Mirroring the nation, Clarke County public schools disproportionately punish black students for behavior infractions, according to a University of Georgia research study.
African American males comprise about one-fourth of the overall Clarke County School District enrollment, but were slightly more than half the discipline cases in three school years from 2014 to 2017, UGA researcher Richard Welsh recently told the Clarke County Board of Education.
The disproportional discipline for African American students with disabilities is even greater, Welsh said. Those students are about 6 percent of the school district’s enrollment, but account for 18 percent of disciplinary actions.
The differences are not the results of different levels of misbehavior, said Welsh, a professor in UGA’s College of Education.
The effect of race on disciplinary outcomes is even stronger than gender, according to Welsh, who studies school discipline nationwide.
But the reason is not racism, said Welsh, who is a UGA district-wide professor-in-residence in the Clarke County public school system in a partnership with UGA's College of Education. Student discipline is "a very complex phenomenon," said Welsh, who called his research "very preliminary."
School districts across the nation are grappling with this problem: trying to find a middle ground between punitive and restorative methods and a way to reduce the days of learning students lose when they are suspended from school.
Having more adults in school is another approach, but that approach can actually be harmful if those adults are not property trained and deployed, Welsh said.
“Resource allocation is as important as more (resources),” he said.
Some school districts revise their codes of conduct and adopt methods that depend more on positive reinforcement. Those changes can result in fewer overall discipline cases, but it seems to do little to reduce the racial disparity, Welsh has found in earlier research.
That may be happening in Clarke County, which has also changed its conduct code and implemented restorative justice policies.
As the school year draws to a close, behavior referrals are on track to be down sharply this year from last year, from about 11,000 to around 8,000, said Heidi Hill, executive director of special education and behavior supports for the Clarke County School District.
That means black students as well as other students were significantly less likely to be referred for discipline, but the ratios didn't change a lot.
Black students were 3.62 times as likely to get a discipline referral this year, down slightly from 3.92 two years earlier.
"We feel like we're having a strong effect, but we've still got a long way to go," said David Brown, a coordinator of behavior supports for the school district.
Next year the school district will have nine “behavior specialists” to help, up from six this year.
"We have to do something different, drastically different," said Clarke County schools Superintendent Demond Means. “Those are tough conversations, but we’re having them.”
Welsh is leaving the university for a post at New York University, but his research in Clarke County schools is not over. He's also going to examine differences among schools within Clarke County, he said.