Racine Leads in Suspensions/Expulsions

Original Story URL:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=671354

RUSD leads in expelling black students

District tops state in suspensions, posts high U.S. rates

By DANI McCLAIN
dmcclain@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Oct. 6, 2007

Reflecting the results of a national study, the Racine Unified School
District has a high rate, as does the state, of suspensions and
expulsions of African-American students.

According to a Journal Sentinel analysis, black students, who make up
just over a quarter of Racine Unified's population, made up 56% of
those suspended and 58% of those expelled in the 2005-'06 school year.

Figures from the state Department of Public Instruction show that 0.6%
of Wisconsin's 91,000 black public school students were expelled in
2005-'06, but that rate more than doubled in Racine, to 1.3% of the
district's black students.

Sue Kutz, who has served on the Racine Unified School Board since
2004, said the district takes a zero-tolerance approach to ensuring
school safety.

"The schools are just enforcing the policies that they have in place,"
said Kutz, a former School Board president.

Board reviews expulsions

School principals make decisions about suspensions, but monthly
expulsion recommendations are subject to board review. Kutz said a
student's demographics play no role in her consideration of
disciplinary action.

"I don't pay attention to the race or the sex or anything like that,"
Kutz said. "I look at what happened and what the consequences were."

But even setting race aside, Racine's suspension and expulsion rates
dwarfed state numbers, as has been the case for at least a decade. A
little more than 7% of Wisconsin public school students were suspended
in 2005-'06, compared with 14% of Racine Unified students.

At MPS, the state's largest district, the total number of suspensions
equaled more than a quarter of its student body and more than a third
of its black student population in 2005-'06, state figures show.

And the Racine Unified expulsion rate, at 0.6%, is three times the
state's and greater than Milwaukee Public Schools'.

No Racine Unified administrators were available to comment on its
suspension and expulsion numbers, according to a district spokeswoman.

The district has made progress in bringing those numbers down in
recent years, said Jeff Browne, director of the Public Policy Forum, a
non-partisan think-tank in Milwaukee.

Browne's organization first started producing an annual analysis of
Racine Unified in 1998 that compared it with nine other peer
districts. Back then, Racine Unified was clearly an outlier with
regard to discipline, he said.

"Its expulsion rate was way higher than any other district," Browne
said. "The Racine district accounted for one-quarter of all the
expulsions for the entire state."

The actions of both the student and the faculty member initiating
discipline should be considered when evaluating discipline patterns
with regard to race, Browne said.

"It takes two to suspend a kid," he said. "We don't know whether a
black child is more likely to be suspended because a black child is
more likely to misbehave, or whether the staff member in any given
case is more likely to react differently because the student is a
child of color."

A look at Racine Unified's 2006-'07 numbers shows that about a third
of infractions related to expulsions - 48 of 151 - were due to
"student behavior."

State ranks 3rd

Wisconsin ranks third among states that suspend a disproportionate
number of African-American students, according to a recent Chicago
Tribune analysis of school discipline nationwide. That study examined
2004-'05 U.S. Department of Education numbers and was published late
last month.

It showed that, nationwide, black students are suspended and expelled
at nearly three times the rate of white students.

In Wisconsin, the racial disparity in suspensions is even greater and
trails only Washington, D.C., and Minnesota, according to the report.
Black students here are nearly six times as likely as white students
to be suspended, the figures showed, and are twice as likely as white
students to be expelled.