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DURHAM — Durham school officials are reviewing discipline policies and procedures as part of an effort to reduce the district’s suspension rate.
Lowering that rate has been a priority for Superintendent Eric Becoats and his predecessor, Carl Harris. Becoats’ team has discussed suspension numbers regularly with principals in an effort to identify problem areas. Eunice Sanders, the assistant superintendent for student support services, recently told the school board that suspensions this year are lower now than at this point in the 2008-09 school year.
If that remains the case through June, it would continue a trend in which suspensions in Durham have fallen over a number of years.
But there is always room for improvement, according to Minnie Forte-Brown, the school board chairwoman.
“I think it’s still too high,” she said of the suspension rate. “I am glad that we are still constantly working on positive behavior interventions so that we can lower it. We are, we have lowered suspensions considerably, but any time children are out of class or out of school, they aren’t engaged in learning as we would like it to be.”
Forte-Brown said that there is a gap between behaviors that are acceptable in a home or community environment and those that are allowed in school. Often, she believes, the differences aren’t properly explained to children. She also wonders whether the district’s expectations are clear and consistent from teacher to teacher and school to school.
School law attorney Mark Trustin maintains that Durham Public Schools policies aren’t clear enough. Trustin and his colleagues at the City-County Violence Prevention Committee have been working for years to make district policy more to their liking; they won a victory in October 2009 by persuading DPS to clarify the rights of families when students are given long-term suspensions.
But the group is seeking still more changes. Trustin wants clarifications on what constitutes assault, for one thing.
“If a teacher is unwittingly in my way as I’m trying to go through a door and I put my hand on his arm and say at the same time, ‘Excuse me,’ that could be an assault, and, I have to say, has been considered an assault by school authorities on occasion,” stated Trustin, who said students in Durham and elsewhere have been punished for such behavior.
Trustin also believes the system needs to change how it handles self-defense, which is considered a valid legal defense in criminal courts. The attorney, who frequently represents suspended students, said self-defense is often not given due weight by school authorities.
In October, Trustin asked the board to take up a knotty issue that was discussed last year: how to handle initial student appeals of long-term suspensions. The Violence Prevention Committee says that the proceedings need more objectivity from the presiding official and from the panel of teachers that is charged with affirming or overruling a suspension decision made by the principal who supervises them.
“There ought to be an impartial third party involved in the suspension process who can act in good conscience without fear or favor of being second-guessed or I call it intimidated by the process,” said Howard Clement, a City Council member and former attorney who serves on the Violence Prevention Committee. “The suspension process to me is fraught with disparity and unfairness.”
Forte-Brown is not sure what reforms can be made in the long-term suspension appeals process because of student privacy concerns.
The school board voted in the spring to create a task force to look at discipline reform, but no panel was ever formed. The school board revisited the matter this month, a few weeks after Trustin’s appearance, and scrapped the task force in favor of having administrators devise a list of recommended changes.
