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In response
to a scathing report released by Hope Street Youth Development (HSYD),
youth leaders forced Wichita Public School officials to agree to
their demands on a school suspension crisis impacting minority students.
More than 250 residents packed into a church in Northeast Wichita
in early September to voice their concerns on the disproportionate
rate in which black students receive suspensions to Superintendent
of Schools Winston Brooks and the school board members.
The residents
also called for a decrease in suspensions across the board.
At the meeting, school district officials agreed to create a suspension
task force to find alternatives to suspensions and report back to
the community, study the correlation between suspensions and low
academic achievement, and support Hope Street’s recommendations
to reform the student court process.
The public meeting was held in response to a report issued by HSYD
on 2000-2001 school-year suspensions. The report found that the
district suspended 1,113 children in kindergarten though third-grade.
It also found that while black students accounted for only 23% of
enrollment in the public schools, they received almost half of the
suspensions and were 2.5 times more likely to be suspended than
their white counterparts.
“As a seventh-grader at Hadley Middle School I got suspended
three different times adding up to a total of 12 days out of school,”
said HSYD’s Austin Green at the meeting. “Two of the
three suspensions were for fighting with the same white kid. Both
times I was the only one to get suspended. Sometimes during those
12 days the teachers refused to give me my missed school work, so
not only did they punish me by kicking me out of school, but also
by not letting me catch up on my work ,which hurt me academically.”
The HSYD report also garnered a firestorm of media activity before
the public meeting. In a time period of just four days, HSYD youth
leaders appeared on 30 radio, TV, and newspaper interviews including
a live call-in radio show where Brooks himself called in and participated
in a nine-minute yelling match with the announcers.
In addition to the concrete agreements made by school administration
and school board members, HSYD pledged to the community to get even
more youth involved in addressing the problem by opening Students
United Chapters, student run chapters at local schools. The first
one opened at Northeast Magnet Schools in mid-October.
“We have had overwhelming interest from students across the
city,” said Students United Chair Kyle Ellison. “Youth
are angry about conditions in the schools and are tired of being
excluded from the dialogue on how to fix the problems.”
“We are starting Northeast Students United with no less than
15 dedicated youth who are ready to step up and be a force for change
in our school,” said HSYD Co-Chair Precious Thompson. “Northeast
Students United will be powerful. We will immediately begin to talk
to youth to find out what problems exist at Northeast, and what
we can collectively do to solve them.”
Ellison said that since the school administration has begun to listen
to youth, Students United will seek to bring more voices to the
table and move from dialogues to results by addressing issues local
to their school and issues that affect youth citywide.
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