Official questioned on school discipline
Racial disparities are focus of hearing
The Pulaski County Special School District’s work to eliminate racial disparities in applying school discipline was the focus Monday of a federal court hearing where one district employee called the effort his “marching order.”
Sherman Whitfield, the district’s director of pupil services, was the only witness to testify on the fifth day of the hearing on whether the 12,000-student Pulaski County Special district has met its desegregation obligations in regard to student discipline, student achievement, the condition of facilities and the self-monitoring of its desegregation plan.
Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. is presiding over the hearing, in which the district’s attorneys and leaders contend that the school system has substantially complied in good faith 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 district’s Black students, who are known as the McClendon intervenors, argue that the district is not ready for release from federal court supervision.
“We’ll illustrate to the court that the numbers still indicate that the Pulaski County Special School District still has a disparity as it relates to African-American children and that of white children,” Austin Porter Jr., the lead attorney for the intervenors, told Marshall.
Porter said that the overall discipline numbers have dropped but that the racial disparity has not decreased. He suggested, too, that statewide initiatives to reduce the exclusion of students from school contributed to changes in the district numbers.
Marshall questioned Amanda Orcutt, an attorney for the school district, about the district’s bottom line.
“Our position is that Plan 2000’s Section F does not
require results,” she said. “It requires good faith effort and substantial compliance in attempting to receive those results. We will see reductions in overall discipline rates as well as reductions in racial disparity.”
Plan 2000’s several paragraphs on discipline call 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 identifying teachers and other staff members, as well as schools, that have atypically high discipline rates and high racial disparities in discipline, and then 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.
Whitfield has been the director of pupil services and the student hearing officer for about 15 years after being a social studies teacher and assistant principal at campuses in the district.
“We have a goal of achieving the elimination of racial disparities. That’s our marching order that we march toward,” Whitfield said Monday about Plan 2000.
Asked by Orcutt why there is a racial disparity, Whitfield said it was his opinion that schools “are a microcosm of the larger society. What’s in society, we’ll see in schools.”
Whitfield testified that the district’s student suspension rates overall and among Black students have declined in recent years and were expected to decline further in the 2019-20 school year, which was cut short in March in terms of on-campus student attendance because of the coronavirus.
In the 2018-19 school year, the district had an enrollment of 5,313 Black students and 6,315 “non-Black” students, which is a category made up of white students and students of other races and ethnicities other than Black. The long-running federal desegregation lawsuit has typically used the Black and nonBlack categories since the early 1980s, when the district had very few students of Hispanic or other ancestry.
Of the Pulaski County Special district’s Black students, 20%, or 1,077, were suspended, compared with 657 suspended non-Black students, or about 10%, Whitfield said.
Whitfield said the district’s 2-to-1 Black-to-non-Black suspension rate is better than state and national figures, which show Black students are suspended at greater rates.
In response to further questions from Orcutt, Whitfield described how the district tracks discipline data by individual schools and by teachers, then meets with school administrators and teachers to provide support to them in decreasing the numbers.
The district is expanding its efforts to set a consistent standard for determining what schools are disciplining students at disproportionate rates compared with the enrollment by race in the school, Whitfield testified. Schools in which the percentage of Black students disciplined is 8 points greater than their enrollment percentage in the school would be considered above the acceptable standard.
Whitfield also highlighted services and initiatives — some newer than others — that the district has undertaken to reduce disciplinary rates, with particular attention to Black students.
Those include the preparation of a discipline management plan at each school, and the district’s alternative learning classrooms and alternative learning education campus for students not successful in a regular school or classroom.
Other efforts include mental health services; school resource officers at some campuses; and the district’s start this coming school year of a “teen court,” in which students who have violated school rules will go before peers in an effort to return or be “restored” to the school. The teen court will be an elective course at the high schools, in which students will learn about the justice system.
Whitfield also cited the district’s undertaking of the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports, the Response to Intervention, and the Advancement through Individual Determination — all nationally recognized achievement and discipline initiatives.
“You can’t separate discipline from achievement,” Whitfield said. “When discipline goes down, we know achievement will go up.”
Orcutt asked Whitfield if the district is doing the work necessary to reduce student discipline rates.
“Yes,” he said, then qualified that to say: “We have disproportionality within our district. I acknowledge that.” But he also said the district has shown improvement.
“The work is never done,” he said.
Porter, the attorney for the black students, questioned Whitfield at the end of the day on whether the district had done a comprehensive study on why discipline rates are high for Black students. Two organizations — From the Heart and an affiliate of the University of Memphis — had done a survey of students, Whitfield said.
In his questions to Whitfield, Porter pointed to data that showed that 10 of the district’s elementary schools and all of its middle and high schools had Black students suspended in numbers disproportionate to the enrollment in the schools. At Pine Forest Elementary in Maumelle, for example, Black students made up 41% of the enrollment and 77% of the suspensions. At College Station Elementary, Black students made up 69% of the enrollment and 92% of the suspensions.
“How do you characterize the numbers? Shocking?” Porter asked.
“Yes, there is a mandate for us to look at the goals of eliminating the disparities,” Whitfield said to Porter near the end of the day. “We are certainly attempting to do that. But sir, that is not an easy job. It is a work. We have work to do.”