In order to determine the characteristics of an at-risk student we must first determine exactly what makes a student at-risk. So how do we categorize a student as being at-risk? These would be determined as those students who because of their home life or lifestyles are a great risk of becoming educationally disabled. Now that we know what determines an at-risk student how do we as educators recognize these student within our classrooms? The obvious indicator would be poor academic performance within the classroom by the student. Some other indicators would be Deviance, Disengagement, and any other out of the ordinary personality traits we may pick up on inside the classroom environment. For the purpose of this article we are going to look at the issue of disengagement of a student that educators might find within their classrooms whenever they are relating with a student.

So what does disengagement mean? The students that an educator may find as being disengaged would act as if they have no friends, they show no desire to be within the school environment and look completely out of place whenever it come to their peers and how they interact with them. Educators would most likely notice this type of behavior while the student would be performing a group task, at recess, or any other time during the day that calls for peer to peer interaction. During these times the disengaged student would appear shy or docile allowing his fellow classmates to interact and complete the task during a group project. At lunch the disengaged student would display this behavior by sitting by themselves at the lunch table and not interacting with their peers. During recess time the disengaged student would not participate in group activities, however would be playing by themselves away from the other children in the schoolyard. This is a problem across America with children