In 2012, the school district promised to voluntarily reduce suspensions of African-American students after the office opened an investigation into whether they were disciplined more frequently and harshly than white students.
The suspension rate for African-American boys and girls dropped from 14 percent to 10 percent between the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years, according to school district data that will be presented at a school board meeting Wednesday. The rate for African-American boys dropped from 16.7 percent to 12.7 percent in the same period.
“We’ve done a lot of work in terms of transforming school culture from punitive discipline to restorative practices,” said Jean Wing, the district’s executive director of research, assessment and data. “That’s really been the cornerstone of reducing those numbers.”
Those restorative practices mean looking deeper into why a student is misbehaving and trying to solve the problem instead of just kicking them out of school for a day.
But the disparity in suspensions between African-American and white kids still is huge.