Student discipline violations in Loudoun County Public Schools during the fall 2025 semester continue to grow, data released by the division shows.
During a March 3 presentation to the School Board’s Performance Monitoring Community, student services administrators said that there were 10,664 discipline incidents last semester involving 6,211 students.
Fall 2024 saw 9,665 incidents; there were 9,542 in 2023 and 7,380 in 2022.
English learner students saw the largest rise, with the percentage of EL students engaging in violations rising from just above 10% last year to around 13.5% this year. The rate for students with disabilities remained the same.
Despite the rise in violations, the number of student suspensions dropped from 640 in 2024 to 606 in 2025. A total of 451 individual students were suspended, down from 467 in 2024. Officials said the Hispanic students have the highest “risk ratio” of suspension at 2.55, which means Hispanic students are 2.55 times more likely to be suspended than non-Hispanic students. The next-highest race, Black students, is at 1.46.
EL student suspensions rose slightly, while suspensions of disabled students and dual-identified students dropped. LCPS said the suspension risk ratio for EL students is 2.83 and for students with disabilities is 4.45.
Ryan Tyler, school assessment director, said that once a risk ratio reaches 3, the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights may begin an investigation into whether unfair treatment is happening toward a specific demographic.
School Board Chair April Chandler (Algonkian) said the presentation left her asking, “what are we going to do about it?” She said school staff members have been trying to address these trends for 10 years, but “obviously” those efforts haven’t worked.
Committee member Lauren Shernoff (Leesburg) asked if she should be encouraged that suspensions for Pacific Islander students had significantly declined, but Tyler said that the number of those students is very low, which means those numbers are prone to steep fluctuations.
Committee Chair Amy Riccardi (Sterling) requested that the officials publish these numbers for the past ten years and said she plans to dig deeper into the issue.
Chief of Schools Rae Mitchell said that her office is considering meeting with other division departments to try to plan a strategy to solve the discipline issues.
