Reply to MacArthur feeder panic

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Former DCPS employee and I want to chime in on the first thing a poster raised a liability that actually indicates competence of this new school: suspension and/or expulsion.

First of all, it is nearly impossible to expel a kid in DCPS. Period. This has nothing to do with the actual school.

Second, I'm going to argue that if a school has a high suspension rate, that means they have a strong admin team that "sweats the small stuff" and is good at dotting i's and crossing t's.

Non-DCPS people have NO idea how many suspensions (for really serious things) Central denies because something was wrong in the paperwork or they feel the school didn't demonstrate reasonable prior steps. Walk in any DCPS school (save for probably Walls and Banneker) and you're going to have kids trying to vape in the bathroom, trying to sneak weed in, the same few kids (less than 2% of the overall student body) trying over and over again to fight, or some other type of poor behavior. If a school has a high suspension rate, it's not necessarily indicative of "oh man, the baddest of the bad kids go here!", but rather a "this is an admin team that knows what they're doing and doesn't play." One school I worked at had a very low suspension rate because the assistant principals were too incompetent to get a suspension package together that Central would actually approve.

Thought we needed some facts to accompany our pearl clutching. [/quote]

This is really valuable context. Every non-application school in the city is going to have some percent of kids with problematic behaviors. I mean, I attended a well regarded public high school in a midsize town that was like 80% white and where fully half of parents were likely UMC or wealthier. And we absolutely had a steady 15-20% of students who were doing things like smoking, sneaking drugs in, ditching class, or getting in fights. The idea that if a public school is "good" it will simply have a 100% rule-compliant student population makes no sense. The only way any school gets to a broadly compliant student population is through selective admissions. JR also has behavioral issues.[/quote]

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