Fewer Wake County students are receiving long-tern suspensions, but the decline isn't as much as first reported to the state.
Wake school officials said today that 647 students received long-term suspensions of 11 days or more during the 2010-11 school year, a 22 percent decline from the prior year. School officials had reported last month that only 320 students had received long-term suspensions this past school year.
Superintendent Tony Tata said the district had erroneously not recorded as long-term suspensions those students who had missed 11 days or more of class before being enrolled in an alternative education program. Many of those students were enrolled in the SCORE program to take online courses.
Tata said they've streamlined procedures this school year so that students who are placed in alternative programs won't miss as much time in class.
Comments
This is not a non-story folks
Fri, 09/02/2011 - 16:20 — LongtimeLurkerThis is not a non-story folks (double negatives are always fun).
Keep in mind that a year ago the Board revised suspension policies. Subsequently, we heard drastically decreased suspension numbers for last school year reported and widely hailed as major progress.
Skepticism about the numbers was expressed by various bloggers here at the time those suspension numbers were announced. This revision yesterday is part of an on-going story. Airing this dirty laundry is worth paying attention to as another example of the good things that are being done on the non-partisan middle ground in Wake County.
I've heard bloggers here criticize or make fun of Legal Aid's efforts to hold the WCPSS due process folks to some kind of standards. Some of that dismissiveness seems to stem from the idea that the kids being "disposed of" may deserve less than our full attention. My guess is that you don't know this is also "your kid" until that situation hits you. Our suspension figures on minor infractions were (and probably have continued to be) through the roof. There are a LOT of good kids caught up in this.
Consider the many different tendrils on this beast.
If the numbers are wrong, where does that lead us in terms of collecting federal money for those kids supposedly still in attendance, in terms of reporting the actual suspension figures to office of civil rights, in terms of what options were supposedly offered to these "non-suspended" suspensions, in terms of the specific processes the students were sent through to "erase" their suspensions and how their records were individually impacted... This story has traction.
All this means we must ask whether kids were simultaneously thrown out of school, counted as present, forced to sign away due-process rights in order to be shunted into meaningless programs with near zero-success rates, and then still ended up with long term suspensions on their permanent record even though they were offered those routes and required to sign away those rights as a way of erasuring that status? And did all that happen to create a cosmetic approach as a response to the new school administration's request to actually and truthfully reduce suspensions. If so, it gives some insight into what kind of a machine this was and what that machine consumes to sustain itself. We should be thinking of these things.
And we should certainly not be dismissive of Legal Aid's efforts to impose some accountability nor should be take lightly WCPSS's refreshing willingness (under the leadership of John Tedesco and Tony Tata) to cooperate in rooting this kind of stuff out even when there is considerable embarrassment involved.
This revision is at least a slip showing some extent of malfeasance in that heretofore autonomous department - look for the whole undergarment soon. We can't clean house without bringing out the dirty laundry.