Students in Alabama who are facing long-term suspension, alternative school placement or expulsion will now be able to have a disciplinary hearing before they are removed from the classroom.

After four years of trying, the Alabama legislature on Thursday passed a bill giving students due process rights.

Alabama is one of the few remaining states in the Southeast without those protections for K-12 students in public schools. If Gov. Kay Ivey signs the bill, it will go into effect Oct. 1.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has long made clear that the rights of students do not stop at the school door and we are pleased that Alabama’s state law is finally acknowledging this,” said Jerome Dees, Alabama policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Action Fund. “This is a long-awaited victory for Alabama students and caregivers who previously were not afforded the chance to be heard at a disciplinary hearing.”

Families of children who faced exclusionary discipline advocated heavily for the legislation in public hearings, telling lawmakers about their experience not having due process rights.

AL.com last year reported on some of those cases, detailing what happens when students are kicked out of school or suspended without the chance to defend themselves. The reporting also found that Black students were disciplined at higher rates.

A recent SPLC report found that Black students are suspended every 15 minutes in Alabama.

“This new law, pending Governor Ivey’s signature, will ensure that parents and guardians of students facing exclusionary discipline receive notification and have an opportunity to be heard and to present evidence and witnesses when accused of an infraction that could derail their education. While there is still more work to be done to address the “school-to-prison” pipeline in Alabama, especially for Black and Brown students, this is a major step in the right direction,” said Dees.

Read more: Alabama schools report more fights, discipline issues. But it’s complicated.

Under the new law, schools will have to provide advance notice of a disciplinary hearing, with information detailing their behavior and how it violated the code of conduct. Students will be allowed to have a lawyer at their hearings.

Students will also be able to review any recordings or documentation of the incident, and question witnesses at the hearing as long as they are older than 14.

The law will require that the school provide a detailed statement with the disciplinary decision, including the relevant code that was violated and what will be included in the student’s record.

The bill, HB188, passed the senate with 32 votes in favor and none against. There were two senators, William Beasley and Merika Coleman, who passed. It passed the House on April 4 by a vote of 96-5 with two abstentions.

Sen. Roger Smithermann (D-Birmingham) has sponsored the bill for the last four years.

“We need a uniform system of expectations just like we have with our penal code in the state,” Smitherman told AL.com last year. “If you commit a particular offense, it doesn’t matter what county you’re in, the same law and the same process and procedures apply. With students, we see the disparity in the implementation of due process.”

Last year, it didn’t make it to the house floor as there was opposition from the Alabama School Superintendents Association who wanted school districts to be able to determine their own policies.

This year, Rep. Terri Collins (R-Decatur) also sponsored the bill in the House.

Alison Hudnall’s son was sent to alternative school for 90 days amid a crackdown on fighting, even though the code of conduct at Northridge High School only called for a five-day suspension.

“We have always parented from a place of logical consequences and it’s really hard for me to explain from a logical standpoint why this punishment was given when school policy says something else,” Hudnall told AL.com for an article last March.

At the time, James Evans, the principal at Northridge, said he had discretion to determine appropriate punishment, despite what the code of conduct outlined. The school categorized the offense as ‘other’ even though fighting is a defined violation.

Statewide, AL.com found that officials chose the ‘other’ code more than 17,300 times to report infractions during the 2021-22 school year.

Cory Jones, whose son was a student at Paul Bryant High School in Tuscaloosa City, also advocated for the bill alongside the Hudnalls.

He shared how his son CJ, who recently testified at the United Nations in Geneva about his experience, was kicked out of school for a marijuana crime he says he did not commit.

At the time, CJ was not allowed a lawyer to appeal the decision to send him to alternative school for 40 days after he’d already served over two months of in-school suspension.

“It was all taken away from me for no reason. Taken away from me like it was a joke,” CJ told AL.com.

Jones and CJ are headed to DC next week to meet with the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education during her United States country visit. They will speak to her about CJ’s experience being kicked out of school and the importance of due process rights.

“I’m elated the due process bill has finally passed in Alabama,” Jones told AL.com “What this bill does for parents and students in schools is take away the guilty until proven innocent, it’s now back in line with the process of innocent until proven guilty.”