Black Suspensions Mushroming EKU Prof Says

Concerns Raised in

Fayette and Jefferson Counties

Fayette County suspends African-American students at a rate higher than the statewide average.

A complaint filed against the Jefferson County school in May, asks the U.S. Department of Education to intervene.

This from the Herald-Leader:

Web page to address high percentage of Black suspensions

A group that includes African-American professors at Eastern Kentucky University is developing a Web page aimed at getting information to students and educators to help them reduce the disproportionate numbers of black students being suspended in Kentucky schools.

For the 2009-'10 school year, 26 out of every 100 students in Kentucky who were suspended for violations of board policies were African Americans, while eight of every 100 students were white, according to the Kentucky Safe Schools Data Project.

Superintendents, principals, teachers, and students will be able to go to the Web page and find information aimed at reducing suspensions and expulsions, said Sherwood Thompson, Assistant Dean in the College of Education at EKU.

"We want to lend our academic resources to a problem that is mushrooming," Thompson said.

A web presence is anticipated by fall, Thompson told H-L, and will provide information on programs being attempted by other school districts nationally, such as teacher training and creating student courts, to reduce the number of suspensions.

Apparently Jon Akers, executive director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety at EKU, and former PL Dunbar principal in Lexington got it started.

As the honcho at KCSS, Jon shares school safety information and ideas with all Kentucky school districts on a regular basis. Some of that data says...

For the 2009-'10 school year, 35 of every 100 students suspended in Fayette County were African-American, compared with 9 of every 100 students who were white.

In February, Fayette County Public Schools and the Equity Council — a group that advises the school board — joined with the non-profit Children's Law Center to try to cut high rates of suspensions and disciplinary actions involving African-Americans and students with disabilities.

The agreement required Fayette County to reduce the disproportionately large number of suspensions among such students. The Fayette district is implementing a system called PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports) to help students and faculty members avoid disciplinary conflicts. The program will be used in five pilot schools.

Safe Schools Report for 2009-10

Good News
but not for all

Disciplinary Actions
Down almost 21% in 5 Years

The 11th Annual Safe Schools Data Project Report for the 2009-10 academic year is out and the news is generally good.

The number of disciplinary actions for the 2009-2010 school year decreased 9.2% (or 6,045 actions) from the 2008-2009 total and 20.8% (or 17,564 actions) from the 2005-2006 total.

This decline is particularly encouraging because it represents a continuous decline over the past five years.

Kentucky’s total public school population for 2009-2010 was 644,963 students. Of that total, 40,721students (6.32%) committed an offense that resulted in an out-of-school suspension or an expulsion (with or without services).

The categories showing the biggest change from 2008-2009 were failure to attend detention (with 34.8% decrease), profanity or vulgarity (an 18.2% decrease), tobacco violations (a 17.7% decrease), disturbing class (a 14.5% decrease), defiance of authority (a 10.1% decrease), and other Board Violations (an 11.3% decrease). Inappropriate sexual behavior (a 7.2% decrease) and dangerous instruments - carrying or using (a 6.6% decrease) also decreased from 2008-2009 levels.

Disciplinary actions for defiance of authority and inappropriate sexual behavior have remained relatively stable over the five-year period while threat/ intimidation (10.4%) has increased substantially over the past five years.

The Kentucky Safe Schools Data Project reflects federal and state guidelines for gathering outcome data in Kentucky’s schools. Each year, the data report has been considerably enhanced into the rich and informative product that we are now able to present to each district. The resulting database is reported to the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Center for School Safety for analysis.

But not all of the news is good.

This from WDRB Fox 41:

When it comes to students breaking the rules and the law, a new report shows JCPS leads all public schools in Kentucky.

Jefferson County Public Schools recorded 15,000 suspensions last year alone.

But one official told Fox 41's Jennifer Baileys that the report isn't exactly fair.

"Drug trafficking would be a suspendable offense," said Jack Jacobs, a spokesperson for JCPS. "Certain bullying offenses would be a suspendable offense. Different aggressive or violent behavior would be a suspendable offense."

In just the last five years, those types of suspendable violations have increased at Jefferson County Public Schools. According to a new report by the Kentucky Center For School Safety: From 2005 to 2010, disciplinary actions or suspensions have increased 19.5 percent. It also states JCPS had the highest rate for suspensions related to breaking the law.

"I feel like the numbers are accurate in the report, and I was not surprised by any of the numbers," Jacobs said.

But Jacobs says the report may not exactly be fair. JCPS, the largest school district in the state with 100,000 students, is compared to other, much smaller schools in Kentucky.

"If you compare a school district like ours with 100,000 students, and you compare it nationally to other school districts similarly, our numbers are lower," Jacobs said. Across the country, drugs are a growing problem. At JCPS, it's the worst in the state. According to the report, over the last five years, drug use and possession at JCPS increased almost 20 percent. Statewide, drug use at public schools increased 3.3 percent. Jacobs says the district is fighting the problem.

"We have a safe school division that we have counselor and assessment coordinators at," he said.

"What are they doing to lower these numbers?" Fox 41's Jennifer Baileys asked.

"What the board suspension means or the board violation means is that we have more services in place than a lot of school districts do," Jacobs replied.

Jacobs says that means sometimes a board violation is not a bad thing: it provides students with the help they need.

"I think that Jefferson County Public Schools, we focus a lot on safety and we want safe schools and we do address issues that would pertain to safety and I felt like the numbers were indicative of that," he said.

KCSS releases 2009 School Safety Report

The tenth annual report produced by the Kentucky Center for School Safety was released this week and once again my old buddy Jon Akers is doing the happy dance.

This from the Kentucky Center on School Safety:

The most significant good news is that a comparison of the data presented here with past reports reveals 10-year lows in the number of expulsions (both with and without services) and corporal punishments for Board Violations, which declined to the lowest levels since we began tracking the data in the current format in 1999-2000.

Additionally, these data reveal a dramatic reduction over the five-year period presented here in:
Total Disciplinary actions for Board Violations
Disciplinary actions for Disturbing class
Disciplinary actions for Board
Violations at each grade level in grades K-9
Disciplinary actions for Drug Possession

Additionally, for the tenth consecutive year, no criminal homicides or forcible rapes were reported.

Furthermore, encouraging developments can be seen in the fact that:

Part II Law Violations decreased over the past year.

There were very few disciplinary actions for menacing or abuse, disciplinary actions we began tracking this year as a result of KRS 158.156.

Nevertheless, not all the news from this report is good news. Despite decreases in both Board and Law Violations over the five-year period for students in grades K-9, disciplinary actions for both Board and Law Violations for 10th, 11th, and 12th graders increased over the five-year period. Additionally, both students that received free and reduced lunch and nonwhite students continue to be disproportionately represented in disciplinary actions for both Board and Law Violations.

Disciplinary actions for serious law violations also increased slightly from 2007-2008, with most of that increase in disciplinary actions for larceny-theft and robbery.

Finally, disciplinary actions for simple assault and drug distribution also increased from 2007-2008 totals, as did the total days that students were absent from school due to Out-of-School suspension. These findings suggest that, despite the many positive findings in this report, there are still areas where further study and efforts are needed....

KCSS reported that the the data collection process for 2008-2009 remained relatively unchanged from the previous years with two exceptions. The first was the addition of several Law Violation codes designed to more accurately measure threats and harassments by students in the school setting...

The second exception involved a statewide transition from the previous data collection system (STI) to a new data collection system known as Infinite Campus (IC) for all of the school districts. The transition caused a number of data issues, delaying the release of the 2007-2008 report for at least four months. But KCCS expressed confidence that successive reports using IC data will be even richer and more reliable because of the enhancements offered by that system....

The most important shortcoming in the data collection process that we continue to try to overcome involves the current inability to connect each disciplinary action to a particular student through a unique identifier.

Individual-level data (gender, ethnicity, grade, lunch type, special education classification, limited English proficiency, mobility, etc.) remain available at the school level; however, we currently do not have access to that information.

This continues to prohibit us from matching disciplinary actions with individuals. If we had that capability, data analysis could be more thorough and detailed. For example, examination of offender recidivism is currently not possible. This connection could assist schools in evaluating programs targeted to repeat offenders...

Dramatic Reductions in School Disciplinary Actions Reported

Todays release of the ninth annual report produced by the Kentucky Center for School Safety and is cause for celebration.

Most importantly, these data show a dramatic reduction over the five-year period under study here in:

• Total disciplinary actions for Part I offenses,
• Total disciplinary actions for Part II offenses, and
• Disciplinary actions for the most serious offenses of aggravated assault, arson, larceny/theft and burglary.

Furthermore, encouraging developments can be seen in:

• The steady decline in disciplinary actions for Board Violations that has occurred over the past five years
• A 34.3% decrease in drug abuse incidents from the 2003-2004 peak in these incidents,
• A 10.0% decrease in suspensions for board policy violations from last year's total, and an 17.4% decrease from the 2003-2004 peak in these incidents; and
• An 11.8% decrease in corporal punishments from last year’s total and a 36.4% decrease over the five-year period. In 2007-2008, 52 districts throughout the state used corporal punishment at least once during the school year.

KCSS Executive Director Jon Akers told KSN&C he is pleased by the trend and believes that, while no place is perfectly safe all the time, he believes that Kentucky schools are safer today than they were ten years ago. Akers cited several factors that may account for the trend.

• General public and professional awareness over the past decade
• Better intelligence, where law enforcement and schools officials more readily share information about possible problems
• students let teachers know when another student displays a troubling change in behavior
• Educators are much more proactive and oriented toward prevention
• Educators monitor better; more actively monitoring students, not just passively being present
• Fewer drugs in school
• It's much more common to see the whole school staff pulling together

And Akers is in a good position to hear the anecdotal data about school safety that is not readily apparent from the report. Not only is he the former principal at Bryan Station and Dunbar high schools in Fayette County, but his organization has conducted over 4,000 training sessions involving more than 230,000 school and law enforcement personnel over the past ten years. "They're hungry for it," he says of school safety protocols and data.

But trends in school disciplinary data are not easily tracked. And it's not always possible to know, for example if a decrease in suspensions means lax enforcement or improved student behavior; does it mean a retreat from a no-tolerance policy or an increase is supervisory personnel?

Nevertheless, not all the news from this report is good news. The number of disciplinary actions for terroristic threatening increased 74.2% over the five-year period and 11.9% between 2006-2007 and 2007-2008.

But is this really bad news? This is roughly the same time frame that bullying has come into the spotlight. I asked Akers about this and he agreed. The increased attention paid to student threats ultimately led to House Bill 91 - the anti-bully bill. "There's been a crack down on bullying," Akers said. A decade ago, school officials might not have considered a "hit list" to be a serious threat. "Today they treat it very differently," Aker said. And the same goes for some kid who writes a note saying "I'm going to get you."

Akers also said he believes high school principals are doing a better job of correctly identifying the elements of Kentucky law that distinguish the various levels of assault. "They're not just calling a fight aggravated assault if it doesn't meet the requirements of the law," he said. For example, a determination of first degree assault requires that a deadly weapon was used or that the perpetrator displayed extreme indifference to human life. The degree of injury matters. Whether the victim is a protected individual, like a teacher, matters.

Furthermore, disciplinary actions for alcohol violations increased 27.1% between 2006-2007 and 2007-2008. Additionally, Expulsions without Services for Law violations increased 20.5% over the five-year period and 56.7% from 2006-2007 to 2007-2008. These findings suggest that, despite the general good news regarding school safety in Kentucky, there are still areas where further study and efforts are needed.

Due to enhanced data collection procedures, this year’s report again provides information on board and Law Violations with regard to grade level, school type, socio-economic indicators, and drug use and distribution. This additional information offers a richer database and affords advanced exploration of the complexities of student behavior. Additionally, for the first time, this report includes a comparison of disciplinary actions between those students who have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) and those who do not.

These enhanced data collection procedures allowed us to identify distinct disciplinary action patterns by grade level, Board, and Law Violations. These data reveal that disciplinary actions for both Law and Board Violations increase dramatically between 5th and 6th grades and 8th and 9th grades. This pattern has held true for four years and supports a variety of anecdotal evidence that suggests these transition years are particularly difficult and that transition may lead to these increases in disciplinary actions.

Despite these enhancements, there are still shortcomings in the data collection process that, when addressed, will allow for much richer data analysis than is currently possible. The most important of these shortcomings involves the current inability to connect each disciplinary action to a particular student through a unique identifier. Currently, the discipline data are reported by infraction and disciplinary action. Although individual-level data (gender, ethnicity, grade, lunch type, special education classification, limited English proficiency, mobility, etc.) are available at the school level, we currently do not have access to that information. This makes it impossible for us to match disciplinary actions with individuals. If we had that capability, data analysis could be more thorough and detailed. For example, examination of offender recidivism is currently not possible...

SOURE: Kentucky Center for School Safety

School districts worry about safety budget cuts following recent Shootings

FRANKFORT, Ky. -- After five school shootings across the country in the past two weeks, Kentucky officials are grimacing at the prospect of a 58 percent cut in funding for school safety in the governor's proposed two-year budget.

"I don't want to play Chicken Little," said Jon Akers, director of the Kentucky Center for School Safety. "But … if we start pulling back our services in how we work with kids, we might be having some more problems here."

Gov. Steve Beshear's budget calls for $4.3 million for the safe-schools program each year, down from $10.4 million this year.

Akers said the cut in Beshear's proposed budget would virtually undo the work done by the center, which was established by the General Assembly in 1998 after a 14-year-old killed three students and injured five others at Heath High School in Paducah....

This fronm C-J.

Kentucky alternative schools scrutinized

Kentucky’s alternative education programs are getting a comprehensive look following a "snapshot" last year that revealed a host of serious problems.

That on-site sampling of 40 alternative programs in 37 Kentucky school districts turned up programs with shortcomings ranging from not having a six-hour instructional day to students having inadequate instructional materials. In some cases, those problems amounted to violations of state education laws and regulations.

Keith Travis, chairman of the state board of education, which ordered the initial review, said he was disappointed in the findings. "The general gist of it was they weren’t getting the full instructional value, which is unfortunate because many times those are the students who (most) need the full instructional value," he said.

The review was conducted for the board last year by the Kentucky Center for School Safety.

This from the Kentucky School Boards Association.