Ferguson-Florissant School Board member Kevin Martin chose his words carefully.
He was speaking at the end of a board meeting in June, after the board had received a letter from calling attention to “unlawful practice†related to the handling of long-term suspensions in the district.
“I’m not going to sit back and be quiet,†Martin said. On the agenda that night, Superintendent Joseph Davis was seeking approval for a policy that would grant him even more leeway in implementing such suspensions. “This is flat-out wrong. These policies are the exact opposite of what we are trying to do.â€
Just a year before, as I had reported, the district led the state in such suspensions, with the brunt of them going to Black students and students with learning disabilities. In the 2020-21 school year, the Ferguson-Florissant district had so many suspensions of 10 days or more they accounted for about 10% of all such suspensions statewide.
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Last year’s school board reacted to that news by implementing new restorative discipline practices in an attempt to reduce the suspensions, and keep more children in the classroom. But what was happening in practice, said the letter from the nonprofit law firm, was that Davis responded to the new policies by changing the rules. Instead of suspending students, he started reassigning them to virtual learning or other options, and didn’t provide any of the due process required by law.
“The District’s practice of ‘reassigning’ students without process and to educational venues of lesser quality implicates the same due process requirements that long-term suspension does, regardless of the label the District gives this removal from the regular classroom,†said the letter from attorneys Hopey Fink, Amanda Schneider and Elizabeth Vandenberg. The letter, which was copied to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, was spurred by complaints from parents and community members, said Fink, who had noticed an “egregious†number of students reassigned to virtual learning outside the classroom environment with little or no supervision.
This week, the school board is set to vote on a series of new policies that restrict the superintendent’s ability to remove students from the classroom without due process, including allowing an appeal by students or their parents to the full school board. The policies were developed in the past two months at the direction of school board president Courtney Graves, on a committee led by Martin.
“This new board of seven people believes that we can’t continue to do the things that we used to do,†Graves said in an interview about the new policies. “The biggest thing for us is making sure that all voices at the table were being heard. Parents really never had a voice.â€
Graves was careful not to point a finger at Davis. But it’s clear from the that they are a reaction to the problems laid out in the letter from Legal Services, and they restrict the superintendent’s power, whereas at the board meeting in June, he was requesting more autonomy in determining the long-term suspensions, or reassignment of students.
Those suspensions have been on the rise in the north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County school district since Davis was hired, with the number of students sent home for 10 days or longer, some for fairly routine disciplinary problems, rising each year since 2015, to nearly 10% of the entire student body of 11,000 students.
Such suspensions lead to the “school-to-prison†pipeline and make it harder for Black students to get a quality education, warned the Forward Through Ferguson report in 2015.
Last spring, Legal Services represented a 9-year-old Ferguson-Florissant student with a disability who had been removed from her classroom without due process. The student’s parents and the district reached a settlement agreement that required Ferguson-Florissant to “review its policies and practices of long-term suspending or transferring children with disabilities …â€
Now, the attorneys with Legal Services’ have alerted both the district and the state that Ferguson-Florissant is in violation of this settlement agreement. “The District must act to address its unlawful practices related to due process for administratively reassigned students,†the letter says, “and it must do so in a way that rectifies disparities and increases data transparency.â€
In an emailed statement, Davis said he disagreed with some of the contentions in the Legal Services letter, but that the administration “fully supports†the new policies developed in the board’s committee.
Graves said the letter gave the district the “push†it needed to make sure the district’s policies and practices meet the board’s overarching goals of improving equity. The attorneys at Legal Services, and the parents they represent, will be watching.
“While districts may claim that transfers to virtual learning are less disruptive than formal ‘suspensions,’ in practice we have seen that this is rarely true,†Fink says. “Virtual learning is often low-quality and fails to meaningfully engage students in a way that maintains the continuity of their education.â€