School Board discusses behavioral trends at workshop

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – During a lengthy workshop on April 10, the School Board of Alachua County heard a presentation on behavioral trends in the district.

Chief of Equity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement Anntwanique Edwards told the Board that nationally, black students are three times more likely to be cited for disciplinary infractions as white students and more than three times as likely to be suspended. She said that in our district, African American students are about one-third of the population but account for “more than 50%” of disciplinary incidents, “so we know that we have the disproportionality, and we are working with schools to address that.” She said that 51% of K-12 students account for 68% of the students who are referred to law enforcement. She added that black girls are “nearly two times more likely to receive one or more in-school suspensions. There’s a growing and alarming rate across the country of the disproportionality, especially of females, black females in particular.”

Edwards presented arrest data for the past five years, clarifying that youth are not technically arrested but are taken into custody based on a probable cause and charged with a law violation. 

In terms of subgroups, Edwards said, “Our black youth are way higher than other subgroups.” The chart below illustrates the number of unique discipline events by ethnicity/race:

• American Indian/Alaska: 3
• Asian: 51
• Black/African American: 4,417
• Hispanic or Latino: 574
• Multi-Racial: 566
• Pacific Islander: 12
• White: 990

The chart below illustrates the number of days suspended by race/ethnicity and by quarter; the list below provides the total numbers of suspension days to date and the number of students in that category in the district:

• American Indian/Alaska: 1 (39 students)
• Asian: 22 (1,466 students)
• Black/African American: 4481 (8,863 students)
• Hispanic/Latino: 494 (4,006 students)
• Multi-Racial: 11 (1,973 students)
• Pacific Islander: 11 (26 students)
• White: 809 (10,271 students)

Edwards said there were increases across the board from quarter to quarter, but “African American children are alarmingly high in comparison to other groups.” She added that elementary schools “are really struggling with addressing eloping – for people who don’t know, those may be your kids who get up and they just run and they might just keep on running and running, and they’re not in class.” 

Member Kay Abbitt referred to a chart (above) showing that the number of days students were suspended increased each quarter: “Would you expect if you had a behavior plan in place that was being implemented with fidelity… Would you expect those days to decrease?”

Edwards responded, “It depends. They decrease in some ways because there’s different factors that play into it.”

Rod Warner from Student Attendance said he was “super positive about everything.” He said the overall number of incidents and number of overall suspension days for the district were down over the last couple of years for secondary schools, but they’ve increased in elementary schools. It said it might be “because we’ve stressed different things.” He said there has been a “stigma” that it doesn’t look good if you “document too much,” but he wants to see everything documented, so he believes the increase is mainly in reporting. He said there are “a lot of challenges” right now with kindergarteners and first-graders, but there are also decreases with secondary students. 

“The real A. Quinn Jones”

Alberta “Bonnie” Bing, Principal of A. Quinn Jones (a district alternative school), said the students at the school are there for reasons ranging from disrupting classrooms to weapons possession and that  it’s a “major challenge” to separate students who’ve had weapons charges but are all placed at A. Quinn Jones. She said the number of students at her school changes almost daily because students are sent to her after court hearings. She said she’d originally been “upset” to be assigned to A. Quinn Jones, but now she is amazed by her faculty and staff. Bing said they have to teach the students how to behave at school before they can teach them to read. 

Bing said A. Quinn Jones is a school of last resort that not only takes Alachua County students who need an alternative placement but also takes students who may not be from Alachua County but maybe just left a residential facility and came to live with a relative here. If students “don’t make it” at SIATech, AMI Kids, or North Central Florida Charter School, for example, “Guess where they come? They come to A. Quinn.”

She continued, “We get students from all of the high schools, all of the middle schools. And so if there’s a major fight in the neighborhood, then they all come to A. Quinn Jones; it’s hard to separate them when you have – and I’m going to call it – east side/west side. My question to them is: which one of you own property? You’re fighting over something you don’t own. And so we talk about that.”

She said many of the students are smart, but teachers haven’t been able to tell because of their behavior. She concluded, “So I just wanted to introduce A. Quinn Jones, the real A. Quinn Jones. It is not the school for bad kids; it is not the school for bad teachers; it is not the school for bad parents; it is not the school for bad Assistant Principals; neither is it the school for a bad Principal.” She said that donations from businesses have allowed the school to have prizes that students can earn, and the school works to help students get jobs. 

96 students have been charged with firearm offenses this year, but most were not on school properties

Chair Diyonne McGraw said she was concerned about the “mixture of kids” and said she believed more training was needed to deal with potential behavior problems. She said last year’s presentation had 37 firearms cases, but this year they’re up to 96 firearms cases, and “I am truly concerned that we wake up one day and something drastic happens.” She said she was concerned about retaliation for shootings that are “now beginning to affect our schools” and students “selling drugs and things in our schools… You know, you’re not trying to scare people. It’s a reality.”

Member Tina Certain clarified that not all of the 96 firearms cases were on school properties; that’s the total for the community. McGraw agreed that was true but said, “What I want to be clear on and I’m gonna continue to say: these are kids who are in our system.”

Executive Director of Exceptional Student Education Kathy Black said, “There are 96 cases of Alachua County Public School students who have been in the juvenile courts with either a felony or misdemeanor charge related to a firearm; some of those events could have happened after hours on our campus. We would not know about them if they’re charged with a misdemeanor because we don’t get notification… But they’re not on-campus events; they are events with our students.”

McGraw said, “We can sit here and try to play this stuff down, but people are leaving. And you’re gonna lose more people, because teachers should come to school able to teach. You only get 50 minutes. If I got a lot of disruptions, how am I making sure kids are being taught?” McGraw asked Bing again about the challenges of having “a mixture of certain students all together” at one school.

Bing said that when students from different schools get into a fight at a football game, for example, “they may all end up at the same school – that’s a concern… We do have some that’s gang-related.” She said that since taking the job she had learned a lot, “just the verbiage that they have, the hidden symbols that’s on their shirts that I didn’t know anything about.”

Budget limits options for alternative schools

Member Sarah Rockwell said that any discussion about more funding for alternative schools would need to be balanced with all the other proposals that have been made, along with the “ESSER fiscal cliff” that is coming up soon. 

McGraw said she wanted to see options “with the resources that we already have… by next month.”

Certain said she was concerned about moving black students to an alternative school “if they’re not charged with a criminal felony… I just get the heebie-jeebies. I watched the movie Push Out where black students are pushed out of school for various reasons, and I’m not going to be privy to that.” She said she wanted to figure out what the options are for the “challenging behaviors that we’re seeing in our community from school-aged children.”

Edwards said that felony placements are usually not optional, but if a student is charged with a misdemeanor, which can include some firearms charges, “we can’t just take kids and put them somewhere else because it is comfortable for us.” She said her staff have been talking to Principals about “creative” solutions like alternative spaces on campuses. 

Concerns about gangs: “those kids have the right to be in school”

Edwards said the concern about gangs “is a very difficult one, because we have to remember that we’re a public school entity, so those kids have the right to be in school. But also, at the same time, we have to prioritize safety. And it becomes difficult when they’re on the same campus.” She said the problem can’t be solved just by the school district because it’s “really about how are we supporting families; some of those things happen with trauma because it is occurring first in the family system. And we have to be able to work with our entire system to provide those supports, we can’t do it all from the school district… It has to be everyone working together.”

McGraw said there may be options at other school sites without opening an entire new school building. She said the district is not “intervening enough, to me, when a kid ends up with 50 or 100 referrals.”

Since this was a workshop, no motions were made, and no votes were taken.