Student lives matter — all of them

School discipline should be colorblind. Period.

A study released last month, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, And Underprotected,” by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies claims it’s not.

But such a study can easily be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Its findings show, of all girls disciplined, black girls were 10 times more likely to be suspended than white girls in New York City and 11 times more likely to be suspended than white girls in Boston.

However, its conclusions, first, were based only on the two cities, dealt more broadly with gender than with race and could apply just as much in some cases to boys as to girls.

Numbers in a vacuum can be dangerous.

So, when statistics show that 69.8 percent of all girls suspended from Hamilton County Schools during the 2014-2015 year are black, as reported by Shelly Bradbury in Monday’s Times Free Press, that doesn’t mean local school discipline is colorblind. And it doesn’t mean it isn’t, either.

School discipline should — and does — take into account a number of variables.

One could imagine the following among the necessary questions needing to be answered before a suspension is given: What was the offense? Who started it? How many people were involved? Was anyone hurt? Was it in class or out of class? Were weapons involved? Is the offender a repeat participant in such activities?

If black girls are suspended from Hamilton County Schools at a rate of more than 2-to-1 because they are black, that’s a problem. If they are suspended at that rate because their particular offenses merit such suspensions, that’s exactly what should happen.

What Lee McDade, assistant superintendent of the Hamilton County Department of Education, told Bradbury should be the case for every school system in every part of the country — that the circumstances of each suspension are unique.

“I don’t care if [the participants are] purple,” he told her. “If they are disrupting the class and the teacher can’t teach and the kids can’t learn, then we need to deal with them. To say I lumped one ethnicity or race in together is just not the case.”

Are there other factors to be considered in walking the narrow line of making school discipline colorblind? You bet.

It would be important to know, if a teacher is involved, how the teacher handles discipline. Or if a white teacher feels intimidated teaching in an all-black school (or vice versa). Or if a student had been bullied so long she lashed at her tormentor. Or if the student involved has just had something traumatic happen at home.

In Hamilton County, fighting, gang activity, robbery, threats, trespassing, bullying, vandalism or sexual offenses can result in suspension. However, the administrator has some leeway in whether to suspend, based on circumstances.

In some cases, known as zero-tolerance offenses such as bringing a firearm to school, having drugs, making certain threats or hitting a school employee, the administrator has no choice. A suspension is automatic.

Indeed, no formula will ever calculate what percentage of aggravating and mitigating factors are perfect in determining a suspension.

When eight girls got into a fight at predominantly black Brainerd High School last week, police had to break it up, and all eight were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Instead of condemning the fighting and suggesting that such disruptions threaten any improvement at one of the state’s “failing” schools, the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for an overhaul of school discipline methods.

“The disparity levels and disproportionate rates experience by African-Americans and minority students in terms of suspensions, expulsions, reassignment to alternative schools and other disciplinary infractions [are] funneling out students out of the school house and into the jailhouse,” local President Elnora Woods wrote.

Such hyperbole not only is unnecessary, but it also fails to understand the fine line schools administrators have to walk in meting out discipline.

The truth is, students should not be treated as if their race, gender or background is all that mattered in their lives. Each student is unique and deserves to be treated as more than a number in a easily misinterpreted study.