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]

+100000. I was very nervous about the high discipline rate of my kid’s T1 MS but it was exactly as you say - a sign of an administration working hard to keep the school in order. And there is nuance - for example I believe there is a lot more discretion in doing in-school suspensions, shorter out-of-school suspensions, and detention. I don’t think these need to go through Central. Also the MS was willing to just suspend for a day with no paperwork and hope for the best (how do I know this? Because not all “bad” kids are the poor black kids, as I can personally attest!)

So yeah I don’t see the high disciple rates at McArthur as necessarily bad. That said it would give me a little pause - I would want to know more about how much lower-level classroom disruption is present and tolerated. We are running into that now in 8th grade and I have to say I’m not really here for it as my kid moves into HS and is more serious about learning. I just don’t want him to have a full year in a main subject lost because the class happens to have a concentration of problem kids.

Finally wrt expulsions, my understanding is that schools can send kids back to their IB school if they get in a lot of trouble. So I would also hope that McArthur is taking full advantage of that. [/quote]

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