Action Agreed, Research Needed

One of the topics I discussed with my site supervisor was campus discipline. We both indicated it would be a terrific action research to identify the most common discipline infraction (with the exception of tardies), what consequences were assigned for this infraction and who seemed to repeat the infraction the most. Since then, another more pressing discipline issue has arisen. We have had several students repeatedly visit the AP’s office and exhausted our discipline consequences such as ISS, OSS, and DAEP. The question is how to intervene early in the process before a student is assigned to an alternative campus.
Another topic that I discussed with my site supervisor was teaming. Teaming was new to our campus last year. We are interested in finding out the effectiveness of teaming on the overall campus culture. Another area we were interested in was the effect teaming had on student interventions and success.
Although both topics were quite interesting we decided that the discipline study was a more pressing issue that needed action. One of the negative issues that my district must confront is our high rate of minority students assigned to DAEP or JJAEP. My campus principal wants me to study discipline referrals across the board, disaggregate the data based on certain indicators such as race, gender, SES, Education status, and grade level. What we are hoping to find is some sort of common denominator that we can isolate and design an intervention to head off consequences that involve exclusion from instruction. Any time a student misses instruction is lost knowledge and skills. So, I have my "marching orders" and I am off to the campus on Monday to gather initial data.