” she said.
But she said that many transfer schools suffer from understaffing and are at risk of losing funding if they don’t maintain enrollment numbers each year.
Reflecting on the legacy of the GFSA, Decoteau Irby said that the spirit of the law, to keep guns out of school, should be preserved. But he posited that we need a “radical reimagining” of “what happens when someone feels like they can’t uphold the value, or can’t uphold the commitment to not have guns in a particular type of space.”
The second part of this series will examine what alternatives to the current system of discipline could look like.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member and writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.