The South Bend Community Schools board is forming a committee to study why Black students are nearly twice as likely to be disciplined. It's an old issue but at their meeting Monday night, the board vowed to take a new more rigorous approach to tackling it.
Board attorney Pete Agostino cited numbers from a periodic discipline report the corporation filed in November, in its federal 1980 desegregation consent decree.
“We’ve got 63% of the discipline cases involving Black students but they only make up a little over 30% of the population," Agostino said. "The question is why is that occurring?”
Agostino said they’ll first study how the code of conduct has been enforced without looking at race to make sure it's consistent. Then they’ll take what he called a deep dive into the data that includes race.
He credited prior calls to address the problem by Regina Williams Preston, a former corporation teacher and administrator.
”I think one of the things she talked about was subjective behavior versus objective behavior because there are reports out there that tend to show that the big difference comes in the area of subjective, where Black students are disciplined at a higher rate based on defiance, disrespect, insubordination, versus the objective offenses where you can say, did a person do something or didn’t they?”
