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They read the report commissioned by the Sacramento chapter of the NAACP. They saw the numbers. And now, residents of Mutual Housing California are mobilizing to help solve the problem of how local school districts suspend African American male students at some of the highest rates in the state.<\/p>\n
At Mutual Housing’s quarterly residents’ meeting in August, parents broke into groups and to discuss the report and poster-board their ideas on how to shut off what the report’s authors criticized as suspension policies that they believe amount to a “schools to prison pipeline.”<\/p>\n
Among their suggestions, aimed at themselves as well as local school administrators:<\/p>\n
Launch early intervention programs for students who act out. Educate teachers about black culture. Create children’s support groups. Help students learn healthy ways to express themselves. Establish drug and sex education workshops. Create year-round group activities for youth. Facilitate communication between the home and school, between students and teachers, between the community and the police. Place more social workers and counselors on campus. Relieve the pressure on teachers. Pay them more. Set up listening circles where students can be heard.<\/p>\n
Charlene Jones, a resident of Mutual Housing on the Greenway, fought off two proposed suspensions of her sons who attended schools in the Elk Grove district. She said in an interview that she succeeded in overturning the suspension decisions through her constant involvement in her sons’ education. She documented her interactions with school officials. She got to know district’s political hierarchy. She demanded accountability at every level of decision making.<\/p>\n
“The lesson here is that parents need to get more involved,” said Jones. “They need to monitor teachers and investigate more. And school districts need to screen their teachers much better. Teachers need to be hired not on where they graduated from college, but on what they can do to help these children learn, what they can do to bring their stress level down, what they can do to make their test scores higher. The districts need to be asking teachers, ‘What are you doing to make sure our children make it through high school? What are you doing to make a difference?’”<\/p>\n
The NAACP report, entitled “The Capitol of Suspensions: Examining the Racial Exclusion of Black Males in Sacramento County,” was published in June by the Community College Equity Assessment Lab at San Diego State University. It found that when it comes to disciplinary suspensions of black males, four of the 15 school districts in Sacramento County rank among the top 14 out of the 1,035 elementary, high school, unified or county school districts in the state.<\/p>\n
Black males in Sacramento County were 5.4 times more likely to be suspended than the statewide average, the report said. According to the report, 18 black males get suspended here every day. Black boys in kindergarten through third grade in the Sacramento districts are nearly 10 times more likely to be sent home from school on suspension than the same-aged kids everywhere else in the state.<\/p>\n
Sacramento City Unified tops the list that no school district should want to be on. Sac City in the 2016-17 school year suspended black boys 1,859 times – more than any other district in the state, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Long Beach and Oakland. The district’s “unduplicated” suspension rate of 20.7 percent meant that one out of every five black males in the district got suspended at least once. It was the highest of any big urban county in California and sixth worst in the state.<\/p>\n
Twin Rivers (20.1 percent, No. 8), San Juan Unified (19.3 percent, No. 10) and Elk Grove (16.5 percent, No. 14) were way up there, too.<\/p>\n
The introduction to the report delivered a harsh reality of what the suspensions mean:<\/p>\n
“Prior research,” the introduction to the report said, “has demonstrated that students who are regularly suspended are being tracked into the prison industrial complex, a pattern often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. Thus, while some students are being socialized by schools for college-going and entering into the workforce, others are being socialized for prison.”<\/p>\n
Even if they manage to avoid incarceration, youth who get run out of school on a regular basis are way more likely to find themselves relegated to the permanent underclass – meaning a lifetime of poverty, downward mobility, exposure to violence, substance abuse, and early death.<\/p>\n
The study produced by researchers from San Diego State in conjunction with UCLA’s Black Male Institute resonated with the grass-roots organizers who work with young people at Mutual Housing California. The good news is that there is no indication that the African American residents in Mutual Housing’s communities in Sacramento and Yolo counties have been unduly affected by the suspension policies of the four school districts called out in the report.<\/p>\n
Still, there is concern among the organizers about the impact of the suspensions on their neighbors in the wider community.<\/p>\n
Chinua Rhodes is the community organizer at Mutual Housing Sky Park, in unincorporated south Sacramento. Even if the youth of the Mutual Housing community are escaping the suspension pattern identified in the study, he remains concerned about the significant number of African American male students in the wider community who are not. Having grown up in the south area, and having been the subject of suspensions himself – for simply being late on occasion when he had to ride a cross-town bus to make it to class at McClatchy High School – Rhodes says that many parents see a system where school officials sometimes look and act as if they are an arm of the police.<\/p>\n
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“It’s another form of the same oppression,” Rhodes said. “You get a call from the school, and it feels like you’re getting a call from the police: ‘I saw your kid do this and that.’ So parents really aren’t engaging with the school system because they’re already apprehensive about that system. You see the commonalities of both systems. Sometimes you feel that the schools and the criminal justice system are related, possibly even as first cousins.”<\/p>\n
For its part, the Sacramento city school district acknowledges that there is a problem. In an email to the Mutual Housing Blog, the district’s chief communications officer, Alex Barrios, said that the agency “takes the report’s findings seriously.” Barrios characterized the data as “unacceptable,” even when the higher suspension rates from charter schools that the district does not control are extracted out, and he vowed that the district “will respond swiftly to make sure that we address underlying root causes that we can address.<\/p>\n
Superintendent Jorge A. Aguilar met with his leadership team three days before the report’s June 18 publication to review the district’s practices, policies and procedures to address suspensions, chronic absenteeism and other issues that hinder student achievement, Barrios said. A district workgroup has since met two more times to gain a greater understanding of exactly what in the system “is producing these outcomes.” The focus of the review, Barrios said, has been on the areas of professional learning, curriculum and instruction, and supervision and evaluation. Barrios said district officials hope to develop a “dashboard” feature that would act as a warning light “when a school is having issues with suspensions and other issues that impact academic performance.”<\/p>\n
“The ultimate system goal, however, is not to just reduce suspension rates, but to help more students improve academically,” Barrios said.<\/p>\n
There is no arguing that some students need to be suspended and expelled. Violent attacks, bullying, weapons violations, drug dealing, and other types of behavior that disrupt the educational environment merit harsh discipline. But Sacramento County’s disproportionate numbers suggest a need for scrutiny for when and why school officials suspend kids, and under what circumstances, and whether less drastic measures might be employed to deal with a problem.<\/p>\n
The report’s authors offer 10 recommendations to reduce suspensions, and they can be found in the report that you can read in its entirety by clicking the following link: https:\/\/cceal.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/sacramento.pdf<\/a>.<\/p>\n One recommendation that makes the most sense to us calls for the elimination of suspensions for young boys in grades K-through-3. More than 500 Sacramento County kids that age were suspended during the 2016-2017 school year. Districts need to stop these suspensions immediately, pending a comprehensive review of the issue, to be conducted by district officials working closely with the authors of the “Capitol Suspensions” report.<\/p>\n Another suggested policy change – not included in the report – would call for the four districts to take a very hard look at the suspensions of students for what they call in the trade “defiance only.” This category accounts for 35 percent of the unduplicated suspensions in the San Juan Unified School District and no less than 19.9 percent in the other three local districts named and shamed in the report. School districts need to establish standards and criteria for what defiance really means so that it isn’t just a catch all for a frustrated teacher who wants to lower the boom on a student the instructor doesn’t like.<\/p>\n Of course students who disrupt classrooms and who show callous disrespect for school officials need to be temporarily separated from their peer groups so that the rest of the kids can learn. But the troublemakers should not be sent home. Maybe there isn’t much discipline – or maybe there is no discipline – being exercised in the home. Maybe the parents both work, or maybe the adults have major issues of their own that they are dealing (or not dealing) with. Maybe the district when it sends a student home is sending him straight into the streets. Maybe that student then finds trouble with the police – and finds himself being downloaded into the school-to-prison pipeline.<\/p>\n These students should be kept on campus, and school officials should develop ways to make school a valuable experience for them.<\/p>\n The report rightly calls for districts to develop support services for students who have been subjected to personal trauma in their home lives, and it recommends “planned interventions” in instances where teachers or administrators see trouble coming, to find out what’s wrong and to fix it if it’s fixable before somebody gets kicked out of school.<\/p>\n These are all recommendations that most people can get behind.<\/p>\n What can’t be tolerated is a system where school districts are complicit in packing prisons and reinforcing young mindsets that society has assigned them to a lifetime of failure and social misfortune.<\/p>\n “I refused to allow it,” Charlene Jones said, of the suspension attempts on her sons when they were in high school. “I went over all my parental rights, the students’ rights, what the school could do and what it couldn’t do. That’s when I realized, I have some power here, too.”<\/p>\n Click to view video of recent Sacramento City Unified School District town hall meeting<\/a><\/a><\/a> They read the report commissioned by the Sacramento chapter of the NAACP. They saw the numbers. And now, residents of Mutual Housing California are mobilizing to help solve the problem of how local school districts suspend African American male students at some of the highest rates in the state. At Mutual Housing’s quarterly residents’ meeting… <\/p>\n
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