Several local school districts appear to have a higher number of disciplinary incidents than their counterparts around the state, but administrators say flawed collection of information is tainting available data.
Seven of the nine school districts in Pike County and its surrounding counties ranked in the top half of the state in the number of student discipline incidents reported last year, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Education.
Two school districts, however, Brookhaven and Lincoln County, barely reported any incidents at all, joining 27 other districts statewide with 50 or fewer reported incidents for the school year.
The variation could stem from disagreement over what districts should consider to be an expulsion or suspension, and also whether an incident should be recorded in only one category if, for example, a student caught fighting is also in possession of a weapon.
“We all have the same guidelines,” said Debbie Hopf, incoming Amite County School District superintendent, who currently serves as the district’s curriculum and testing coordinator. “There’s just a little bit left to the interpretation.”
State guidelines mandate the categories under which an infraction can be logged, and certain types of serious offenses must be reported within 72 hours.
Most are self-explanatory labels, such as “alcohol” or “theft.”
But others are ambiguous. What is considered “fighting” in one school district goes unreported as a shoving match in another. And just how severe the punishment of a lesser offense must be to gain the “suspension” label is largely left to the discretion of individual districts.
For example, administrators in the McComb School District reported 10 suspensions for staff assault in 2006-07, but said none were cases of a student actually attacking a teacher.
“It’s not seen as a problem,” community/school liaison Greg Gilmore said. “Where that comes from is if a kid breaks through or pushes a teacher out of the way as they’re going to another location, we consider that a staff assault. They are not actually physically assaulting the teacher.”
The category, by the state department of education’s definition, can also include verbal threats.
“It depends on how threatened the teacher felt,” Gilmore said.
To that end, the district has cut red tape that previously took discipline cases for disrespect or subordination through higher channels.
“We began the school year saying that we were not going to tolerate subordination, disrespect or profanity,” said interim superintendent Therese Palmertree. “We wanted the reaction to be swift and the consequences to be memorable.”
Palmertree said turnover among teachers had been a problem in the district, and letting principals handle problems more directly had helped “draw a line in the sand.”
And aside from state-reported data, Palmertree said school-specific data helps the district find out where and when incidents are occurring, in addition to what kind of problems are popping up.
Still, the confusion over what discipline data really shows prompted State Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds to tell The Associated Press last month he didn’t doubt both purposeful and accidental incorrect information gathering.
And even assuming correct numbers, the raw totals can be misleading: Amite County, for instance, reported possession of drugs offenses at nearly five times the state rate per student population in 2006-2007, but with a comparatively small student population, the actual number of incidents was 11.
Most local districts defined a suspension to include minor infractions, but also listed many under “non-criminal behavior,” limiting the availability of specific information on what types of problems were occurring. The state department of education defines non-criminal behavior as “any incident which is a violation of school policy that is not a violation of the law.”
Dr. Ben Cox, superintendent of North Pike School District, said his district had been instructed by the state to use the category unless law enforcement officials were involved.
“Any type of office visits that we have, we put that in the computer,” said Cox. “So if a child is talking in class and it’s serious enough for the teacher to send him or her to the office then that would be logged into the school district.”
The result: North Pike led the area with 1,031 suspensions in 2006-2007.
“We always strive to have fewer office referrals, but we don’t want to go to the point where our administrators tell our teachers not to send students to the office,” Cox said. “It’s a balancing act. If you go too far that way then you’ve got teachers with disruptive students in their classroom and they’re afraid to send them to the office.”
Other local districts reporting a comparatively high number of incidents had similar experiences.
South Pike High School principal Warren Banks provided his district’s data collection policy, which spelled out that all referrals to administration and punishments should be entered into the district’s files.
And Lawrence County High School Principal Daryl Scoggin said counting visits to his office as in-school suspensions had bumped up the numbers there, too. “A lot of times the action that you take determines the infraction that is coded” more than the violation itself, said Scoggin.
But Brookhaven and Lincoln County administrators had far more stringent criteria to meet before calling an incident a suspension, preferring to mediate problems with students’ families when possible.
Brookhaven School District Superintendent Lea Barrett said her rule of thumb was to report a suspension whenever an incident was significant enough “to cause a disturbance in the learning environment.” That categorization, Barrett said, might not include even out-of-school suspensions if they were for a problem that didn’t disrupt class and could be quickly resolved by communication with parents.
Reporting methods were comparable in Lincoln County, where Assistant Superintendent Letha Presley said suspension and expulsion data was limited to students recommended for a disciplinary hearing.
“Typically most of our hearings are on kids that bring knives or have a severe fight,” Presley said. “We just have some good students. We don’t have a lot of gang-related activities or violent acts.”
But since the data is what it is, number collectors can only hope that’s really the case around the state.
For more information on disciplinary statistics, see the Mississippi Department of Education’s definitions for infractions and definitions, available online at: http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/msis/documents/Incidents_Dispositions_2007-2008.pdf .
