East High School student Terrance Covington finds it in seating charts in some of his classes, where the majority of black students are assigned to sit in the front. Denfeld High School sophomore Donnie White notices it when he walks down the hall during class. Staff have asked the black student for a hall pass, he said, while white students walking in the same hall might get a greeting instead of the same question. And Denfeld senior Lorenzo Smith sees it in the way discipline is handled, recounting an incident in which he was sent out of class to a behavior referral room for being 20 seconds late. “We are always being looked at differently; like you’re the wild card,” said Covington, a senior. “We always have to be supervised, like we can’t be controlled.” Each of these students - all black - describes treatment by some Duluth school district teachers, support staff and administrators that they say stems from the color of their skin. And that treatment is reflected in disproportionate suspension rates for black students, seen in district data and across the nation. Though black males represent less than 5 percent of students enrolled in the Duluth district, that group made up 20 percent of out-of-school suspensions between 2008 and 2014, according to data provided by the Duluth school district and reviewed by the News Tribune. (One year of district data - for 2012-13 - was taken out because of data-entry mistakes made at Denfeld High School.) White males, 43 percent of enrollment during that time, were given about 41 percent of the out-of-school suspensions - numbers in proportion with each other. These differences persist despite dramatic reductions in the overall number of days students are suspended out of school districtwide. That number decreased by about 34 percent from the 2008-09 school year to last school year, with reductions each year except for 2010-11 and last school year.
Enrollment also dropped, by more than 10 percent, from 2008 through last school year. The district has made reducing suspensions a priority, partly through changes in how it handles punishment for nonviolent behavior. It is also working with its educators and other staff to help them gain better understanding of different cultures and backgrounds. Duluth’s teachers must juggle that kind of work - which ultimately helps to foster stronger relationships with kids - with managing the issues that come with overcrowded classrooms and the pressure that comes with state testing demands. Teaching kids, teaching teachers Principals and assistant principals generally make the decision to suspend, but teachers and support staff are often the witnesses to bad behavior, and make initial reports. According to district data, the top three reasons for suspensions are assaults, fights and offenses that fall into a wide-ranging, open to interpretation category that includes acts of insubordination, disruption and disorderly conduct. District administrators seem to agree that alternatives for suspension don’t generally work in cases involving violence - that a separation from school for safety reasons and to formulate a plan for re-entry are necessary, along with finding ways to help change behavior. But in many other instances, it’s thought that mediation, counseling, in-school suspension and other forms of treatment are better options and help keep kids in classrooms. Some schools are turning to those alternatives in lieu of kicking kids out. “When kids are having a hard time reading, we teach,” said climate coordinator Ron Lake, who deals with districtwide discipline issues. “When kids are having a hard time getting along, we should teach. Suspension typically doesn’t change behavior.” [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2878941","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"464","title":"","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]] And it keeps kids out of the classroom. Since the 2008-09 school year, black students - less than 10 percent of enrollment - accounted for 31 percent of the 12,880 days lost to suspension. And that’s a group for which the achievement gap continues to be a problem. The gap, which involves disparities in academic performance between groups, such as students of color and white students, can’t be closed until the discipline problem is addressed, said Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA. Getting at the disproportionate suspension numbers takes continual work, school officials say. Efforts last school year included staff and community training on historical and generational trauma related to minority cultures, engaging parents and the community and creating positive school climates. Those efforts continue this school year, with one staff training already held in late August. But it’s more than just professional development, Lake said. It takes community support, and helping kids come up with different ways to relate to each other and regulate their emotions. RELATED: Staff training helps reduce disproportional suspension rates, but it's not as simple as it sounds Why the disparity? A recent study done by Stanford University researchers shows that teachers are more likely to see repeated misbehavior by a student as a problem if the student is black rather than white. Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua’s research included asking teachers from all over the country to look at two minor behavior incidents and judge their severity. Stereotypical black and white names - Darnell or DeShawn for black students or Greg or Jake for white students - were assigned to the incidents. The researchers found that racial stereotypes influenced the response of the teacher after the second infraction. “The more likely the teachers were to think the student was black … the more likely they were to label the student a troublemaker,” according to a research article published in Psychological Science. The researchers said racial disparities in discipline are a problem because they contribute to the achievement gap, and increase the likelihood that black students will drop out of school or be incarcerated. The issue isn’t unique to Duluth; black males are suspended at higher rates than other students across the country. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of more than 12,000 U.S. school districts showed that 21 percent suspended at least one of every four black secondary school students during the 2011-2012 school year. And it’s happening for a number of reasons. Implicit biases and stereotypes are “more intensely negative against black males” than any other group, Losen said. And they have been “since slavery. … It’s a legacy of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination in our nation.” That shows up in the classroom, experts say, and affects how black students act in school. “Black males are often seen as being aggressive and scary,” said Sam Simmons, a Twin Cities-based behavioral consultant hired by the district to help with training. “I am 6-foot-4. I walk into a room and the room will change.” If a white woman, for example, says she feels threatened by a black man, people believe it, whether or not there is reason for her to feel that way, he said. “And if I am not managing my frustration or emotions, I am fighting back,” Simmons said, referring to minority students. “Because that’s what I do, where I come from.” That’s an example of how minor misbehavior, exacerbated by misunderstanding and mistrust, can escalate into something that is cause for discipline. White, the Denfeld sophomore, said he was suspended many times in middle school, and not always for what he feels were legitimate reasons. Sometimes he was provoked, and things escalated from there, he said. One incident involved him accidentally hitting a white girl with a ball in gym class. She called him an obscenity, he said, and when he told her not to, she did it again. He threatened to hit her with the ball, this time on purpose, and the teacher overheard, sending him out of class. To his knowledge, the girl was not reprimanded for her cursing. Sometimes certain behaviors are a cultural thing, or a way of life, said Bill Howes, coordinator of the district’s Office of Education Equity. Whether it’s cursing or physical contact, ideas of what’s normal or appropriate mean different things to different people, he said. “Obviously, an assault is an assault, and has to be addressed,” Howes said, but there are “unfortunate fears we have of people based on their backgrounds. It can be where they live, where they come from … or it can be about somebody’s race.” Culturally, people deal with stress and conflict in different ways, he said, which can result in problems. Some students don’t realize that expectations for school behavior could be different than what they experience at home, said Duluth superintendent Bill Gronseth. “Waiting in line, waiting your turn, lowering your voice; those are pieces we have to teach,” he said, “and recognize it may be a cultural difference not just between races and religion, but in life experience.” Denfeld integration specialist Aaron Gelineau sees how family structure and culture can play into behaviors. In his job dealing with at-risk kids, he worked with a black student who had been in a fight. She explained to him that when she was little, someone picked on her. Her mom told her, he said, “‘If you get beat up, you better find a way to beat her up before you come home.’ That’s the culture of her family. It’s a survival skill some of these kids are taught.” When kids grow up in families that use violence to correct behavior, or verbal and emotional abuse, it shows them that’s how you fit in in the world, Lake said, and it comes out at school. “And it’s violent behavior that often leads to suspension regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender,” he said. Officials say there’s no question that out-of-school suspensions are a fair response to violent behavior at school - but steps also can be taken to reach students from those backgrounds before trouble happens. Setting expectations Claudie Washington, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, said the expectations some teachers have of black students have much to do with the discipline problem. Some teachers “don’t have high enough expectations of our kids to demand and get them to perform at the level they are capable of performing at,” he said. “Kids gravitate to the level that’s expected of them.” During a 2000 NAACP speech about the achievement gap, President George W. Bush called that “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Washington said it’s often easier for white teachers to identify with white students, because it is what they know. That can lead to treating black students differently. “He knows what you’re doing …that kid sees that. After four or five years of that, he’s really angry,” Washington said, and that treatment shapes the student’s personality and attitude. “If you were treating all kids the same and teaching all kids the same, there wouldn’t be this problem.” Students who are nurtured - by family, the community and educators - do better no matter their color, he said. Former assistant superintendent and Denfeld principal Ed Crawford said implicit bias exists in Duluth classrooms, as it does everywhere. “I believe it’s unconscious, but it contributes to some disparity you see in the manner that students are disciplined,” he said. “You go in with the values you have. The kids you are educating are not (necessarily) of the same mindset you are in.” Teachers in the Duluth district are largely middle-class white women, said Rogier Gregoire, a retired educator and member of the city of Duluth’s Human Rights Commission. “These are people whose cultural and social backgrounds don’t prepare them,” he said, for the baggage some kids bring to school, such as homelessness or having a single parent. “The teacher says they have to serve the majority,” Gregoire said. “That’s the core of the problem of what gets children of color suspended. They are treated as ‘the other.’ ” The Duluth district - which this past year served about 8,600 students - employed just three black teachers and one black administrator out of about 643 full- and part-time teachers and about 20 building-level administrators, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education and the district. These figures do not include support staff. The number of black male teachers is low nationwide, at just 2 percent, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released in May. The district’s minority student enrollment was 20.9 percent last year, with just under half of that black students. Understanding kids Other groups of students are also suspended at disproportionate rates. District data showed that despite making up about 15 percent of district enrollment, special education students accounted for 46 percent of those suspensions from 2008 to 2014. And students living in poverty make up just under half of district enrollment, but they’ve been given more than 80 percent of suspensions for those years. In the data, there are individual students who may be included in several of those groups. Students who receive special education services are often suspended at higher rates because they haven’t been given adequate behavioral assessments or improvement plans, said the Civil Rights Project’s Losen. Educators can be “too quick to suspend these kids rather than work with them and their (individualized education plans) to make sure they are in a proper setting and getting the right amount of supports and services,” he said. “And when they are cut off from school, they are cut off from other services.” Dealing with behaviors that are manifestations of a disability is challenging, Gronseth said. Often a behavior is beyond a student’s control. When that happens, he said, staff need to study what is happening, find out what is triggering it and work to support the student to prevent the behavior from occurring. Staff may also need to try different techniques and approaches for some students who live in poverty. Those kids, one expert says, are “constantly on the lookout for threats.” Paul Tough, author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” spoke at an Education Writers Association conference in Boston in May. He said that kids living in poverty need interventions before they begin school if they are to succeed. When “stressed out” kids begin school they don’t learn to read on time because of anxiety, he said, and because their “fight or flight” response is on high alert, they are more likely to get in fights, talk back to teachers or check out from school. “We blame these kids, label them, say they have attention difficulties, a bad attitude,” he said. “We try to shake their behavior with punishments and rewards.” But researchers have found that doesn’t work, especially with kids growing up with “serious adversity,” he said. Helping them form different mindsets to become more motivated and gritty and bounce back from disappointments can change the way they behave at school, he said. Early learning opportunities go a long way in helping kids succeed, Gronseth said. The district’s large population of kids living in poverty often begin kindergarten on an unequal playing field. They haven’t had the opportunities of other kids, he said. “Anything from playing T-ball to going to preschool or a structured daycare, nutrition, health care, early screenings, vision and dental care … Some kindergarten-screened kids have never had their hands on a book,” he said. “It all plays a role in creating that gap we’re seeing.” Pushing aside biases At Lincoln Park Middle School, assistant principal Jacob Hintsala and dean of students Joanna Walters make most of the suspension decisions. “We are working hard to keep everything ‘in-school suspension’ as much as possible,” Walters said, except for more “cut and dried” cases, such as violence and drug possession. When it comes to the insubordination and disorderly conduct category, an out-of-school suspension might be assigned for “major disrespect” for a teacher or staff member, or disruption of instruction. This past year, 33 percent of behavior referrals were pegged to the disorderly conduct category, although only some of those turned into an out-of-school suspension. Since 2012, when kids from Morgan Park Middle School - known for its high rates of suspensions - transitioned to the new Lincoln Park, the number of days lost to suspension have been reduced by more than half. Hintsala said he and Walters are “hypersensitive” to the backgrounds of students when considering discipline. “Sometimes what’s happening at school is minor compared to what’s happening at home,” he said, stressing the need for more mental health help in the community and at the school, which has waiting lists for its therapists. “We try to step into every situation and understand our biases and push them aside,” Hintsala said of the two, who started a practice at Lincoln Park called “focus walks” that they or support staff take with misbehaving kids to deter bad behavior and get them back on track and in the classroom. At East, where days lost to suspension have declined annually from a peak in 2011-12, when a chunk of students from the closed Central High School began attending, assistant principal Jon Flaa handles much of the discipline. Policy dictates some behaviors automatically mean suspension, like for drug use or fighting, he said. But if it’s subjective, “I am always thinking about what I can do to get this kid back into the classroom and learn,” he said. “Suspension is that last thing on my list of options.” He and other administrators started a weekend restorative program at East in 2012, that allows truant students to make up time and be paired with a student tutor. It’s been effective, he said, in changing some behaviors and getting kids to care about school. Lincoln Park staff think about the implications of suspension, Walters said, referring to the school-to-prison pipeline. The phrase points to school practices and policies - such as suspension - that can push students into the criminal justice system. “It’s easier to suspend,” she said. “But we don’t want to do the easy thing.” Maude Dornfeld is director of Life House in Duluth, which offers support to homeless youth. She sees many kids who are “disenfranchised” from school; who have dropped out, or been suspended. “They have a trauma response,” she said, “when you suggest they might want to go back to school. It’s been a really negative experience for them. … (They have) no real successes or enjoyment related to school.” Giving a punitive response in school for bad behavior - like a suspension, she said, “is creating model inmates, not model citizens.” Some students notice the difference in district policy, and some don’t. Denfeld’s Gelineau said he worked with a black female student last year who came to Duluth from Chicago. She told him some of the behaviors happening at Denfeld would mean expulsion at a zero-tolerance school in Chicago. But at Denfeld, there is trouble-shooting. “It’s a whole new world for her,” he said. But Denfeld’s Smith said his negative experiences have led to distrust of authority, citing several times he’s felt disciplinary action taken toward him was unfair. “They don’t understand how to talk to us, or how to relate,” Smith said. “They look at us like we are full of B.S. … like they have it out for me.” East’s Covington - a varsity basketball player who hopes to pursue a business degree at a four-year university next year - hasn’t been disciplined since he was a middle school student in Duluth. Then, he said, punishment for him seemed harsher than it was for white students. In high school, differing treatment toward him is still frustrating, but it’s more subtle. He pointed to the seating charts and staff who focus more intently on black students in class. “But we don’t say anything,” Covington said. “Dealing with this as long as I have; you just learn to accept it.” Tina Gajda of the News Tribune contributed data reporting for this story. East High School student Terrance Covington finds it in seating charts in some of his classes, where the majority of black students are assigned to sit in the front. Denfeld High School sophomore Donnie White notices it when he walks down the hall during class. Staff have asked the black student for a hall pass, he said, while white students walking in the same hall might get a greeting instead of the same question. And Denfeld senior Lorenzo Smith sees it in the way discipline is handled, recounting an incident in which he was sent out of class to a behavior referral room for being 20 seconds late. “We are always being looked at differently; like you’re the wild card,” said Covington, a senior. “We always have to be supervised, like we can’t be controlled.” Each of these students - all black - describes treatment by some Duluth school district teachers, support staff and administrators that they say stems from the color of their skin. And that treatment is reflected in disproportionate suspension rates for black students, seen in district data and across the nation. Though black males represent less than 5 percent of students enrolled in the Duluth district, that group made up 20 percent of out-of-school suspensions between 2008 and 2014, according to data provided by the Duluth school district and reviewed by the News Tribune. (One year of district data - for 2012-13 - was taken out because of data-entry mistakes made at Denfeld High School.) White males, 43 percent of enrollment during that time, were given about 41 percent of the out-of-school suspensions - numbers in proportion with each other. These differences persist despite dramatic reductions in the overall number of days students are suspended out of school districtwide. That number decreased by about 34 percent from the 2008-09 school year to last school year, with reductions each year except for 2010-11 and last school year. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2878856","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","title":"","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"452"}}]] Enrollment also dropped, by more than 10 percent, from 2008 through last school year. The district has made reducing suspensions a priority, partly through changes in how it handles punishment for nonviolent behavior. It is also working with its educators and other staff to help them gain better understanding of different cultures and backgrounds. Duluth’s teachers must juggle that kind of work - which ultimately helps to foster stronger relationships with kids - with managing the issues that come with overcrowded classrooms and the pressure that comes with state testing demands. Teaching kids, teaching teachers Principals and assistant principals generally make the decision to suspend, but teachers and support staff are often the witnesses to bad behavior, and make initial reports. According to district data, the top three reasons for suspensions are assaults, fights and offenses that fall into a wide-ranging, open to interpretation category that includes acts of insubordination, disruption and disorderly conduct. District administrators seem to agree that alternatives for suspension don’t generally work in cases involving violence - that a separation from school for safety reasons and to formulate a plan for re-entry are necessary, along with finding ways to help change behavior. But in many other instances, it’s thought that mediation, counseling, in-school suspension and other forms of treatment are better options and help keep kids in classrooms. Some schools are turning to those alternatives in lieu of kicking kids out. “When kids are having a hard time reading, we teach,” said climate coordinator Ron Lake, who deals with districtwide discipline issues. “When kids are having a hard time getting along, we should teach. Suspension typically doesn’t change behavior.”
And it keeps kids out of the classroom. Since the 2008-09 school year, black students - less than 10 percent of enrollment - accounted for 31 percent of the 12,880 days lost to suspension. And that’s a group for which the achievement gap continues to be a problem. The gap, which involves disparities in academic performance between groups, such as students of color and white students, can’t be closed until the discipline problem is addressed, said Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA. Getting at the disproportionate suspension numbers takes continual work, school officials say. Efforts last school year included staff and community training on historical and generational trauma related to minority cultures, engaging parents and the community and creating positive school climates. Those efforts continue this school year, with one staff training already held in late August. But it’s more than just professional development, Lake said. It takes community support, and helping kids come up with different ways to relate to each other and regulate their emotions. RELATED: Staff training helps reduce disproportional suspension rates, but it's not as simple as it sounds Why the disparity? A recent study done by Stanford University researchers shows that teachers are more likely to see repeated misbehavior by a student as a problem if the student is black rather than white. Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua’s research included asking teachers from all over the country to look at two minor behavior incidents and judge their severity. Stereotypical black and white names - Darnell or DeShawn for black students or Greg or Jake for white students - were assigned to the incidents. The researchers found that racial stereotypes influenced the response of the teacher after the second infraction. “The more likely the teachers were to think the student was black … the more likely they were to label the student a troublemaker,” according to a research article published in Psychological Science. The researchers said racial disparities in discipline are a problem because they contribute to the achievement gap, and increase the likelihood that black students will drop out of school or be incarcerated. The issue isn’t unique to Duluth; black males are suspended at higher rates than other students across the country. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of more than 12,000 U.S. school districts showed that 21 percent suspended at least one of every four black secondary school students during the 2011-2012 school year. And it’s happening for a number of reasons. Implicit biases and stereotypes are “more intensely negative against black males” than any other group, Losen said. And they have been “since slavery. … It’s a legacy of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination in our nation.” That shows up in the classroom, experts say, and affects how black students act in school. “Black males are often seen as being aggressive and scary,” said Sam Simmons, a Twin Cities-based behavioral consultant hired by the district to help with training. “I am 6-foot-4. I walk into a room and the room will change.” If a white woman, for example, says she feels threatened by a black man, people believe it, whether or not there is reason for her to feel that way, he said. “And if I am not managing my frustration or emotions, I am fighting back,” Simmons said, referring to minority students. “Because that’s what I do, where I come from.” That’s an example of how minor misbehavior, exacerbated by misunderstanding and mistrust, can escalate into something that is cause for discipline. White, the Denfeld sophomore, said he was suspended many times in middle school, and not always for what he feels were legitimate reasons. Sometimes he was provoked, and things escalated from there, he said. One incident involved him accidentally hitting a white girl with a ball in gym class. She called him an obscenity, he said, and when he told her not to, she did it again. He threatened to hit her with the ball, this time on purpose, and the teacher overheard, sending him out of class. To his knowledge, the girl was not reprimanded for her cursing. Sometimes certain behaviors are a cultural thing, or a way of life, said Bill Howes, coordinator of the district’s Office of Education Equity. Whether it’s cursing or physical contact, ideas of what’s normal or appropriate mean different things to different people, he said. “Obviously, an assault is an assault, and has to be addressed,” Howes said, but there are “unfortunate fears we have of people based on their backgrounds. It can be where they live, where they come from … or it can be about somebody’s race.” Culturally, people deal with stress and conflict in different ways, he said, which can result in problems. Some students don’t realize that expectations for school behavior could be different than what they experience at home, said Duluth superintendent Bill Gronseth. “Waiting in line, waiting your turn, lowering your voice; those are pieces we have to teach,” he said, “and recognize it may be a cultural difference not just between races and religion, but in life experience.” Denfeld integration specialist Aaron Gelineau sees how family structure and culture can play into behaviors. In his job dealing with at-risk kids, he worked with a black student who had been in a fight. She explained to him that when she was little, someone picked on her. Her mom told her, he said, “‘If you get beat up, you better find a way to beat her up before you come home.’ That’s the culture of her family. It’s a survival skill some of these kids are taught.” When kids grow up in families that use violence to correct behavior, or verbal and emotional abuse, it shows them that’s how you fit in in the world, Lake said, and it comes out at school. “And it’s violent behavior that often leads to suspension regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender,” he said. Officials say there’s no question that out-of-school suspensions are a fair response to violent behavior at school - but steps also can be taken to reach students from those backgrounds before trouble happens. Setting expectations Claudie Washington, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, said the expectations some teachers have of black students have much to do with the discipline problem. Some teachers “don’t have high enough expectations of our kids to demand and get them to perform at the level they are capable of performing at,” he said. “Kids gravitate to the level that’s expected of them.” During a 2000 NAACP speech about the achievement gap, President George W. Bush called that “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Washington said it’s often easier for white teachers to identify with white students, because it is what they know. That can lead to treating black students differently. “He knows what you’re doing …that kid sees that. After four or five years of that, he’s really angry,” Washington said, and that treatment shapes the student’s personality and attitude. “If you were treating all kids the same and teaching all kids the same, there wouldn’t be this problem.” Students who are nurtured - by family, the community and educators - do better no matter their color, he said. Former assistant superintendent and Denfeld principal Ed Crawford said implicit bias exists in Duluth classrooms, as it does everywhere. “I believe it’s unconscious, but it contributes to some disparity you see in the manner that students are disciplined,” he said. “You go in with the values you have. The kids you are educating are not (necessarily) of the same mindset you are in.” Teachers in the Duluth district are largely middle-class white women, said Rogier Gregoire, a retired educator and member of the city of Duluth’s Human Rights Commission. “These are people whose cultural and social backgrounds don’t prepare them,” he said, for the baggage some kids bring to school, such as homelessness or having a single parent. “The teacher says they have to serve the majority,” Gregoire said. “That’s the core of the problem of what gets children of color suspended. They are treated as ‘the other.’ ” The Duluth district - which this past year served about 8,600 students - employed just three black teachers and one black administrator out of about 643 full- and part-time teachers and about 20 building-level administrators, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education and the district. These figures do not include support staff. The number of black male teachers is low nationwide, at just 2 percent, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released in May. The district’s minority student enrollment was 20.9 percent last year, with just under half of that black students. Understanding kids Other groups of students are also suspended at disproportionate rates. District data showed that despite making up about 15 percent of district enrollment, special education students accounted for 46 percent of those suspensions from 2008 to 2014. And students living in poverty make up just under half of district enrollment, but they’ve been given more than 80 percent of suspensions for those years. In the data, there are individual students who may be included in several of those groups. Students who receive special education services are often suspended at higher rates because they haven’t been given adequate behavioral assessments or improvement plans, said the Civil Rights Project’s Losen. Educators can be “too quick to suspend these kids rather than work with them and their (individualized education plans) to make sure they are in a proper setting and getting the right amount of supports and services,” he said. “And when they are cut off from school, they are cut off from other services.” Dealing with behaviors that are manifestations of a disability is challenging, Gronseth said. Often a behavior is beyond a student’s control. When that happens, he said, staff need to study what is happening, find out what is triggering it and work to support the student to prevent the behavior from occurring. Staff may also need to try different techniques and approaches for some students who live in poverty. Those kids, one expert says, are “constantly on the lookout for threats.” Paul Tough, author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” spoke at an Education Writers Association conference in Boston in May. He said that kids living in poverty need interventions before they begin school if they are to succeed. When “stressed out” kids begin school they don’t learn to read on time because of anxiety, he said, and because their “fight or flight” response is on high alert, they are more likely to get in fights, talk back to teachers or check out from school. “We blame these kids, label them, say they have attention difficulties, a bad attitude,” he said. “We try to shake their behavior with punishments and rewards.” But researchers have found that doesn’t work, especially with kids growing up with “serious adversity,” he said. Helping them form different mindsets to become more motivated and gritty and bounce back from disappointments can change the way they behave at school, he said. Early learning opportunities go a long way in helping kids succeed, Gronseth said. The district’s large population of kids living in poverty often begin kindergarten on an unequal playing field. They haven’t had the opportunities of other kids, he said. “Anything from playing T-ball to going to preschool or a structured daycare, nutrition, health care, early screenings, vision and dental care … Some kindergarten-screened kids have never had their hands on a book,” he said. “It all plays a role in creating that gap we’re seeing.” Pushing aside biases At Lincoln Park Middle School, assistant principal Jacob Hintsala and dean of students Joanna Walters make most of the suspension decisions. “We are working hard to keep everything ‘in-school suspension’ as much as possible,” Walters said, except for more “cut and dried” cases, such as violence and drug possession. When it comes to the insubordination and disorderly conduct category, an out-of-school suspension might be assigned for “major disrespect” for a teacher or staff member, or disruption of instruction. This past year, 33 percent of behavior referrals were pegged to the disorderly conduct category, although only some of those turned into an out-of-school suspension. Since 2012, when kids from Morgan Park Middle School - known for its high rates of suspensions - transitioned to the new Lincoln Park, the number of days lost to suspension have been reduced by more than half. Hintsala said he and Walters are “hypersensitive” to the backgrounds of students when considering discipline. “Sometimes what’s happening at school is minor compared to what’s happening at home,” he said, stressing the need for more mental health help in the community and at the school, which has waiting lists for its therapists. “We try to step into every situation and understand our biases and push them aside,” Hintsala said of the two, who started a practice at Lincoln Park called “focus walks” that they or support staff take with misbehaving kids to deter bad behavior and get them back on track and in the classroom. At East, where days lost to suspension have declined annually from a peak in 2011-12, when a chunk of students from the closed Central High School began attending, assistant principal Jon Flaa handles much of the discipline. Policy dictates some behaviors automatically mean suspension, like for drug use or fighting, he said. But if it’s subjective, “I am always thinking about what I can do to get this kid back into the classroom and learn,” he said. “Suspension is that last thing on my list of options.” He and other administrators started a weekend restorative program at East in 2012, that allows truant students to make up time and be paired with a student tutor. It’s been effective, he said, in changing some behaviors and getting kids to care about school. Lincoln Park staff think about the implications of suspension, Walters said, referring to the school-to-prison pipeline. The phrase points to school practices and policies - such as suspension - that can push students into the criminal justice system. “It’s easier to suspend,” she said. “But we don’t want to do the easy thing.” Maude Dornfeld is director of Life House in Duluth, which offers support to homeless youth. She sees many kids who are “disenfranchised” from school; who have dropped out, or been suspended. “They have a trauma response,” she said, “when you suggest they might want to go back to school. It’s been a really negative experience for them. … (They have) no real successes or enjoyment related to school.” Giving a punitive response in school for bad behavior - like a suspension, she said, “is creating model inmates, not model citizens.” Some students notice the difference in district policy, and some don’t. Denfeld’s Gelineau said he worked with a black female student last year who came to Duluth from Chicago. She told him some of the behaviors happening at Denfeld would mean expulsion at a zero-tolerance school in Chicago. But at Denfeld, there is trouble-shooting. “It’s a whole new world for her,” he said. But Denfeld’s Smith said his negative experiences have led to distrust of authority, citing several times he’s felt disciplinary action taken toward him was unfair. “They don’t understand how to talk to us, or how to relate,” Smith said. “They look at us like we are full of B.S. … like they have it out for me.” East’s Covington - a varsity basketball player who hopes to pursue a business degree at a four-year university next year - hasn’t been disciplined since he was a middle school student in Duluth. Then, he said, punishment for him seemed harsher than it was for white students. In high school, differing treatment toward him is still frustrating, but it’s more subtle. He pointed to the seating charts and staff who focus more intently on black students in class. “But we don’t say anything,” Covington said. “Dealing with this as long as I have; you just learn to accept it.” Tina Gajda of the News Tribune contributed data reporting for this story. East High School student Terrance Covington finds it in seating charts in some of his classes, where the majority of black students are assigned to sit in the front.Denfeld High School sophomore Donnie White notices it when he walks down the hall during class. Staff have asked the black student for a hall pass, he said, while white students walking in the same hall might get a greeting instead of the same question.And Denfeld senior Lorenzo Smith sees it in the way discipline is handled, recounting an incident in which he was sent out of class to a behavior referral room for being 20 seconds late.“We are always being looked at differently; like you’re the wild card,” said Covington, a senior. “We always have to be supervised, like we can’t be controlled.”Each of these students - all black - describes treatment by some Duluth school district teachers, support staff and administrators that they say stems from the color of their skin. And that treatment is reflected in disproportionate suspension rates for black students, seen in district data and across the nation.Though black males represent less than 5 percent of students enrolled in the Duluth district, that group made up 20 percent of out-of-school suspensions between 2008 and 2014, according to data provided by the Duluth school district and reviewed by the News Tribune. (One year of district data - for 2012-13 - was taken out because of data-entry mistakes made at Denfeld High School.) White males, 43 percent of enrollment during that time, were given about 41 percent of the out-of-school suspensions - numbers in proportion with each other.These differences persist despite dramatic reductions in the overall number of days students are suspended out of school districtwide. That number decreased by about 34 percent from the 2008-09 school year to last school year, with reductions each year except for 2010-11 and last school year.
Enrollment also dropped, by more than 10 percent, from 2008 through last school year. The district has made reducing suspensions a priority, partly through changes in how it handles punishment for nonviolent behavior. It is also working with its educators and other staff to help them gain better understanding of different cultures and backgrounds. Duluth’s teachers must juggle that kind of work - which ultimately helps to foster stronger relationships with kids - with managing the issues that come with overcrowded classrooms and the pressure that comes with state testing demands.Teaching kids, teaching teachersPrincipals and assistant principals generally make the decision to suspend, but teachers and support staff are often the witnesses to bad behavior, and make initial reports. According to district data, the top three reasons for suspensions are assaults, fights and offenses that fall into a wide-ranging, open to interpretation category that includes acts of insubordination, disruption and disorderly conduct. District administrators seem to agree that alternatives for suspension don’t generally work in cases involving violence - that a separation from school for safety reasons and to formulate a plan for re-entry are necessary, along with finding ways to help change behavior. But in many other instances, it’s thought that mediation, counseling, in-school suspension and other forms of treatment are better options and help keep kids in classrooms. Some schools are turning to those alternatives in lieu of kicking kids out. “When kids are having a hard time reading, we teach,” said climate coordinator Ron Lake, who deals with districtwide discipline issues. “When kids are having a hard time getting along, we should teach. Suspension typically doesn’t change behavior.”[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2878941","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"464","title":"","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]]And it keeps kids out of the classroom. Since the 2008-09 school year, black students - less than 10 percent of enrollment - accounted for 31 percent of the 12,880 days lost to suspension. And that’s a group for which the achievement gap continues to be a problem. The gap, which involves disparities in academic performance between groups, such as students of color and white students, can’t be closed until the discipline problem is addressed, said Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA.Getting at the disproportionate suspension numbers takes continual work, school officials say. Efforts last school year included staff and community training on historical and generational trauma related to minority cultures, engaging parents and the community and creating positive school climates. Those efforts continue this school year, with one staff training already held in late August.But it’s more than just professional development, Lake said. It takes community support, and helping kids come up with different ways to relate to each other and regulate their emotions.RELATED: Staff training helps reduce disproportional suspension rates, but it's not as simple as it soundsWhy the disparity?A recent study done by Stanford University researchers shows that teachers are more likely to see repeated misbehavior by a student as a problem if the student is black rather than white. Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua’s research included asking teachers from all over the country to look at two minor behavior incidents and judge their severity. Stereotypical black and white names - Darnell or DeShawn for black students or Greg or Jake for white students - were assigned to the incidents. The researchers found that racial stereotypes influenced the response of the teacher after the second infraction.“The more likely the teachers were to think the student was black … the more likely they were to label the student a troublemaker,” according to a research article published in Psychological Science.The researchers said racial disparities in discipline are a problem because they contribute to the achievement gap, and increase the likelihood that black students will drop out of school or be incarcerated. The issue isn’t unique to Duluth; black males are suspended at higher rates than other students across the country. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of more than 12,000 U.S. school districts showed that 21 percent suspended at least one of every four black secondary school students during the 2011-2012 school year. And it’s happening for a number of reasons.Implicit biases and stereotypes are “more intensely negative against black males” than any other group, Losen said. And they have been “since slavery. … It’s a legacy of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination in our nation.”That shows up in the classroom, experts say, and affects how black students act in school.“Black males are often seen as being aggressive and scary,” said Sam Simmons, a Twin Cities-based behavioral consultant hired by the district to help with training. “I am 6-foot-4. I walk into a room and the room will change.”If a white woman, for example, says she feels threatened by a black man, people believe it, whether or not there is reason for her to feel that way, he said.“And if I am not managing my frustration or emotions, I am fighting back,” Simmons said, referring to minority students. “Because that’s what I do, where I come from.”That’s an example of how minor misbehavior, exacerbated by misunderstanding and mistrust, can escalate into something that is cause for discipline.White, the Denfeld sophomore, said he was suspended many times in middle school, and not always for what he feels were legitimate reasons. Sometimes he was provoked, and things escalated from there, he said. One incident involved him accidentally hitting a white girl with a ball in gym class.She called him an obscenity, he said, and when he told her not to, she did it again. He threatened to hit her with the ball, this time on purpose, and the teacher overheard, sending him out of class. To his knowledge, the girl was not reprimanded for her cursing.Sometimes certain behaviors are a cultural thing, or a way of life, said Bill Howes, coordinator of the district’s Office of Education Equity.Whether it’s cursing or physical contact, ideas of what’s normal or appropriate mean different things to different people, he said.“Obviously, an assault is an assault, and has to be addressed,” Howes said, but there are “unfortunate fears we have of people based on their backgrounds. It can be where they live, where they come from … or it can be about somebody’s race.” Culturally, people deal with stress and conflict in different ways, he said, which can result in problems.Some students don’t realize that expectations for school behavior could be different than what they experience at home, said Duluth superintendent Bill Gronseth.“Waiting in line, waiting your turn, lowering your voice; those are pieces we have to teach,” he said, “and recognize it may be a cultural difference not just between races and religion, but in life experience.”Denfeld integration specialist Aaron Gelineau sees how family structure and culture can play into behaviors.In his job dealing with at-risk kids, he worked with a black student who had been in a fight. She explained to him that when she was little, someone picked on her. Her mom told her, he said, “‘If you get beat up, you better find a way to beat her up before you come home.’ That’s the culture of her family. It’s a survival skill some of these kids are taught.”When kids grow up in families that use violence to correct behavior, or verbal and emotional abuse, it shows them that’s how you fit in in the world, Lake said, and it comes out at school.“And it’s violent behavior that often leads to suspension regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender,” he said.Officials say there’s no question that out-of-school suspensions are a fair response to violent behavior at school - but steps also can be taken to reach students from those backgrounds before trouble happens.Setting expectationsClaudie Washington, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, said the expectations some teachers have of black students have much to do with the discipline problem.Some teachers “don’t have high enough expectations of our kids to demand and get them to perform at the level they are capable of performing at,” he said. “Kids gravitate to the level that’s expected of them.”During a 2000 NAACP speech about the achievement gap, President George W. Bush called that “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”Washington said it’s often easier for white teachers to identify with white students, because it is what they know. That can lead to treating black students differently.“He knows what you’re doing …that kid sees that. After four or five years of that, he’s really angry,” Washington said, and that treatment shapes the student’s personality and attitude. “If you were treating all kids the same and teaching all kids the same, there wouldn’t be this problem.”Students who are nurtured - by family, the community and educators - do better no matter their color, he said.Former assistant superintendent and Denfeld principal Ed Crawford said implicit bias exists in Duluth classrooms, as it does everywhere.“I believe it’s unconscious, but it contributes to some disparity you see in the manner that students are disciplined,” he said. “You go in with the values you have. The kids you are educating are not (necessarily) of the same mindset you are in.” Teachers in the Duluth district are largely middle-class white women, said Rogier Gregoire, a retired educator and member of the city of Duluth’s Human Rights Commission.“These are people whose cultural and social backgrounds don’t prepare them,” he said, for the baggage some kids bring to school, such as homelessness or having a single parent.“The teacher says they have to serve the majority,” Gregoire said. “That’s the core of the problem of what gets children of color suspended. They are treated as ‘the other.’ ”The Duluth district - which this past year served about 8,600 students - employed just three black teachers and one black administrator out of about 643 full- and part-time teachers and about 20 building-level administrators, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education and the district. These figures do not include support staff. The number of black male teachers is low nationwide, at just 2 percent, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released in May.The district’s minority student enrollment was 20.9 percent last year, with just under half of that black students.Understanding kidsOther groups of students are also suspended at disproportionate rates.District data showed that despite making up about 15 percent of district enrollment, special education students accounted for 46 percent of those suspensions from 2008 to 2014. And students living in poverty make up just under half of district enrollment, but they’ve been given more than 80 percent of suspensions for those years.In the data, there are individual students who may be included in several of those groups. Students who receive special education services are often suspended at higher rates because they haven’t been given adequate behavioral assessments or improvement plans, said the Civil Rights Project’s Losen.Educators can be “too quick to suspend these kids rather than work with them and their (individualized education plans) to make sure they are in a proper setting and getting the right amount of supports and services,” he said. “And when they are cut off from school, they are cut off from other services.”Dealing with behaviors that are manifestations of a disability is challenging, Gronseth said.Often a behavior is beyond a student’s control. When that happens, he said, staff need to study what is happening, find out what is triggering it and work to support the student to prevent the behavior from occurring.Staff may also need to try different techniques and approaches for some students who live in poverty. Those kids, one expert says, are “constantly on the lookout for threats.” Paul Tough, author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” spoke at an Education Writers Association conference in Boston in May.He said that kids living in poverty need interventions before they begin school if they are to succeed. When “stressed out” kids begin school they don’t learn to read on time because of anxiety, he said, and because their “fight or flight” response is on high alert, they are more likely to get in fights, talk back to teachers or check out from school.“We blame these kids, label them, say they have attention difficulties, a bad attitude,” he said. “We try to shake their behavior with punishments and rewards.”But researchers have found that doesn’t work, especially with kids growing up with “serious adversity,” he said.Helping them form different mindsets to become more motivated and gritty and bounce back from disappointments can change the way they behave at school, he said.Early learning opportunities go a long way in helping kids succeed, Gronseth said.The district’s large population of kids living in poverty often begin kindergarten on an unequal playing field. They haven’t had the opportunities of other kids, he said.“Anything from playing T-ball to going to preschool or a structured daycare, nutrition, health care, early screenings, vision and dental care … Some kindergarten-screened kids have never had their hands on a book,” he said. “It all plays a role in creating that gap we’re seeing.”Pushing aside biasesAt Lincoln Park Middle School, assistant principal Jacob Hintsala and dean of students Joanna Walters make most of the suspension decisions.“We are working hard to keep everything ‘in-school suspension’ as much as possible,” Walters said, except for more “cut and dried” cases, such as violence and drug possession. When it comes to the insubordination and disorderly conduct category, an out-of-school suspension might be assigned for “major disrespect” for a teacher or staff member, or disruption of instruction. This past year, 33 percent of behavior referrals were pegged to the disorderly conduct category, although only some of those turned into an out-of-school suspension.Since 2012, when kids from Morgan Park Middle School - known for its high rates of suspensions - transitioned to the new Lincoln Park, the number of days lost to suspension have been reduced by more than half.Hintsala said he and Walters are “hypersensitive” to the backgrounds of students when considering discipline.“Sometimes what’s happening at school is minor compared to what’s happening at home,” he said, stressing the need for more mental health help in the community and at the school, which has waiting lists for its therapists.“We try to step into every situation and understand our biases and push them aside,” Hintsala said of the two, who started a practice at Lincoln Park called “focus walks” that they or support staff take with misbehaving kids to deter bad behavior and get them back on track and in the classroom.At East, where days lost to suspension have declined annually from a peak in 2011-12, when a chunk of students from the closed Central High School began attending, assistant principal Jon Flaa handles much of the discipline. Policy dictates some behaviors automatically mean suspension, like for drug use or fighting, he said. But if it’s subjective, “I am always thinking about what I can do to get this kid back into the classroom and learn,” he said. “Suspension is that last thing on my list of options.” He and other administrators started a weekend restorative program at East in 2012, that allows truant students to make up time and be paired with a student tutor. It’s been effective, he said, in changing some behaviors and getting kids to care about school. Lincoln Park staff think about the implications of suspension, Walters said, referring to the school-to-prison pipeline. The phrase points to school practices and policies - such as suspension - that can push students into the criminal justice system.“It’s easier to suspend,” she said. “But we don’t want to do the easy thing.”Maude Dornfeld is director of Life House in Duluth, which offers support to homeless youth. She sees many kids who are “disenfranchised” from school; who have dropped out, or been suspended.“They have a trauma response,” she said, “when you suggest they might want to go back to school. It’s been a really negative experience for them. … (They have) no real successes or enjoyment related to school.”Giving a punitive response in school for bad behavior - like a suspension, she said, “is creating model inmates, not model citizens.” Some students notice the difference in district policy, and some don’t. Denfeld’s Gelineau said he worked with a black female student last year who came to Duluth from Chicago. She told him some of the behaviors happening at Denfeld would mean expulsion at a zero-tolerance school in Chicago. But at Denfeld, there is trouble-shooting.“It’s a whole new world for her,” he said.But Denfeld’s Smith said his negative experiences have led to distrust of authority, citing several times he’s felt disciplinary action taken toward him was unfair. “They don’t understand how to talk to us, or how to relate,” Smith said. “They look at us like we are full of B.S. … like they have it out for me.” East’s Covington - a varsity basketball player who hopes to pursue a business degree at a four-year university next year - hasn’t been disciplined since he was a middle school student in Duluth. Then, he said, punishment for him seemed harsher than it was for white students. In high school, differing treatment toward him is still frustrating, but it’s more subtle. He pointed to the seating charts and staff who focus more intently on black students in class. “But we don’t say anything,” Covington said. “Dealing with this as long as I have; you just learn to accept it.”Tina Gajda of the News Tribune contributed data reporting for this story.East High School student Terrance Covington finds it in seating charts in some of his classes, where the majority of black students are assigned to sit in the front.Denfeld High School sophomore Donnie White notices it when he walks down the hall during class. Staff have asked the black student for a hall pass, he said, while white students walking in the same hall might get a greeting instead of the same question.And Denfeld senior Lorenzo Smith sees it in the way discipline is handled, recounting an incident in which he was sent out of class to a behavior referral room for being 20 seconds late.“We are always being looked at differently; like you’re the wild card,” said Covington, a senior. “We always have to be supervised, like we can’t be controlled.”Each of these students - all black - describes treatment by some Duluth school district teachers, support staff and administrators that they say stems from the color of their skin. And that treatment is reflected in disproportionate suspension rates for black students, seen in district data and across the nation.Though black males represent less than 5 percent of students enrolled in the Duluth district, that group made up 20 percent of out-of-school suspensions between 2008 and 2014, according to data provided by the Duluth school district and reviewed by the News Tribune. (One year of district data - for 2012-13 - was taken out because of data-entry mistakes made at Denfeld High School.) White males, 43 percent of enrollment during that time, were given about 41 percent of the out-of-school suspensions - numbers in proportion with each other.These differences persist despite dramatic reductions in the overall number of days students are suspended out of school districtwide. That number decreased by about 34 percent from the 2008-09 school year to last school year, with reductions each year except for 2010-11 and last school year.[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"2878856","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","title":"","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"452"}}]]Enrollment also dropped, by more than 10 percent, from 2008 through last school year. The district has made reducing suspensions a priority, partly through changes in how it handles punishment for nonviolent behavior. It is also working with its educators and other staff to help them gain better understanding of different cultures and backgrounds. Duluth’s teachers must juggle that kind of work - which ultimately helps to foster stronger relationships with kids - with managing the issues that come with overcrowded classrooms and the pressure that comes with state testing demands.Teaching kids, teaching teachersPrincipals and assistant principals generally make the decision to suspend, but teachers and support staff are often the witnesses to bad behavior, and make initial reports. According to district data, the top three reasons for suspensions are assaults, fights and offenses that fall into a wide-ranging, open to interpretation category that includes acts of insubordination, disruption and disorderly conduct. District administrators seem to agree that alternatives for suspension don’t generally work in cases involving violence - that a separation from school for safety reasons and to formulate a plan for re-entry are necessary, along with finding ways to help change behavior. But in many other instances, it’s thought that mediation, counseling, in-school suspension and other forms of treatment are better options and help keep kids in classrooms. Some schools are turning to those alternatives in lieu of kicking kids out. “When kids are having a hard time reading, we teach,” said climate coordinator Ron Lake, who deals with districtwide discipline issues. “When kids are having a hard time getting along, we should teach. Suspension typically doesn’t change behavior.”
And it keeps kids out of the classroom. Since the 2008-09 school year, black students - less than 10 percent of enrollment - accounted for 31 percent of the 12,880 days lost to suspension. And that’s a group for which the achievement gap continues to be a problem. The gap, which involves disparities in academic performance between groups, such as students of color and white students, can’t be closed until the discipline problem is addressed, said Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project of UCLA.Getting at the disproportionate suspension numbers takes continual work, school officials say. Efforts last school year included staff and community training on historical and generational trauma related to minority cultures, engaging parents and the community and creating positive school climates. Those efforts continue this school year, with one staff training already held in late August.But it’s more than just professional development, Lake said. It takes community support, and helping kids come up with different ways to relate to each other and regulate their emotions.RELATED: Staff training helps reduce disproportional suspension rates, but it's not as simple as it soundsWhy the disparity?A recent study done by Stanford University researchers shows that teachers are more likely to see repeated misbehavior by a student as a problem if the student is black rather than white. Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua’s research included asking teachers from all over the country to look at two minor behavior incidents and judge their severity. Stereotypical black and white names - Darnell or DeShawn for black students or Greg or Jake for white students - were assigned to the incidents. The researchers found that racial stereotypes influenced the response of the teacher after the second infraction.“The more likely the teachers were to think the student was black … the more likely they were to label the student a troublemaker,” according to a research article published in Psychological Science.The researchers said racial disparities in discipline are a problem because they contribute to the achievement gap, and increase the likelihood that black students will drop out of school or be incarcerated. The issue isn’t unique to Duluth; black males are suspended at higher rates than other students across the country. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of more than 12,000 U.S. school districts showed that 21 percent suspended at least one of every four black secondary school students during the 2011-2012 school year. And it’s happening for a number of reasons.Implicit biases and stereotypes are “more intensely negative against black males” than any other group, Losen said. And they have been “since slavery. … It’s a legacy of the most virulent forms of racial discrimination in our nation.”That shows up in the classroom, experts say, and affects how black students act in school.“Black males are often seen as being aggressive and scary,” said Sam Simmons, a Twin Cities-based behavioral consultant hired by the district to help with training. “I am 6-foot-4. I walk into a room and the room will change.”If a white woman, for example, says she feels threatened by a black man, people believe it, whether or not there is reason for her to feel that way, he said.“And if I am not managing my frustration or emotions, I am fighting back,” Simmons said, referring to minority students. “Because that’s what I do, where I come from.”That’s an example of how minor misbehavior, exacerbated by misunderstanding and mistrust, can escalate into something that is cause for discipline.White, the Denfeld sophomore, said he was suspended many times in middle school, and not always for what he feels were legitimate reasons. Sometimes he was provoked, and things escalated from there, he said. One incident involved him accidentally hitting a white girl with a ball in gym class.She called him an obscenity, he said, and when he told her not to, she did it again. He threatened to hit her with the ball, this time on purpose, and the teacher overheard, sending him out of class. To his knowledge, the girl was not reprimanded for her cursing.Sometimes certain behaviors are a cultural thing, or a way of life, said Bill Howes, coordinator of the district’s Office of Education Equity.Whether it’s cursing or physical contact, ideas of what’s normal or appropriate mean different things to different people, he said.“Obviously, an assault is an assault, and has to be addressed,” Howes said, but there are “unfortunate fears we have of people based on their backgrounds. It can be where they live, where they come from … or it can be about somebody’s race.” Culturally, people deal with stress and conflict in different ways, he said, which can result in problems.Some students don’t realize that expectations for school behavior could be different than what they experience at home, said Duluth superintendent Bill Gronseth.“Waiting in line, waiting your turn, lowering your voice; those are pieces we have to teach,” he said, “and recognize it may be a cultural difference not just between races and religion, but in life experience.”Denfeld integration specialist Aaron Gelineau sees how family structure and culture can play into behaviors.In his job dealing with at-risk kids, he worked with a black student who had been in a fight. She explained to him that when she was little, someone picked on her. Her mom told her, he said, “‘If you get beat up, you better find a way to beat her up before you come home.’ That’s the culture of her family. It’s a survival skill some of these kids are taught.”When kids grow up in families that use violence to correct behavior, or verbal and emotional abuse, it shows them that’s how you fit in in the world, Lake said, and it comes out at school.“And it’s violent behavior that often leads to suspension regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender,” he said.Officials say there’s no question that out-of-school suspensions are a fair response to violent behavior at school - but steps also can be taken to reach students from those backgrounds before trouble happens.Setting expectationsClaudie Washington, president of the Duluth chapter of the NAACP, said the expectations some teachers have of black students have much to do with the discipline problem.Some teachers “don’t have high enough expectations of our kids to demand and get them to perform at the level they are capable of performing at,” he said. “Kids gravitate to the level that’s expected of them.”During a 2000 NAACP speech about the achievement gap, President George W. Bush called that “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”Washington said it’s often easier for white teachers to identify with white students, because it is what they know. That can lead to treating black students differently.“He knows what you’re doing …that kid sees that. After four or five years of that, he’s really angry,” Washington said, and that treatment shapes the student’s personality and attitude. “If you were treating all kids the same and teaching all kids the same, there wouldn’t be this problem.”Students who are nurtured - by family, the community and educators - do better no matter their color, he said.Former assistant superintendent and Denfeld principal Ed Crawford said implicit bias exists in Duluth classrooms, as it does everywhere.“I believe it’s unconscious, but it contributes to some disparity you see in the manner that students are disciplined,” he said. “You go in with the values you have. The kids you are educating are not (necessarily) of the same mindset you are in.” Teachers in the Duluth district are largely middle-class white women, said Rogier Gregoire, a retired educator and member of the city of Duluth’s Human Rights Commission.“These are people whose cultural and social backgrounds don’t prepare them,” he said, for the baggage some kids bring to school, such as homelessness or having a single parent.“The teacher says they have to serve the majority,” Gregoire said. “That’s the core of the problem of what gets children of color suspended. They are treated as ‘the other.’ ”The Duluth district - which this past year served about 8,600 students - employed just three black teachers and one black administrator out of about 643 full- and part-time teachers and about 20 building-level administrators, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education and the district. These figures do not include support staff. The number of black male teachers is low nationwide, at just 2 percent, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released in May.The district’s minority student enrollment was 20.9 percent last year, with just under half of that black students.Understanding kidsOther groups of students are also suspended at disproportionate rates.District data showed that despite making up about 15 percent of district enrollment, special education students accounted for 46 percent of those suspensions from 2008 to 2014. And students living in poverty make up just under half of district enrollment, but they’ve been given more than 80 percent of suspensions for those years.In the data, there are individual students who may be included in several of those groups. Students who receive special education services are often suspended at higher rates because they haven’t been given adequate behavioral assessments or improvement plans, said the Civil Rights Project’s Losen.Educators can be “too quick to suspend these kids rather than work with them and their (individualized education plans) to make sure they are in a proper setting and getting the right amount of supports and services,” he said. “And when they are cut off from school, they are cut off from other services.”Dealing with behaviors that are manifestations of a disability is challenging, Gronseth said.Often a behavior is beyond a student’s control. When that happens, he said, staff need to study what is happening, find out what is triggering it and work to support the student to prevent the behavior from occurring.Staff may also need to try different techniques and approaches for some students who live in poverty. Those kids, one expert says, are “constantly on the lookout for threats.” Paul Tough, author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” spoke at an Education Writers Association conference in Boston in May.He said that kids living in poverty need interventions before they begin school if they are to succeed. When “stressed out” kids begin school they don’t learn to read on time because of anxiety, he said, and because their “fight or flight” response is on high alert, they are more likely to get in fights, talk back to teachers or check out from school.“We blame these kids, label them, say they have attention difficulties, a bad attitude,” he said. “We try to shake their behavior with punishments and rewards.”But researchers have found that doesn’t work, especially with kids growing up with “serious adversity,” he said.Helping them form different mindsets to become more motivated and gritty and bounce back from disappointments can change the way they behave at school, he said.Early learning opportunities go a long way in helping kids succeed, Gronseth said.The district’s large population of kids living in poverty often begin kindergarten on an unequal playing field. They haven’t had the opportunities of other kids, he said.“Anything from playing T-ball to going to preschool or a structured daycare, nutrition, health care, early screenings, vision and dental care … Some kindergarten-screened kids have never had their hands on a book,” he said. “It all plays a role in creating that gap we’re seeing.”Pushing aside biasesAt Lincoln Park Middle School, assistant principal Jacob Hintsala and dean of students Joanna Walters make most of the suspension decisions.“We are working hard to keep everything ‘in-school suspension’ as much as possible,” Walters said, except for more “cut and dried” cases, such as violence and drug possession. When it comes to the insubordination and disorderly conduct category, an out-of-school suspension might be assigned for “major disrespect” for a teacher or staff member, or disruption of instruction. This past year, 33 percent of behavior referrals were pegged to the disorderly conduct category, although only some of those turned into an out-of-school suspension.Since 2012, when kids from Morgan Park Middle School - known for its high rates of suspensions - transitioned to the new Lincoln Park, the number of days lost to suspension have been reduced by more than half.Hintsala said he and Walters are “hypersensitive” to the backgrounds of students when considering discipline.“Sometimes what’s happening at school is minor compared to what’s happening at home,” he said, stressing the need for more mental health help in the community and at the school, which has waiting lists for its therapists.“We try to step into every situation and understand our biases and push them aside,” Hintsala said of the two, who started a practice at Lincoln Park called “focus walks” that they or support staff take with misbehaving kids to deter bad behavior and get them back on track and in the classroom.At East, where days lost to suspension have declined annually from a peak in 2011-12, when a chunk of students from the closed Central High School began attending, assistant principal Jon Flaa handles much of the discipline. Policy dictates some behaviors automatically mean suspension, like for drug use or fighting, he said. But if it’s subjective, “I am always thinking about what I can do to get this kid back into the classroom and learn,” he said. “Suspension is that last thing on my list of options.” He and other administrators started a weekend restorative program at East in 2012, that allows truant students to make up time and be paired with a student tutor. It’s been effective, he said, in changing some behaviors and getting kids to care about school. Lincoln Park staff think about the implications of suspension, Walters said, referring to the school-to-prison pipeline. The phrase points to school practices and policies - such as suspension - that can push students into the criminal justice system.“It’s easier to suspend,” she said. “But we don’t want to do the easy thing.”Maude Dornfeld is director of Life House in Duluth, which offers support to homeless youth. She sees many kids who are “disenfranchised” from school; who have dropped out, or been suspended.“They have a trauma response,” she said, “when you suggest they might want to go back to school. It’s been a really negative experience for them. … (They have) no real successes or enjoyment related to school.”Giving a punitive response in school for bad behavior - like a suspension, she said, “is creating model inmates, not model citizens.” Some students notice the difference in district policy, and some don’t. Denfeld’s Gelineau said he worked with a black female student last year who came to Duluth from Chicago. She told him some of the behaviors happening at Denfeld would mean expulsion at a zero-tolerance school in Chicago. But at Denfeld, there is trouble-shooting.“It’s a whole new world for her,” he said.But Denfeld’s Smith said his negative experiences have led to distrust of authority, citing several times he’s felt disciplinary action taken toward him was unfair. “They don’t understand how to talk to us, or how to relate,” Smith said. “They look at us like we are full of B.S. … like they have it out for me.” East’s Covington - a varsity basketball player who hopes to pursue a business degree at a four-year university next year - hasn’t been disciplined since he was a middle school student in Duluth. Then, he said, punishment for him seemed harsher than it was for white students. In high school, differing treatment toward him is still frustrating, but it’s more subtle. He pointed to the seating charts and staff who focus more intently on black students in class. “But we don’t say anything,” Covington said. “Dealing with this as long as I have; you just learn to accept it.”Tina Gajda of the News Tribune contributed data reporting for this story.
