Judge orders sides to key on discipline gap
LITTLE ROCK — Participants in a federal court hearing on Pulaski County Special School District’s desegregation efforts agreed Tuesday that Black students are disciplined at disproportionately higher rates than their classmates of other races — but disagreed on how best to measure the disparity.
U.S. District Chief Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. directed the attorneys for the school district and for Black students known as the McClendon intervenors to plan to resolve their mathematical dispute through witness testimony when the hearing resumes for its seventh day at 8:30 a.m.
Marshall is presiding in the hearing on whether the Pulaski County Special district has met its desegregation obligations in regard to student discipline, student achievement, the condition of school facilities and the self-monitoring of its desegregation work.
The district’s attorneys and leaders contend that the school system has in good faith substantially complied with their desegregation plan, Plan 2000, and should be declared unitary and released from further court monitoring in the 37-year-old lawsuit.
Attorneys for the McClendon intervenors argue that the district has not met its obligations and/or has initiatives to do so that are too new to evaluate, and so is not ready for release from federal court supervision.
Student-discipline practices have been the focus of the hearing this week. Sherman Whitfield, the district’s director of pupil services who compiles the district’s annual report on student suspensions, acknowledged to Austin
Porter Jr., an attorney for the intervenors, that there is disproportionality in the discipline of Black students but that is being addressed and has improved.
“We truly believe we are on the right course,” Whitfield told Porter, adding “It’s a hard work.”
In response to questions from Amanda Orcutt, an attorney for the school district, Whitfield said that there are myriad factors both in and outside of schools that affect discipline referrals. That can include changes in teachers and principals at a school and bias, as well as family dysfunction, poverty, and medical conditions,
“It’s not always about race,” Whitfield said.
The district that is reported by the Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education as having 11,863 kindergarten through 12th grade students in the 201819 school year, 43% of whom were Black students.
The school district reported 1,894 suspensions of Black students for that year, and 1,100 suspensions of students who were white, Hispanic, Asian or of other races and ethnicities. The percentage of suspensions of Black students made up 63% of all suspensions while the suspensions of students of other races represented 37% of all suspensions.
Porter questioned Whitfield and John McCraney, the district’s coordinator of equity initiatives, about year-toyear changes in student suspension numbers, suggesting at one point that changes in the 2016-17 school year reflected the detachment of the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District from the Pulaski County Special district.
Porter also highlighted the 2018-19 suspension numbers as well as similar statistics in previous school years. He subtracted one percentage from the other, resulting in what he said was a disparity of 26 percentage points.
Orcutt challenged the relevancy of the calculations for the different years, saying that they don’t take into account the differences in the Black and non-Black student enrollments in the district.
Student discipline is the focus of several paragraphs of the district’s Plan 2000. The plan calls for the district to “continue to gather data, which allows a full assessment of its success in achieving its objective of eliminating racial disparities in the imposition of school discipline.”
It further calls for a plan to identify teachers and other staff members, as well as schools, that have atypically high discipline rates and high racial disparities in discipline. The plan commits the district to work with those schools and employees.
A comprehensive study on the causes of high discipline rates for Black male students was to have been done within 150 days of the court approval of the desegregation plan. Other provisions set requirements for a hearing officer and the appeal process for a student in trouble.
McCraney, the coordinator of equity initiatives in the Pulaski County Special district, described the district’s practice of identifying teachers and schools with high rates of discipline referrals of Black students and then providing those teachers with training on classroom management, cultural diversity and strategies for reducing the referrals.
Early on the measure for identifying a teacher for excessive referrals was one standard deviation above the average or mean but that is no longer used, McCraney said.
The district starting in 2011 provided the training on learning styles and classroom management strategies. In December 2012, the district hired consultant Mack Hines III to provide the services, which he did until 2018. Most recently the district assumed the job, using what was learned from Hines as well as relying on the training teachers receive for the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports, and Advancement Via Individual Determination programs, McCraney said.
Hines not only provided training to identified teachers but to other teachers and school administrators in workshops with titles such as Discipline, Emotions, African American Students, and Leading the Way for African American Success. He also observed and provided feedback to teachers in their classrooms, worked with whole faculties at a half dozen district schools, and served as a mentor to Black students at an elementary school, McCraney said.
McCraney said it was her job and the job of principals to monitor the student discipline referral rates of previously identified and trained teachers — to remind them of strategies to use if their referrals were high. But she said she never had to do that follow-up with an individual.
Porter questioned McCraney about incentives and punitive measures for teachers who persisted for two or three years to have high rates of student discipline referrals.
If a teacher has a culture bias and is not willing to admit it or take the training to heart, training won’t help,” he noted to McCraney who said there were no district penalties or incentives.