Current Issue in Guilford County Education--Too many suspensions

Doug Clark, an editorialist from the Greensboro News and Record, recently published a column detailing some statistics of suspensions amongst Guilford County Schools middle and high school students. In response to this he wrote the following column, which I have pasted on this blog. Also, I have added a couple of comments from his blog that I found interesting. Let me know if you think this will work.


Doug Clark
Troubled students need tough love
Greensboro News and Record
December 07, 2005

I hope Board of Education member Amos Quick does pull together a "suspension summit" featuring students who have been removed from school.
The views of troubled young people need to be heard. Understanding their problems can be the first step toward correcting them. ...
Guilford County certainly has a problem. The number of crimes reported in schools rose last year, including a 40 percent jump in possession of weapons. Seven thousand students were suspended, more than 500 of them for more than 10 days.
The numbers tell us how many incidents involved weapons, how many drugs, how many assaults and so on. The students can tell us why. What's going wrong in their lives that causes them to commit crimes or other offenses at school, which in turn requires them to be barred from class?
Some people think they know the answer. School board member Deena Hayes believes that black students who are suspended from school shouldn't be blamed. They have been mistreated at school; they're victims of a hostile environment, she said at a forum last week. That's one message these young people could be given at a suspension summit. They could be told that the fault lies with teachers and principals rather than themselves. They're misunderstood, or discriminated against, or misjudged, or poorly taught.
There might even be some truth to that, in a few cases. No system, composed as it is of fallible human beings, operates without making mistakes. People aren't free of prejudices, and it's possible that some let personal feelings influence how they respond to some students.
Instances when school discipline was administered improperly should be investigated. Opportunities to improve the way school officials deal with troublesome students must be explored. Kicking a child out of school is a terrible way to educate him.
But it's also necessary to face facts. A weapon is a weapon, no matter who carries it into school. The same with drugs. It's hard to claim discrimination. Besides, students of every race and ethnicity were cited for these offenses, and students of every race and ethnicity are endangered by them.
So, I hope that a suspension summit will be attended by community leaders who will use the occasion to communicate some important points to students who have gotten into trouble at school. Along these lines:
"Thanks for coming and for explaining the circumstances that led to your suspensions. We take what you say very seriously, and now we hope that you will listen to us. We very much want to help you.
"Our first advice is that you do everything you can to stay in school and learn. If you want to have any kind of future at all, you have to graduate. You will fail if your actions and attitudes cause you to be removed from class. This means you have to follow the rules and respect people in authority, most of whom are working very hard in your best interest.
"Please understand what it means when you act up in school, when you're disruptive, when you make it hard for teachers to teach and for other students to learn. You become a problem. You become expendable, as in someone it's better to do without than to work with. If you're thought of that way in school, you'll be thought of that way at your place of employment, if you can find a job, and even in the community where you live. The ultimate expression of that is being sent to prison. No one wants that to happen.
"We're here to prevent that. We'll try to do that by filling in the places where life has let you down so far. If you need caring adults in your life, we'll provide mentors. If you need help studying, we'll give you tutors. If you need places to go where you can have positive experiences and stay out of trouble, we'll offer churches, recreation facilities, boys' and girls' clubs and other programs.
"You've got to make a decision. Do you want to continue on your present course or try a different direction? If your complaint is with 'the system,' well, maybe you're right because the system expects you to work hard and follow the rules. If you think you can change the system by the way you're going now, you've got some hard lessons yet to learn.
"The bottom line is this: We need you to succeed. We've seen too many failures already, too many dropouts, too many young people washed into the juvenile justice system, too many adults stuck in dead-end jobs or unable to find any work at all, too many men and women without hope and falling into drug addiction, alcoholism or wasting their best years behind bars. We're sick of it, and we just can't tolerate it anymore. We owe it to you, we owe it to the kids who are trying to do well in school, and we owe it to ourselves to turn you around before it's too late.
"So, yes, tell us when you've been wronged, and we'll do what we can to make it right. But tell us where you've been wrong and let us help make you right. Because, ultimately, your life is your responsibility."

Here are a few comments from his blog:

I'll tell you what would solve this problem overnight. Have the NC legislature enact a law requiring that if a child misbehaves while in school, the parent or guardian of that child, MUST leave work, travel to the school and assist in dealing with the problem. Under the threat of the potential of losing a job as a result of a misbehaving child and having to leave work, most parents would deal with this issue in a forceful manner at home. Oh, I forgot, most of the parents of these kids that misbehave on a consistent basis don't have REAL jobs, and whose kids are a reflection of their dysfunctional parents.

Mr. Clark,
I agree with everything you said and it pretty much takes any hopes for debate away.
The reality of it, in my opinion, is that some students are raised to fail, interstingly enough, the parents that are raising them to fail are pretty much 100 percent unaware of what they are doing to their kids. Because, in the black community a lot of the parents are drop outs or just uninterested in book knowledge. There are always those few kids who overcome and everyone on the outside looking in says "they made it out of the ghetto, so why can't you." Those are exceptions to the norm, the focus needs to be on the norm. There is a reality that some people are just not going to get it, because they have no idea what "it" is. It's sad, because most young brothers and sisters could do do well if they had a true family life, you know with a mother and father that works, a house to live in and peace of mind. When they get suspended they are pretty much prepared for it, because failure is what is expected, when compliance with authorites is hoped for. This is not a problem that began in 2004 or 2005, this problem began many, many moons ago and will persist until some form of leadership is willing to go all out to remove this ignorance, by using all available resources for our childrens future, you know, similar to what's going on in Iraq. There is a part of the population that believes we should not, this is funny, "cut and run" cut and run what a 1960's type of statement. Oh yeah school kids is my topic. Maybe they should research the affects of slavery and the lack of a formal education during those times and see what type of residue from not being able to go to school, like white kids, and they should research how black slaves had to sneak to learn from masters kids. Then they lived in fear if they know they have learned to read, hence we had slaves that had to act ignorant. Just like in todays times it's true, some black folks love to not know educational info, they seem to act like it's a crime to know some book knowledge. It may be possible that is why traditionally you have under-achivement from black students. But as usual the majority in Greensboro is probably so afraid of the topic that we let the opporunity to learn slip right on by...