African-American Students Still Disciplined at Higher Rate than CHCCS Classmates

Discipline in Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools has been a focus of the Board of Education in recent years, as more data has shown that African-American students are disciplined at a higher rate than their schoolmates.

Interim assistant superintendent Dr. Rydell Harrison gave the board an update on the latest discipline data last Thursday night.

“One of the things as a principal I would always say to my staff, ‘In God I trust, all others need data,’” Harrison said. “I think that we have been a data-rich district, but we have not been a data-driven district in every decision that we’ve made.”

Harrison said it was important to tailor efforts going forward around data that the district has at its disposal.

A concern in recent years has been African-American students being disciplined for subjective reasons, including “disrespect.”

Harrison said “disrespect” has gone down as a source for Office Discipline Referrals, or ODR’s, but that other areas have taken its place.

“I think where in the past, there has been a lot of focus on ‘disrespect’ and us unpacking, ‘Well, that’s really subjective,’” Harrison said, “we’ve seen that almost be a nonexistent referral.

“While that process has happened and we’ve seen ‘disrespect’ go away, then you see things like ‘disruption’ and ‘defiance’ creeping up because, again, there’s some level of subjectivity in that.”

Harrison said that one way to measure the success of the district’s efforts with Positive Behavior Intervention and Support was to see if the method was helping reach 80 to 90 percent of students.

“When we look at what the data says, out of the 11,982 students, the number of students that we have with ODR’s was 1,016,” Harrison said. “So it’s working [for] 91.5 percent of our students, overall.”

But in those overall numbers, a common problem showed itself – 97 percent of Asian students, almost 95 percent of multi-racial students, 94 percent of white students and 90 percent of Latino students went without a discipline referral throughout the entire school year.

“And then we get to African-American, and almost 73 percent of our students had zero referrals,” Harrison said. “That’s really an eye-opener I think for us.

“We know there’s disproportionality, but I think that that is glaring for us to say, ‘This is not working.’”

Harrison said it was time to realize punitive discipline does not help the students and that new methods must be used, including restorative practices and interventions.

Harrison said some improvements were now being made as teachers were being required to take a two-day course on restorative practices as part of Project ADVANCE.

That training will be extended to administrators as well, the board said on Thursday.

Harrison said the next steps included reviewing the data with principles at each school and keeping track of the restorative practice training.

The board also emphasized equity as a cornerstone in its search for a new superintendent after citizen input.

The board is hoping a new superintendent will be in place in January.

African-American Students Still Disciplined at Higher Rate than CHCCS Classmates

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