News flash! Hamilton County Schools is one of 25 school districts recently flagged by the Tennessee Department of Education for disproportionately disciplining students with disabilities, especially black students.
Do the math. Of Hamilton County’s 43,800 students, 44 percent are black. And among all students, 12.7 percent – about 5,500 kids – have a classified disability, such as learning disabilities, language impairments or other health impairments. Of that 12 percent disabled, more than 30 percent are black.
Then there are the suspensions: Among those roughly 5,500 kids classified with a disability, almost 56.5 percent of suspensions were meted out to blacks. White students with disabilities accounted for about 36.5 percent of suspensions, though they make up more than 55 percent of the disabled student population, according to a recently released state report and Hamilton County data.
School leaders don’t deny this is a problem, here and nationwide. Locally, they say, they are working – successfully – to bring down the suspension numbers and to close the disparity gap.
“It does nobody any good to put their head in the sand and say there’s not an issue,” Superintendent Bryan Johnson said. “We know it’s something that all systems struggle with. I’d like to think we’ve been a little bit of a leader and in the area of saying ‘We’re gonna dig in and try to do right for all children.'”
During the 2015-16 academic year, Hamilton County Schools saw 1,450 suspensions of students with disabilities. The following year, that number dropped to 1,197. In this current school year, there have been 248 such suspensions.
Part of the fix, according to school officials, was ensuring there are specific procedures for discipline and consequences for different behaviors that do not vary from school to school, something Johnson said the district has not had before.
What a concept! Specific procedures for discipline that do not vary from school to school. Rules that apply fairly. Equally. Equitably.
Go figure. Who could possibly have known that might be needed? Who could possibly have thought that might work?
How many superintendents have we had before Bryan Johnson came in June 2017? How many school board members does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Of course, it isn’t just applying rules fairly and consistently. Teachers and administrators have to understand the perspective of students with disabilities and students of color. And schools need more behavior specialists and school counselors – especially schools with higher numbers of those students.
That’s called equity, and it’s something our school board has not fully embraced. In fact, some of our school board members pitched such a fit about equity when school officials began working on it in the spring of 2018 that plans to hire a consultant to help reverse the inequities in our schools were scuttled, and an equity task force that had been formed hasn’t met as a group since.
What would almost certainly have been commonsense progress for our schools ground to a halt when two school board members balked, seeming to read “forced busing” into a call for equity and other local proposals intended to ease the impact of high poverty in some of our schools. Even though forced busing was never part of the plan, those board members’ knee-jerk reactions prevailed.
At the time, some leaders in the community privately acknowledged that the task force was put on hold until new school board members would take office after the August county elections. But still the group isn’t meeting as a whole, schools spokesman Tim Hensley acknowledged this week.
What? We can’t even talk about equity in our schools? We can’t even talk about Orchard Knob Elementary School youngsters (86 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic and 86 percent economically disadvantaged) starting school with tiny vocabularies because their parents can’t afford books or don’t read to them as toddlers? We can’t talk about how and why consistent suspension rules for disabled students seems to be working to bridge one of the many equity gaps our students face?
Hensley says the equity task force is expected to meet in late March, April and May, with expectations that it will present recommendations to the board in May or June. As a community, we must insist that this happen. Behind the scenes, the work apparently has continued.
Marsha Drake, the district’s chief equity officer, told Times Free Press education reporter Meghan Mangrum recently that the district is rolling out equity training that includes special education simulations, unconscious bias and cultural competency training to administrators and teachers. She said the district hopes to have trained 40 percent of staff by August.
That’s excellent. But our community needs to talk openly about equity in our schools and apply those good lessons we seem already to be learning about disciplining disabled students across all areas of education – and in all schools.
Instead of being afraid of progress and equity, let’s celebrate it.