Critics of the Wake County school system's student suspension policies are poised to get a win today.
School administrators will ask the school board today to change the definition of a long-term suspension to mean anything longer than 10 days to the rest of the school year. Currently, a long-term suspension means you're out for the rest of the school year with no exceptions.
Principals would have discretion, except where state law has a mandatory penalty, to determine whether to allow the student back before the end of the school year. Wake issues more than 1,000 long-term suspensions each school year.
This change is one of the recommendations from a professional learning team created by the school district to find ways to reduce dropouts.
Groups that work with suspended students have for awhile been lobbying Wake to change the definition of a long-term suspension. They've argued it's unfair to make a blanket suspension for the whole school year without giving principals some discretion.
Changing the definition of a long-term suspension was one of the recommendations from a report presented last month by Jason Langberg, an attorney for Advocates for Children’s Services, a project of Legal Aid of North Carolina.
Langberg had argued that the current definition could lead to "unfair and arbitrary outcomes." For instance, he said the student who commits an offense on the 15th day of school will miss 165 days while one who does the same thing on the 150th day will only 30 days.
The members of the school board's economically disadvantaged student performance task force had been receptive to the idea of changing the definition of a long-term suspension.
"When you put kids on the streets for more than a year, they’re going to do drugs and join gangs and probably never come back," said school board member John Tedesco, chairman of the ED task force at last month's meeting. "So how can we stop that?"
UPDATE
Even though the online board agenda, says the definition will be changed to between more than 10 days and up to 180 days, that's a typo.
The definition change, which board members backed during the COW meeting, would say a long-term is between more than 10 days and the remainder of the school year.
The change was unanimously approved on first reading.
Comments
This is a good measure but
Tue, 08/10/2010 - 13:27 — red_balloonThis is a good measure but needs to be accompanied by guidelines for the principals so that there is uniformity and consistency in determing the number of days of long term suspension for at least the high frequency violations.