State education regulators have launched an investigation into the student suspension practices of the Ferguson-Florissant School District that includes questions about how the administration reported attendance data for students who were suspended or placed in virtual education programs during the 2021-22 school year.
In July, officials from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) requested information from Ferguson-Florissant Superintendent Joseph Davis and let him know that some of the district’s practices appear to be in violation of state or federal law.
“In short, we want to review how students who were suspended or reassigned from their home school were handled in terms of attendance. We also have concerns as to whether these students were given due process as called for under state and federal laws,” wrote DESE area supervisors Craig Larson and Maureen Clancy-May in an email to Davis and other administrators in late July. That email was a follow-up to a letter sent earlier that month seeking data from the district. The Post-Dispatch obtained the records in a Sunshine Law request.
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According to a DESE spokesperson, Ferguson-Florissant has yet to respond properly to DESE’s inquiries. What response the district has sent is unclear. On Aug. 1, Davis told the state that the district would be sending the requested documentation on Aug. 2. When the Post-Dispatch asked for those documents, Davis’ chief of staff, Kevin Hampton, said the records were closed.
Davis has declined multiple requests for an interview about how he handles suspensions.
School Board President Courtney Graves said the board was aware of the investigation and that the district was cooperating with it.
“We understand that DESE is reviewing the attendance data and the district is fully cooperating with this process,” Graves said in an emailed statement. “As a district, we remain committed to dealing with this matter as openly as possible and fully support their review.”
The inquiry from state regulators was spurred by complaints from parents, a letter from Legal Services of Eastern Missouri outlining due process issues, and concerns raised by officials at the Special School District, which serves students with disabilities in the Ƶ region.
During Davis’ tenure as the superintendent, starting in 2015, the number of long-term suspensions has exploded, to more than 1,000 in 2020, nearly 10% of all such suspensions statewide. This is despite guidance from the Ferguson Commission report, released the year Davis was hired, which cautioned that one of the barriers to racial equity in the Ƶ, is the school-to-prison pipeline that often begins with overly harsh student discipline against Black students. The Ferguson-Florissant School District serves more than 11,000 students. About 80% of its student population is Black.
Reassignments instead of suspensions
Last school year, the Ferguson-Florissant School Board responded to the rise in long-term suspensions in the district by passing policies intended to reduce those suspensions. Among the strategies adopted to reverse this trend was the creation of the Mark Twain Restoration and Wellness Center, which was supposed to be a place to help suspended students learn from specially trained educators in an attempt to reduce classroom disruptions.
In practice, based on parent complaints and the letter Legal Services sent the board early this summer, Davis and administrators were reassigning students to the school in lieu of out-of-school suspensions. The students only had access to the building one day a week, and the rest of the week, they were supposed to be doing “virtual” education from home.
According to the DESE documents, Ferguson-Florissant doesn’t actually have a virtual program that meets state requirements. If the district was counting those students assigned to such a program as having attended school, it could be in violation of attendance reporting requirements. Schools in Missouri receive much of their state aid based on attendance reporting.
State regulations require that students “must be in attendance in an instructional capacity under the direct supervision of a certificated employee of the district to be counted for attendance purposes.” Students who are attending school virtually can count for up to 94% of their attendance, but only if the virtual program aligns with state standards and the student is being directly supervised.
Lack of due process
Toleta Thomas, whose daughter, Payden, was assigned to Mark Twain last year from October until the end of the year, said the virtual program was virtually nonexistent and had little supervision. Thomas’ daughter was given a 10-day suspension without a hearing, and then reassigned to the restoration center, also with no due process, Thomas said.
Thomas’ complaints mirror one about a Ferguson Middle School student that DESE received in May. The student, who had an individualized education program, or IEP, had been assigned to Mark Twain, but, according to emails from DESE, “has not received any instruction from Mark Twain.”
Thomas said she believed the reassignment to Mark Twain or the so-called virtual program was a way for the district to claim attendance of the students who had, in practice, been kicked out of school. That is the issue that was also raised at a June school board meeting by board member Kevin Martin.
“Lost school days are no longer being reported,” Martin said of the reassigned students in comments at that board meeting. “We are claiming them for attendance.”
If true, that could lead to a state audit of attendance figures in the school district. If the figures are inflated, it’s possible DESE could seek to recoup some funding.
Attendance is generally recorded daily at the school building level by administrative assistants, who upload the data to DESE on a regular basis. In June, every district in the state sends DESE its “core” data, that includes all major statistics from the school year, including attendance and suspensions, so the state can publish the details and parents and others can make comparisons. It is possible to go back into that data to make changes, but generally, DESE would notice such changes, compared to the data that is uploaded monthly or quarterly.
The Ferguson-Florissant School Board revised suspension policies for the new school year, reducing Davis’ ability to act unilaterally and explicitly requiring due process before any long-term suspension and before a student is reassigned to virtual education.
‘Accountability is for everybody’
The DESE investigation centers on the students that were reassigned to the Mark Twain building and the virtual program connected to McCluer High School. Besides attendance figures, the state regulators seek information on staffing and instruction at the Mark Twain building, including “modes and methods of instruction.”
In one email exchange with state regulators, Davis called their request “particularly unusual,” and said he planned to ask the board’s attorney to be involved in the response. Lisa Stump, an attorney with the Lashly & Baer law firm, was copied on some of the correspondence between DESE and Davis.
State Rep. Raychel Proudie, D-Ferguson, has said she plans to hold hearings on the amount and methods of long-term suspensions at the district. She has heard from parents and teachers in the district who want to get to the bottom of how the district disciplines its students and reports that data to the state.
Proudie, a long-time educator, said she’s particularly concerned with potential discrepancies in how boys and girls are treated, and students who have disabilities.
“They absolutely need to investigate,” Proudie said of DESE. “I look forward to helping them anyway I can. Accountability is for everybody.”