The scene at last week's St. Petersburg International Economic Forum [SPIEF], Russia's annual economic showcase, would have been unimaginable just a couple years ago.

There sat a beaming Vladimir Putin on the keynote panel, flanked by French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, and Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan. Out in the corridor lurked US Ambassador Jon Huntsman, who had agreed to speak but later declined due to the presence of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, recently sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, at the meeting.

Still, Mr. Huntsman had a message for SPIEF's nearly 15,000 business participants, including 40 major investment funds from 20 countries: “Dialogue is our only path to progress,” he told journalists.

It's a big reversal from a couple of years ago, when the State Department advised US companies not to attend at all to avoid “reputational damage” from dealing with Russia. It's all the more surprising since the number of Kremlin-linked scandals have only multiplied since then, including the Olympic doping controversy and allegations that Russia was behind the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent in England. Indeed, Mr. Putin's heavyweight panel discussion came just one day after a Dutch-led team of investigators for the first time explicitly blamed Russia for the shootdown of Malaysian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine four years ago.

The main reason for the apparent turnaround in Russian fortunes might be summarized in two words: Donald Trump.

The US president has behaved in ways so out of keeping with precedent, trashing long-term understandings, that an exasperated Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, declared recently that “with friends like this, we don't need enemies.”

‘In the same boat as the Europeans’

Mr. Trump has slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum exports from the European Union, raising the specter of a trade war, and warned that US sanctions might be imposed on European companies participating in the Russian-German Nord Stream II gas pipeline. Most seriously, earlier this month he unilaterally pulled the United States out of the six-nation Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and threatened Iran with total economic isolation. That will require European companies, including giants like Total, Siemens, and Airbus, to abandon billions of dollars worth of contracts with Iran, or face retaliation in the form of “secondary sanctions” from the US.

The Europeans have so far been defiant, vowing to uphold the JCPOA and maintain business ties with Iran. That helps explain the flurry of diplomatic activity, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel coming to meet Putin in the Russian resort of Sochi two weeks ago, and Mr. Macron joining him on the panel at SPIEF last week. Russia, which also staunchly supports the JCPOA, is potentially an important player in Europe again.

“There is a palpable sense in Moscow that this situation represents a critical window of opportunity for Russia. We didn't think we could ever break the stranglehold of united Western sanctions, but things can change,” says Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist for the Moscow business daily Kommersant. “Suddenly we are in the same boat as the Europeans.

“The emergence of Trump has created a new reality. Putin's message to the Europeans has been ‘let's make a new deal.’ For them it's not just about business contracts, it's about European sovereignty. They may not like Russia, but they no longer want to have their Russia policy dictated by Washington. A new deal looks quite possible.”

It's a seductive possibility that Macron explicitly held out to Putin. “We all know your taste for judo, dear Vladimir,” he said on the SPIEF stage. “It is based on a mastery of one's own strength and respect for one's opponent. Let us emulate those principles in the international arena. Let us play a cooperative game, a joint game.”

Too big a change?

But many Russian analysts warn it's too soon to say whether the frantic diplomacy of May is leading anywhere. For one thing, they say, European politicians may just be learning to play Trump's game of behaving unpredictably and brandishing threats. At the end of the day, the seven-decade-old Atlantic alliance cannot be so easily shattered, and Europe's economic ties to the US are far more important than anything it has with Iran or Russia.

“It was a bit surreal watching Macron making nice with Putin, saying ‘dear Vladimir’ this and that. But talk is one thing, action another,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal. “But I kept wondering, how can he do that when France has signed on to the worst interpretations of things like MH17 and the Skripal poisoning? How can you turn around and call for normalizing relations, just like that?

“Europeans are very confused right now. Much depends on their ability to stick to the idea they have expressed, that the US measures against Iran are illegal. And even if they do, it doesn't mean they must reach some new accommodation with Russia. There is a huge array of reasons why it would be very hard for Europe to disconnect from the US.”

One of those reasons, Mr. Lukyanov says, is the historical animosity between Europe and Russia. For hundreds of years, Russia has been seen as a giant menace, and an alien presence, occupying the bulk of Eurasia.

“These feelings of viewing Russia as a murky enemy in the east are very deep-rooted. This will not evaporate overnight, any more than Europe's long standing alliance with the US will. Facing Russia alone is probably not something they would want to contemplate,” he says.

Yet Trump has already changed realities, in ways that will be playing out for a long time to come, says Mr. Strokan.

“Russian diplomacy and the public mind alike are already grappling with the stunning shift that is taking place,” he says. “It's no longer appropriate to talk about ‘Russia and the West’ as a single topic, as we did until practically yesterday. Now we must specify ‘Russia and the US,’ or ‘Russia and Europe.’ It's a whole new world already.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Hawa Tembe, whose mother is from Mozambique, joins the applause as Sen. Kamala Harris (D) of California, top center, Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) of New Mexico, and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) of Nevada, protest against a Trump administration policy that separates children from their parents to deter migrants from crossing into the United States, at the Capitol in Washington, May 23.

A social media firestorm about 1,475 children “lost” by the federal government, together with a new policy that results in separating unauthorized immigrant children from their parents, has heightened scrutiny of President Trump’s zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration.

Amid recent reports – some examining Obama-era enforcement – of children being beaten by government agents and in some cases released to human traffickers and forced to work in miserable conditions, ramped-up detention of minors has amplified human rights concerns.

Mr. Trump, who had already pushed for more stringent border enforcement in his first year in office, is cracking down in what many characterize as an unprecedented way. Supporters say that approach is necessary to stem illegal immigration, which compromises US border security and costs taxpayers as much as $116 billion per year. But critics say Trump’s policy is counterproductive and unduly harsh, and contravenes international law governing asylum seekers.

“The Trump administration is looking at the immigration law and saying: What are all of the enforcement levers that we’re allowed to use under the current law, and let’s use all of them,” says Theresa Cardinal Brown, who worked with former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff under the Bush administration and is now director of immigration and cross-border policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. She compares the approach to a get-tough-on-crime mayor who goes after graffiti artists as well as violent criminals, and says Trump’s policy may not have the desired effect of deterring would-be migrants.

But she and others see a middle way forward that embraces both security and humanity.

“We can enforce our laws and treat human beings the right way, and those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” says Kristie De Peña, director of immigration and senior counsel with the libertarian Niskanen Center in Washington.

The firestorm, explained

Many have accused the government of separating 1,475 minors from their parents and then losing track of them. But that conflates two separate developments.

Last fall, the government tried to check in on the well-being of 7,635 minors who had arrived in the US unaccompanied and had been placed with sponsors; of those, it was unable to reach 1,475.

“If you call a friend and they don’t answer the phone, you don’t assume that they’ve been kidnapped,” said Steven Wagner of the Department of Health and Human Services in a telephone briefing with reporters May 29.

He said the lack of response was at least in part because some sponsors are unauthorized immigrants and afraid to answer calls from a federal official, something Obama administration official Cecilia Munoz also acknowledged.

The more recent development is a Trump administration policy enacted May 6. Under this policy, 100 percent of adults caught entering the country in violation of US law – even those seeking asylum – are referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, rather than allowing for prosecutorial discretion.

These individuals are then put in a facility run by the US Marshals Service or the Bureau of Prisons, which has resulted in effectively separating all parents from their children, since children are generally not criminally prosecuted and thus are not detained in the same facilities. This marks a stark departure from the previous practice of allowing most families, or at least mothers and children, to stay together while their cases were pending.

Critics have accused the government of taking custody of children without adequately ensuring their safety and well-being. A new ACLU report, based on government documents from 2009 to 2014, during which there was a spike in unaccompanied minors crossing illegally, depicts cruel treatment by Customs and Border Patrol officials – including running over a child with a vehicle, threatening sexual abuse, and calling minors “dogs” and other derogatory terms. There are also concerns about the process by which unaccompanied minors are placed with sponsors, after a PBS “Frontline” documentary detailed the plight of Guatemalan minors forced to work in awful conditions at an Ohio chicken farm. On Friday, immigrant advocates are planning events in more than 25 cities to protest the separation policy.

Even before the new policy was implemented, the nonpartisan group Human Rights First issued a report asserting that the Trump administration was violating US and international law in its treatment of asylum seekers. It cited the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, which stipulates that, “subject to specific exceptions, refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay. This recognizes that the seeking of asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules.” The original convention was limited in geographic scope, but the US is a signatory to a 1967 protocol that removed those geographic limitations.

Why so many families are crossing illegally

Many of the migrants crossing illegally into the United States are coming from El Salvador and Honduras – ranked second and fourth in the world for violent deaths per capita, above countries at war like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Osman, a carpenter from Honduras, never intended to enter the US illegally. Sometimes his family didn’t have much to eat, he says, and he thought about the US. But the dangers and risks associated with an illegal border crossing weren’t for him. Instead he tried to gain a more solid economic footing, putting everything he owned into a small carpentry business in his town.

But one day in November 2016, when he was almost ready to open his shop, three men appeared at his business, robbed him, and threatened to kill him and his family.

They asked for 30,000 lempiras ($1,255) and said that he had 24 hours to produce it. “I told them I didn’t have that money. They said they didn’t care, that they were going to go after me.”

He fled to his aunt’s house on his motorbike, taking his wife and young son. She helped them organize illegal passage to the US for the following day. The journey took 25 days, and he had to pay $6,000 – for him and his son – with money his extended family pooled together. They didn’t have enough for his wife, so she stayed behind.

“I was afraid. I had never done anything like this before. But I was more afraid of what would happen to me if I stayed home,” he says.

He made his way to Massachusetts, where his cousins live, and applied for asylum in a drawn-out process that he says he barely understands. His next meeting isn’t until December 2019, a reflection of America’s backlogged immigration system. There are more than 650,000 pending cases, with an average wait time of nearly two years, according to a database maintained by Syracuse University in New York.

In the meantime, Osman’s lawyer has been unable to get him permission to work in the US legally, so he is working under the table as a carpenter. He was able to bring his wife here in November 2017, his son is happy, and he says he feels safe and grateful to the US.

But Osman says the new policy to separate children from their parents could prevent many from the safety he was able to find in the US system. “I left to save my son. If you take my son away from me, you are taking a part of me away. It is the worst thing they can do.”

The case for legal entry

Kim Veinberg, a mother who lives just outside of New York in the New Jersey suburbs, says it’s heartbreaking to hear stories of parents being separated from their children.

But as someone who spent the better part of a decade and considerable funds chugging her way through the US immigration system to help her Russian husband secure US citizenship, she is strongly in favor of requiring would-be immigrants to go through legal channels.

“When it comes down to looking at a family, I don’t know how hard-nosed I could be,” says Ms. Veinberg, who supports the Trump administration’s policy. “But when you ask me in theory what I think – their parents created the situation by not doing it the right way.”

“There has to be a limit at which you say – my heart is breaking for you, but this just isn’t working for our country,” she adds, citing the economic burden on America.

Possible solutions

Tom Jawetz, vice president of immigration policy at the progressive Center for American Progress, says taking children into government custody, and prosecuting, detaining, and deporting their parents, is not a cost-savings approach.

There are now more than 10,000 unaccompanied minors in government custody at a cost to taxpayers of $1 billion per year, according to Mr. Wagner from HHS – far more than the system was designed to hold. The Trump administration blames the border crisis on “loopholes” that Democrats refuse to close, but critics say those provisions were made to protect minors and should be kept in place. Mr. Jawetz says the Trump administration is ignoring a genuine refugee crisis and he and others are concerned that the government will make it more difficult for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors to find protection in the US.

“None of this is solutions-based,” says Jawetz. “It’s all counterproductive and being driven not by someone who has serious policy solutions in mind but is trying to drive an ideological agenda about what America should look like now and in the future.”

A major problem is the backlog in the immigration system, says Ms. Brown of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“When the process is working efficiently, then we are able to treat people with respect and dignity … but we’re still maintaining the integrity of our immigration system,” says Brown, who previously worked with US Customs and Border Protection. “What happened is we didn’t plan for the numbers that we saw.”

Ms. De Peña, who recently visited and interviewed asylum seekers in a detention facility in Texas, says that one solution is educating potential migrants about the asylum process. Most of those she interviewed said the reason they crossed over illegally is because they were intercepted by someone in Mexico who told them they needed to pay for safe passage or else they were going to be shot by a border agent. “They had no idea or understanding what a port of entry is,” she says.

Additionally, she says, restoring prosecutorial discretion would help those with the most information make expedient decisions rather than following an order from Washington to refer every individual for criminal prosecution.

“I know the Attorney General [Jeff Sessions] is very well acquainted with these laws. I would bet a lot of money that he knows exactly what he’s doing,” says De Peña. “As a rule of law proponent, he should be able to figure out a way to do this better.”

“Many of our laws are rooted in compassion. You can’t distance law from humanity,” she adds. “The law is meant to protect human beings.”

Monitor staff writer Sara Miller Llana contributed to this report.

The first time that Tanweer Ahmed, a soft-spoken hospital research director, met Ian Durrant, a bluff ex-British Army sergeant, they were on opposite sides of a fight that was going to get increasingly ugly: Professor Ahmed wanted to build a mosque in this provincial cathedral city; Mr. Durrant was trying to stop him.

That was twelve years ago; earlier this month Ahmed welcomed Durrant to the mosque’s opening as an honored guest. “I think now we are friends,” he says.

That reconciliation signals a new mood in the neighborhood. In a country where immigrant newcomers often complain they do not feel welcome, and where many indigenous Britons say they no longer feel at home, Lincoln’s example suggests that home-making does not have to be a zero-sum game.

Local people who had feared the Islamic place of worship as “a foreign object in a Christian area,” as Durrant puts it, have been reassured. They still feel at home. And so do members of the city’s Muslim community in their brand new mosque.

Their story began in December 2006, when the Islamic Association that Ahmed heads bought a disused church and applied for planning permission to convert it into the city’s first purpose-built mosque for the 1,500 Muslims who live in Lincoln, a prosperous town 150 miles north of London.

St. Matthew’s Church, a wooden-framed, corrugated iron building known to locals as “the tin tabernacle,” sat on a plot of land on Boultham Park Road, a quiet residential street of red brick bungalows, net curtains in the windows, and wooden fences around neat front gardens. The residents, like Durrant, were mostly retired.

After 18 months, the local council granted planning permission. But the day that Ahmed went to collect the permit, he recalls, “I got a call from the police. St. Matthew’s had been burned down. I was in tears. It was shocking.”

Peter Ford/The Christian Science Monitor

Tanweer Ahmed, the head of Lincoln's Islamic Association, stands in front of the mosque he fought for 12 years to build, eventually winning over local residents who had had reservations.

There had been anonymous letters and social media posts, he says, “threatening that we would not be able to use that place.” But nobody was ever charged in connection with the fire.

More than the church went up in flames; now that there was no building on the plot a different kind of construction permit was needed and a new planning process started. Ian Durrant had become a planning enforcement officer when he left the army; he knew the ropes. He set up a Residents Association and challenged the mosque proposal on the grounds that there was not room for sufficient parking spaces.

“They would have been parking everywhere up and down our street on Fridays,” the day of weekly Muslim prayers, says Don Addlesee, a retired mechanic living opposite the proposed mosque site. “It would have been a mess.”

There was more to local opposition than that, perhaps. “But nothing was said” that suggested anti-Muslim feeling, Durrant recalls. “People have been living here a long, long time and they don’t like change,” he explains. Residents lodged more than 200 objections to the new planning permission request and they won their case. No mosque would be built on Boultham Park Road.

Durrant was delighted. But he was decidedly less happy about the way that extreme right-wing, anti-Muslim groups tried to hijack the Residents Association campaign. He had served in the army in the Middle East and Asia, and says he has only pleasant memories of the Muslims among whom he lived.

The Residents Association Facebook page was “drowned” in comments by members of the neo-fascist British National Party, Durrant recalled. He was also alarmed when a young man from another far right group assumed that the Union Jack he flies in his garden as a patriotic gesture was a sign that he didn’t like immigrants.

As the Islamic Association negotiated the purchase of a larger piece of land about 300 yards away from St. Matthews, located on a commercial main road out of sight of local homes, Durrant began to change his mind. He invited Ahmed to the Naval Club – the main social center in the neighborhood – to explain his plans, and he accepted Ahmed’s invitation to visit the building that served as a small Islamic prayer hall and to eat together. It was a good thing that Durrant is fond of curry.

Ahmed, meanwhile, shocked by the scale of the hostility that his failed planning permission bid had revealed, decided that a public relations campaign was in order. So he and a colleague went door to door on Coultham Park Road and nearby streets trying to calm local fears.

“We listened to them,” he says. “We knew that without understanding their concerns it would be difficult for us.”

There had been much talk of loudspeakers blaring the call to prayer five times a day: Pakistan-born Ahmed reassured residents that Lincoln’s Muslims had watches. Many people had worried that the mosque might breed extremists: Ahmed’s own placid demeanor helped dispel such fears, and he said everybody would be welcome to attend the mosque and listen to the imam’s sermons.

Remembrance Day 'turning point'

As part of this outreach effort, Ahmed decided on Nov. 11, 2012, to attend Remembrance Day ceremonies at the war memorial just across the street from the new planned site for the mosque. Wearing a poppy in his buttonhole, he laid a wreath at the foot of the obelisk, bowed his head, and pushed a small wooden crescent moon into the earth among the crosses that Durrant and his comrades had planted.

“This is my country,” is how he explains a ritual that he now performs each year. “Thousands of Muslims gave their lives in the world wars and I have the same respect as anyone.”

His gesture marked “a turning point” in his relationship with the local community, Ahmed believes. Certainly it impressed a friend of Durrant’s he calls “Big John.” “He used to have a go at me about being friendly with ‘terrorists,’ ” Durrant remembers. “But he changed his mind when they showed up at the memorial wearing poppies, same as he was wearing.”

On three occasions the British National Party and another extreme right wing group calling themselves the East Anglian Patriots staged protests in Lincoln against the mosque. Each time the Residents Association went out of its way to disassociate itself from their antics, writing letters to the local paper urging Lincolnites to turn their backs on the demonstrators.

“They were morons,” Durrant says bluntly. “The best thing was just to ignore them.”

The protests fizzled. “The good thing is that the locals spoke out more loudly and clearly than I could have done,” says Ahmed. “They made it clear that [the demonstrators] were not welcome in Lincoln.”

Eventually the mosque – and a 68 car parking lot – won planning approval, although it was not until 2015 that work got under way on the $2.6 million building. Ahmed invited Durrant, his old nemesis, to say a few words at the groundbreaking ceremony. “I told them that I’ve lived here for a number of years and that this is my community,” Durrant recalls. “But I hoped that once the mosque was built we’d call it our community.”

Opening day

As far as Tanweer Ahmed is concerned, that goal has been met. Seven hundred non-Muslims showed up at the mosque’s opening day, some of them bearing gifts, others just curious to see for the first time what the inside of a mosque looks like.

As they explored the light and airy building, admiring its jade-green dome from the parking lot, or sitting in the prayer room with its cool beige ceramic tiles decorated with verses from the Koran in Arabic and English, Ahmed could not hide his delight.

“The level of support we’ve got from the white community is unbelievable,” he says, grinning. “When we were working on the St. Matthew’s site there were lots of reservations. But now local people seem much more comfortable; there has been a significant change in attitudes.”

And Muslims in Lincoln are much more comfortable too, now that they have their own purpose-built mosque. “It’s changed the way they feel,” says Ahmed. “It’s their place, they’ve made it home. Some people even said that sitting here was like sitting in Mecca!”

More work is needed to keep indigenous white Britons and Muslims from around the world feeling comfortably at home in Lincoln, both Ahmed and Durrant agree. Ahmed is planning to open the mosque to non-Muslim preschool playgroups and gatherings for the elderly, and he is keen that as many local people as possible should visit the mosque to demystify it. Durrant would like to see an active Residents Association that could “kill off any silly rumors” that might spread.

“We must reassure [local people] that we are part of this city and this community and this country,” insists Ahmed. “And we must educate our own people about cultural differences.”

But 12 years of patient bridge-building has worked, he thinks. “We defeated those people who were trying to divide us. We are all British; we may have different faiths or no faith, but we worked together to build a common home.”

Eric Gay/AP/File

Seventh grader Jayden Witter, foreground, discusses a recent conflict with another student using a restorative justice approach – a suspension alternative – at Ed White Middle School, Friday, Oct. 16, 2015, in San Antonio. States are trying to adjust discipline policies, which disproportionately impact students of color and those with disabilities.

Debra Barr understands how everyday occurrences in schools can escalate and result in multi-day suspensions. Until recently, that was commonplace in her district.

“We realized that what we were doing wasn’t working,” says Ms. Barr, the director of student services and behavior supports at Port Huron Area School District in Michigan. Prior to a district-wide emphasis on school culture, she says, “we were losing too many students to dropping out or the criminal justice system.”

How to approach discipline in an equitable way is being debated across the United States, as educators struggle with finding a balance between being too punitive and feeling limited in their options for creating safe learning environments. The Department of Education signaled recently that it may alter or rescind Obama-era guidance aimed at addressing disparities in discipline, in part because of mixed feedback. That move has rekindled discussion about the number of students of color who are being suspended, and about another group overrepresented in discipline data – special education students. 

Last month, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights published a report showing that students with disabilities made up 12 percent of enrollment in 2015-16, but accounted for 26 percent of students who received an out-of-school suspension and 28 percent of students who were referred to law enforcement or arrested.

Regional numbers offer a similar picture. In Washington State, the American Civil Liberties Union last year filed a lawsuit, arguing that special education students there are expelled or suspended “at more than twice the rate of their non-special education peers.” One of every four special education students in Florida receives an out-of-school suspension, while 17 schools in Tulsa, Okla., have in recent years expelled more than half of their students with disabilities.

“There’s no evidence to suggest [students with disabilities] should have more behavior issues,” says Lindsay E. Jones, vice president and chief policy and advocacy officer for the National Center for Learning Disabilities. “The vast majority have problems with reading, math, and paying attention. These numbers are shocking, we need to address them.”

Data prompts changes

Various states are in the process of making changes to their discipline policies. In Tennessee, one of 22 states that allows corporal punishment, lawmakers passed a bill in April banning spanking or any other type of hitting of special education students unless parents give their consent. The bill, which has not yet been signed  by Gov. Bill Haslam, came after state statistics showed students with disabilities were hit at a higher rate than students without disabilities.

In Washington State, the ACLU lawsuit, filed a year ago against the office of the superintendent of public instruction, is bringing more attention to the issue. It alleges mistreatment of several students, including a 13-year-old with multiple special education diagnoses who was given a five-day suspension for an incident that started when he refused to change out of his gym clothes. In total, he was suspended or sent home from school for 52 days in one school year. 

The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages but is asking for “systematic reform,” says Eunice Hyunhye Cho, a staff attorney in the ACLU’s Washington state office. 

Chris Reykdal, Washington’s superintendent, says the state is holding public hearings and hopes to have a new policy in place for the beginning of the 2018 school year. “We want to make discipline decisions a last resort, not a first resort,” Mr. Reykdal says.

States that have already taken steps are seeing results. California banned out-of-school suspensions for all students from kindergarten to third grade for “willful defiance” – which is basically nonviolent disruptive behavior – after statistics showed that this category targeted minorities in disproportionate numbers. Los Angeles and San Francisco banned suspensions for this behavior for all students. In the five years between the 2011-12 and 2016-17 school years, suspensions of all types in California dropped 46 percent. The ban for grades K-3 is set to expire on July 1.

Suspensions and consequences don’t teach skills, argues Jessica Minahan, a behavioral analyst and  coauthor of  “The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students.” She trains both teachers and school leaders about the neural science of how students respond to various events. “The traditional way to handle behavior can exacerbate anxiety in students,” she says.

Better communication by adults within schools can help, especially with special education students who have individual education programs (IEPs), says Anurima Bhargava, who worked in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice under President Obama, and is founder and president of Anthem of Us, a strategic advisory and consulting group. One teacher may not know a student’s IEP especially well, for example, or another may not be aware of a family situation that could be affecting the student. 

While the law prohibits schools from suspending students with disabilities for behavior that their IEP team determines is a manifestation of their disability, it is clear, she says, citing the examples in the ACLU’s Washington lawsuit, that in many cases students are suspended exactly for that reason. 

National guidance

The Department of Education has tried to help districts by offering guidance on issues related to disability – and race. An April report from the Center for Civil Rights and Remedies, Disabling Punishment, concludes that black students with disabilities lose about 77 more days of instruction every school year due to discipline than white students with disabilities. The report is the first to break down suspension disparities for students with disabilities state by state.

“There are no excuses for states to ignore these profound disparities,” said Dan Losen, the director of the center – an initiative of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles – when the report was released.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is considering revising or rescinding guidance related to discipline and race issued in 2014. The “Dear Colleague” letter from the Departments of Education and Justice warned schools not to discriminate racially when disciplining students. Secretary DeVos met with both critics and supporters last month as she considers next steps.

Advocates say the Obama-era guidance protects civil rights and has led to reflection and positive changes in districts as well as lessening the school-to-prison pipeline. Those with concerns say that it affects school safety by limiting teacher discretion and ability to maintain order – and that factors other than school policies, such as the impact of poverty, may lead to students of color acting out more. 

A new poll by the School Superintendents Association shows that just 16 percent of district leaders say they changed their schools’ discipline policies after the 2014 document was issued. The survey did conclude that pressure from the Office for Civil Rights, in the form of investigations or compliance reviews, seemed to move more districts to alter discipline policies. The office opened hundreds of investigations and reviews starting in 2009. The association has not taken a position on the possible withdrawing of the guidance. 

District-wide buy in

In Port Huron, the change in approach originally came about to address a racial imbalance in suspensions in the district. But the effort has helped lower incidents with special education students too, according to Barr, the student services director.

The district has seen a 20 percent decrease in student suspensions overall in the past three years, she says. When expulsions and suspensions are considered together, the decrease is 35 percent.

In the past, she says, schools made hit-or-miss use of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program – designed to recognize good behavior to improve the school culture, while at the same time lessening actions that call for discipline.

Now, as part of a plan set-forth by a new superintendent, PBIS is being used district-wide. When discipline is needed, Barr can walk administrators through seven factors to help them decide whether a suspension is appropriate. More important, she says, teachers and all school staff are being trained in how to deescalate situations such as students refusing to follow directions, in the hope of avoiding the need for discipline. “If you can predict behavior is going to happen, you can prevent it most of the time,” she adds. 

She emphasizes that the district is far from finished. “Systems take a long time to be built,” she says “It’s a huge task.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story misstated the period of time during which the student in the ACLU lawsuit was suspended or sent home. It was 52 days in one year, rather than over the course of two. 

AP Photo

An Indian man in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir stands near marks on a wall caused by cross border firing between India and Pakistan. The countries agreed to stop trading artillery fire along the border on May 29.

As long as he is already trying to denuclearize North Korea as well as permanently ban Iran from building a nuclear weapon, President Trump may want to pay heed to India and its neighbor Pakistan. The two nuclear-armed powers have gone to war three times since they achieved independence in 1947. And over the past year, regular skirmishes along their disputed border in Kashmir have killed dozens and displaced 50,000 civilians.

Pakistan and India each recognize a nuclear war would be mutually devastating. Yet they need help in overcoming a deep suspicion and animosity, driven in part by diverging narratives of their shared past, that could someday trigger a full-scale conflict.

With the border fighting in Kashmir getting out of hand in recent months, the two countries agreed May 29 to honor a cease-fire pact that was first put in place 15 years ago. The agreement is a welcome step. Yet it provides only a pause in hostilities without a commitment to a peace dialogue and, more important, the creation of a culture of reconciliation.

Iran and North Korea are still a long way from any attempt to reconcile with their perceived foes. Ending their nuclear threat has required outside pressure. Pakistan and India, however, have tried at times to come to terms with each other since the violent partition of British India into their respective countries, one largely Muslim and the other largely Hindu. Sometimes their leaders talk or the countries share a sports contest. Nonetheless, trade and travel between the two remain minimal given the size of their economies. And the Kashmir dispute as well as terrorist attacks keep them apart.

Religious differences have mattered less in their relations than the role of nationalist politicians who find it convenient to whip up hatred and fear of the other side. The ill will is generated in large part by competing histories of the 1947 partition – who started it, who killed more people, and who were the heroes and villains. Over the decades, the official history textbooks in each country have become political weapons to create an enemy and build up national unity.

Peace between India and Pakistan will require some sort of agreement on their shared history, one that must reduce old grievances and lessen the paranoia that could trigger a nuclear war. In Northeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and China have tried in the past two decades to write a joint history in hopes of reducing the use of old resentments. The efforts have largely failed.

Yet this past winter, India and Pakistan achieved some success in transcending nationalist histories with the first citizen-level attempt at a joint telling of their shared history. Two history professors, one in Pakistan and the other in India, held a semester-long course titled “Introduction to South Asian History” that included more than 20 students from each country connected online. The teaching took place mainly over Skype and included a visit of 11 Pakistani students to India in May.

The two teachers, Ali Usman Qasmi of the Lahore University of Management Sciences and Pallavi Raghavan at OP Jindal Global University, reported that the students were amazed to discover what they did not know about the other country. They achieved an “overlapping consensus” on historical events with respect and understanding. The success of the course, they wrote, “shows that an alternative imagining of the past conducive to achieving peace and harmony in the region is ... possible.”

Cease-fires in Kashmir, even a peace dialogue or a full opening of trade, will help India and Pakistan avoid the worst kind of wars. But much of that may not matter until the two peoples can craft a shared understanding of the past in order to reconcile for a better future.