Keep NC Black students safe from COVID and discrimination, civil rights group says
North Carolina’s public schools must address the ongoing racial bias against Black students as they prepare to deal with education after COVID-19, a civil rights group says.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice released “racial equity report cards” on Thursday for the state and for individual school districts. They show that Black students are more likely to be suspended and referred to the court system than their white classmates.
The data is largely from the 2019-20 school year, when in-person instruction was cut short in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The total number of suspensions and school court referrals were down because of the school closures, but the coalition found that the rates were still disproportionately high for Black and brown students.
“The imperative is to actually implement reform and changes to school discipline that bring equity and a different kind of safety to Black and brown students when we return back to school in 2021,” Tyler Whittenberg, chief counsel for justice system reform with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in an interview Thursday.
“We want them to be safe from COVID . But we want them to also be safe against discrimination and exclusionary discipline.”
Whittenburg said there’s been some progress over the past year, such as how Gov. Roy Cooper’s task force on racial equity released dozens of recommendations in December. Several dealt with schools and juvenile justice, including revising the role of school resource officers and raising the age a child can be prosecuted in juvenile court.
Reports for this year and prior years can be found at https://rerc.southerncoalition.org/.
Racial disparities in suspensions
Among the findings in the 5th annual report:
▪ Black students received 54.9% of all short-term suspensions, even though they made up 24.8% of the state’s student population.
▪ White students received 26% of short-term suspensions, even though they accounted for 45.5% of the state’s enrollment.
▪ Black students were 3.9 times more likely to receive a short-term suspension than white students.
Similar patterns can be seen in individual North Carolina school districts:
▪ Black students in Wake County were 7.3 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro were 6.7 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Durham were 6.5 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Johnston County were 6 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
▪ Black students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg were 7.1 times more likely than white students to receive a short-term suspension.
School districts throughout North Carolina have worked to reduce suspensions, saying keeping students out of schools keeps them from learning.
Students call for removing school police
Supporters of school resource officers say they help keep students and teachers safe by having armed law enforcement officers on campus.
But Whittenberg says school resource officers also contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline by helping to push Black and brown students into the juvenile and adult criminal court systems.
Black students accounted for 49% of school-based juvenile court complaints referred to the justice system. White students only accounted for 35.2% of the referrals.
In Wake County, Black students accounted for 75.3% of the school-based juvenile complaints while making up 22.4% of the district’s enrollment. in Durham, Black students accounted for 64% of the school-based complaints while making up 41.6% of the student population.
Whittenberg pointed to how students in Wake and Durham have held protests over the past year calling for replacing school resource officers with mental health professionals. These protests were fueled in part by nationwide anger over the deaths of George Floyd and other Black people at the hands of white police officers.
“Instead of paying for more officers, we should be paying for more professionals of the other kind to try to change the school culture,” Whittenberg said.
The Wake County school board has said it will continue to have school resource officers but will seek community input as it revises the agreement that govern how officers operate in schools. A protest will be held Monday afternoon outside the school district’s headquarters in Cary calling for “meaningful changes” in the agreement.
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
