Hello, I’m Tiffany Hinton, the Director of Research and Planning.
Each year, school divisions are required to report conduct incidents from the most recent
academic year to state and federal agencies. These reports are incident based and data are
reported at the school and divisions levels.
New this year as part of federal reporting requirements, the school division is expected to
report data on incidents of bullying and harassment on the basis of gender, race, or disability.
If, during a bullying or harassment incident, the offending student behaves in a hostile manner
because of a victim student’s gender, race, or disability, the following codes should be used:

Sexual harassment – SX0

Harassment on the basis of race – HR3

Harassment on the basis of disability – HR4

Bullying on the basis of gender – BU0

Bullying on the basis of race – BU3

Bullying on the basis of disability – BU4
Please note that not all of these codes are included in the Student Code of Conduct, because
some of them are not the state reporting codes. These codes are only being used to meet
federal reporting requirements.
Also, not all bullying or harassment incidents will fall into these reporting categories. If the
target of an offending student is of a different gender, race, or disability status than the
offending student that fact does NOT automatically demonstrate that the bullying or
harassment was due to those differences.
We are also required to capture the demographic information about the victims of bullying and
harassment due to gender, race, or disability. Therefore, if you report an incident using the
codes discussed earlier, you will also need to report information on the victim student. To do
this, we have created a code of VT1 and an outcome of “Victim-no action taken” for you to
enter information about the victim student. These students will appear on the conduct file for
the purpose of federal reporting only and will not be reported to the state. Victims of these
bullying and harassment incidents will need to be linked to the offending students using the
same process we use for linking students for fighting – with a flag containing the
administrator’s initials and a number.
Coding accuracy of student conduct data is important because of the need to correctly reflect
the behaviors of students. Incidents are used for federal safe school designations, and are
reported in multiple ways on the Virginia Department of Education website, including the
school report cards. To assist with data accuracy, Research and Planning works with school
staff to review the conduct data quarterly throughout the school year. Auditing information is
sent to principals at the end of each 9 weeks describing this review process.
During the review, it is important to keep in mind the most common coding errors:

First, all incidents involving more than one student must be linked by an identifier
preferably at the beginning of the location field, such as the administrators initials and a
number. All linked incidents must have the same incident date and time of day flag.

Second, when students are involved in a fight, all students involved must have the FA2
code and all fights must involve at least two students.

Also, all incidents must have a flag to indicate the time when the offense took place.
This flag should be placed in the first column of the conduct comment field. More
information about the location codes are provided in the resources section of the
Research and Planning website.

Lastly, please keep in mind that all battery/assault incidents must be reported to law
enforcement. If law enforcement should not be involved then you are most likely over
coding the incident in terms of severity. Please consider alternative codes when
appropriate particularly with our younger students as options to battery/assault.
Thank you in advance for your diligent and careful tracking of this data. Please don’t hesitate to
contact our office if you need any assistance and best wishes for a safe school year.