Middle school wasn’t a good time for Curtis Clark Jr. or his mother.
As an eighth-grader at Lake Worth Middle two years ago, Clark was suspended more than a dozen times in one school year for talking back to teachers, being disruptive in class and not listening.
“I just felt like I had something to prove,” said Clark, now 17.
His mother, Antoinette Lester, said her son was having a difficult time at home and often angry over her separation from his father. “But I felt like he was being targeted at school,” she added.
Lester said the suspensions helped push Clark, who is African-American, down a path that led to his arrest for robbery and probation violation last year. Clark served 15 months and was released last week .
“With all those suspensions, he lost interest in everything,” Lester said. “He felt like no one really cared about him.”
Stories like Clark’s have become all too familiar in Palm Beach County, where a recent national study found that the school district suspended 53 percent of its black male middle school students at least once in 2006.
The district disputes that figure, saying it was 38.3 percent, but acknowledges that black males in middle school have been suspended at higher rates than white students.
Recently, the district has taken steps to reduce out-of-school suspensions for all students. It also has set up a task force to find solutions for the low graduation rate, high dropout rate and high suspension rate among black males.
According to the national study, Palm Beach County ranked No. 1 among 18 large, urban school districts nationwide in how often they suspended black male middle school students in 2006.
The report said just 18 percent of white males and 6 percent of white females were suspended in Palm Beach County’s middle schools that year, compared with more than half of black males.
Nationwide, black males in middle schools were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white males in 2006, according to the study, published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It said black girls in middle schools were suspended at 4 1/2 times the rate of white girls.
The study was co-written by Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University. It analyzed U.S. Department of Education data on suspensions to find a growing disparity in treatment of white and nonwhite students.
The researchers said they focused on middle school because suspensions during those years often have long-term repercussions, with many of those students landing in jail as Clark did.
But Palm Beach County school officials refuse to point the finger at race.
“If race were an issue, it would be minuscule,” said Alison Adler, the district’s chief of safety and learning.
Superintendent Art Johnson attributed the high suspension rate to zero tolerance, a district policy that imposes automatic punishment for unacceptable behavior such as fighting or insubordination.
“We were at the pinnacle of zero tolerance at that time, and schools needed to tighten up and be very serious about correcting behavior,” Johnson said of the 2006 figures. “But we’ve had a lot of discussions about finding alternatives to suspensions. We realize you just can’t put kids out of school because they often get in trouble when they’re home.”
Now the district said it is offering preventive programs to help reduce the suspension rate.
Project Mind, for example, is in place at five middle schools – Bear Lakes, Jeaga, John F. Kennedy, Lake Worth and Roosevelt – and is designed to reach troubled kids through counseling before their behavior leads to a suspension. About 100 students will be identified in each school, Adler said.
“We’re trying to help students who have multiple risk factors and determine where they are academically and emotionally,” Adler said. “We want to look at programs that change behavior, not just give consequences.”
Another program is Alternative To Out-of-School Suspensions, which gives suspended students an opportunity to make up their schoolwork and do FCAT prep work at an off-campus site. If the students complete the assignments, the suspension is removed from their record, said Janice Cover, an assistant superintendent.
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