Attention will again be focused on the Syracuse City School District’s discipline practices this month.

Civil rights expert Dan Losen will present his findings on district suspension rates at a board of education special work session on Sept. 30.

Losen said he has been analyzing the district’s suspension rates since the spring, which is when the district hired him for an amount that would not exceed $30,000, The Post-Standard reported in July.

“I’ve been looking at more recent data and basically will be trying to help them with what their understanding of the issues is and what the next steps are,” said Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

The decision to hire Losen as a consultant came after he co–published a report on suspension rates in U.S. school districts in April. The report, titled “Out of School and Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools,” additionally identified racial disparities in districts’ suspension rates. 

Syracuse was one of 20 cities featured in the report.

Losen said Syracuse’s inclusion in the report is not a reflection of any particularly offensive practices. Rather, the district was chosen in an effort to feature a geographic variety of large districts with high rates of suspension, he said.

In analyzing suspension rate data from 26,000 U.S. middle and high schools, Losen said he found some “shocking” numbers.

For example, in the 2009-10 school year — the year analyzed in the report — one out of nine secondary school students was suspended at least once, according to the report.

Syracuse school districts had a 30.8 percent suspension rate for all secondary school students in year 2009-10, according to the report. This breaks down to a 26 percent rate for African-American students, an 18 percent rate for Latino students and a 12 percent rate for white students.

High rates are especially alarming because a student’s likelihood of dropping out of school doubles after being suspended just once in ninth grade, Losen said, emphasizing the correlational relationship.

“Excessive school suspension is harmful to all kids,” Losen said. “If it’s not an educationally sound practice, we shouldn’t be doing it with this frequency.”

When suspensions further create racial divisions and therefore affect minority students more harshly, he continued, the issue becomes a civil rights concern. 

Addressing the district’s high suspension rates is an ongoing process, said Patricia Body, Syracuse’s school board president. The issue first came into discussion before the 2012-13 school year, she said. This year, the district is placing social service workers in school buildings and training teachers to better deal with disruptive students, she added.

“A teacher is taught how to identify the signs that a child is stressed or upset about something,” Body said, explaining the premise. “They can identify that and have that child go to a social worker.”

The district also plans to create a group with community representation to revise its code of conduct based on Losen’s findings, she said.

“To their credit, Syracuse seems to be certainly moving in the right direction,“ said Losen.  “I think they’ve been taking a pretty strong position publically that they want to address this issue.”

Losen’s presentation at the special work session on Sept. 30 will take place at the school district headquarters, 725 Harrison St., between 4:30-6:30 p.m. It is open to the public.

Published on September 25, 2013 at 12:41 am