Trump's school safety commission recommendations

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President Trump’s commission on school safety has recommended revoking a federal guideline directing schools not to punish minority students at higher rates, a stricture that some Republicans and other activists feared has led schools to avoid punishing potentially violent students.

The commission, formed after the school shooting Feb. 14 that killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla., largely sidesteps making any recommendations to tighten access to firearms, falling far short of what Democrats and most education policy officials say is necessary to reduce the frequency of gun-related violence.

The 177-page report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and will be released publicly Tuesday afternoon, does recommend that individual states or districts consider arming school personnel, either teachers or law-enforcement officials present in school buildings, particularly in rural areas where supplemental help would take longer to arrive.

It urges districts to take steps to “harden” their exteriors, including installing blast-proof glass.

It also calls on states and cities to adopt laws making it easier for courts to temporarily remove guns from people who pose a danger to themselves or others, known as extreme risk protection orders, and urges states to ease standards under which courts can force people to submit to psychiatric medications or other treatments.

Mr. Trump formed the commission, chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, after backtracking from a public call to place new age restrictions on firearm purchases—an issue he instead asked the commission to study.

The commission’s report calls for further research into the issue, but is otherwise silent on other gun restrictions.

White House officials involved in drafting the report said they focused the report on mental health and physical-safety recommendations because they preferred to focus on policies that stand a chance of being enacted.

“The real issue we hear from parents of victims is that individuals who are a danger to themselves or others have firearms in moments of crisis, and we’ve got a solution to that problem,” one official said.

The report makes a handful of other federal recommendations. It asks Congress to update the federal education privacy law to account for new technologies and urges the Education Department to write new guidelines clarifying that schools can share students’ disciplinary records in many cases. It also directs the Department of Health and Human Services to look for ways to increase the number of psychiatric-residency slots for graduating medical students.

Most of the report’s other recommendations fall to state or local agencies to implement. It calls on local agencies to develop ratings systems for violent videogames, which the report posits contribute to a culture of violence, and urges all government communications to omit the names of specific mass shooters to discourage copycat attacks.

The report’s primary federal recommendation—to rescind the controversial Obama-era racial discipline guidelines—became a cause célèbre for some on the right, after reports emerged showing that school officials were aware that the Parkland gunman had exhibited clearly troubling behavior, including drinking gasoline, cutting himself and owning a gun he intended to use.

The guidelines, published in 2014, had long been the focus of conservative dislike, and Mrs. DeVos had targeted them for elimination even before the Parkland shooting. The policy warned schools to ensure they weren’t suspending or expelling black and Hispanic students at higher rates than their white peers, and suggested models schools could adopt to reduce their reliance on punishment.

The report’s primary federal recommendation—to rescind the controversial Obama-era racial discipline guidelines—became a cause célèbre for some on the right, after reports emerged showing that school officials were aware that the Parkland gunman had exhibited clearly troubling behavior, including drinking gasoline, cutting himself and owning a gun he intended to use.

The guidelines, published in 2014, had long been the focus of conservative dislike, and Mrs. DeVos had targeted them for elimination even before the Parkland shooting. The policy warned schools to ensure they weren’t suspending or expelling black and Hispanic students at higher rates than their white peers, and suggested models schools could adopt to reduce their reliance on punishment.

The new report recommends that the Education Department replace the policy with its own, and one administration official said it is likely that a replacement set of guidelines would keep many of the Obama recommendations but eliminate the language on racial disparities.