Parents of Latino and Black students, with the support of an advocacy group, have filed a lawsuit against California alleging that their children are disproportionately harmed because the state does not monitor or take action on some disciplinary practices of school districts.
Each year, school districts release their expulsion and suspension rates, in which students of color are overrepresented.
In the 2018-2019 school year, in the Riverside District, 71% of expelled students were Latino, although they represent 63% of the population.
While in the Sacramento City district,
41.4% of suspensions were black students, who constituted 15.5% of the population
.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accuses the state government of not doing enough to curb this disparity, the Los Angeles Times reported.
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They also consider state intervention policies, such as those that establish how behavior problems must be reported, to be very lax, allowing some districts to take undercover disciplinary action against students.
They cite as an example the transfer of students to other schools that do not offer advanced placement courses or those required for college.
Los Angeles school disciplinary measures, such as penalties and expulsions, disproportionately affect minority students in California, according to statistics.
File / AP
State data shows a drop in expulsion and suspension rates since 2015. But parents note that
California
regulations
do not require districts to officially report student transfers
between schools.
The plaintiffs, including parents from Kern and Los Angeles counties and an advocacy group called the Black Parallel School Board, are
asking the state to monitor the districts' actions
, ensuring they have discriminatory disciplinary practices.
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The complaint cites as an example the case of the Antelope Valley Union high school district that serves students in Lancaster and Palmdale, north of the city of Los Angeles.
The district reported 61 expulsions during the 2018-19 school year, with a large proportion of black students.
In parallel, it transferred 573 students to alternative schools, according to data obtained by parents through public records requests.
However, this large number of transfer students was not publicly reported by the district because California law does not require it.
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Parents also assure that they are pressured to waive the right to an expulsion hearing and that in this way their children are transferred “voluntarily”, among other reported practices.
Black students have long faced excessive school discipline in California, according to their advocates.
Los Angeles Unified School District parents have previously accused administrators of sending their children home without a formal suspension, a practice known as
off the book
.
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The new complaint says the practice persists, and that
lack of state oversight hurts students of color in the long run
, who miss out on instructional time in school and are at a higher risk of dropping out.
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A mother, who lives in Kern County, reports that her son, who is 9 years old and has a Section 504 plan that allows additional support services for students with disabilities, was suspended in 2019 for not listening to his teacher and
“destroy” school property after rubbing his pencil eraser on a chair
.
In the pandemic, when schools were closed, the child was blocked from online classes at least three times and was excluded from virtual educational games, says the family, who preferred to remain anonymous.
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In 2019, a law was passed in California to limit certain types of suspensions, after research showed that black students were the hardest hit.
