Why does West High kick out so many kids?

One student got 10 days after she recorded a fight in the girls' bathroom.

Another got five after he wiped hot glue on a classmate.

It happens at every school: Students misbehave, and they get suspended. But at one Cincinnati Public Schools site, it happens a lot.

Western Hills University High School issued 743 suspensions and expulsions in the 2015-16 school year, a rate of 71 per 100 students.

That's more than six times the district average, which is just shy of 11 per 100, and almost twice the rate at Taft IT, the CPS school with the second-highest rate.

Schools in neighborhoods with similar populations and economic conditions don’t approach the kind of numbers seen at West. All CPS schools are guided by the same districtwide code of conduct, which means suspensions and expulsions are supposed to be handled the same way.

It’s “completely unreasonable,” said school board member Eve Bolton, who suspects a combination of factors including new programming at schools, which puts new expectations on students; outside factors, such as poverty and home life; and school leadership.

“It has to go down,” Bolton said. “And it will go down.”

There are caveats to the numbers. CPS uses a system where, instead of going home when they’re suspended or expelled, students in most cases are temporarily reassigned to an alternative school designed for discipline cases. Experts say that makes a big, positive difference.

It’s also important to note that some students are kicked out more than once, so 50 suspensions doesn't necessarily equal 50 students getting suspended.

Those distinctions mean little to one student who said she was suspended from West four times before transferring this year to a charter school. Kayla Brantley was suspended once for missing a detention, she said, once for attendance issues, once after an argument with another classmate and once after she was accused – though later cleared – of stabbing a classmate with a pencil.

The discipline system at West is “backward,” said Brantley, 16. “You’ll get suspended over your phone before a bully gets suspended. I don’t think everyone gets treated the same.”

CPS administrators could not explain why the numbers are higher at some schools than others or why West, in West Price Hill, is such an outlier. They said they are focused, districtwide, on finding and addressing the root causes that lead to discipline.

There is a plan to pump more targeted intervention into schools with elevated rates.

The district is also partnering with doctors and mental health professionals for a more holistic approach.

“Our goal is for every student to be in school every day,” said Assistant Superintendent Bill Myles. “We only have them 180 days. It’s important for them to be there so they can get that learning in.”

Myles pointed to overall suspension and expulsion rates and the rates of repeat offenders, both of which are down year-over-year, as a sign the approach is working. And while students being sent to the discipline school is not ideal, he said, it is better than the alternative of sending them home.

“Is it the best thing to happen? No,” he said. “But are we moving in the right direction? Yes, we are. … It’s not about the penalty. It’s about, how can we help each child become a better person?”

It’s up to adults

Students were suspended for getting caught with drugs and alcohol, swearing at and threatening teachers, throwing supplies and desks, fighting, skipping class, having sex and gambling in the school bathroom.

The Enquirer reviewed more than 2,000 suspension and expulsion reports from CPS to see why students are getting sent to the discipline school. The reports are from nine different high schools, including West, for a set period. The Enquirer initially requested reports from all CPS schools, but the district denied that request as too broad.

At West, infractions ran the gamut from chronic tardiness and goofing around during detention to fights so violent police had to be called. 

In one case, a black freshman at West was suspended for five days after an adult intercepted a note littered with profanity and racial slurs. It’s not marked in the discipline report, but the note was a copy of lyrics from the song “Brothers” by rapper L’A Capone.

The student was sent to the office, where he reportedly refused to cooperate and repeatedly swore at school administrators, saying “F*** this s***! You all got me f***** up!”

In another case, a senior at West was suspended for five days for overreacting when another student farted. “(The student) became dramatic about it and made a commotion when trying to move his seat. When (the teacher) tried to address his behavior he said, ‘man what the f*** did I do?’”

On a basic level, the reports at West do not seem all that different from the reports at other schools. Students are getting suspended and expelled for the same types of infractions; it’s just happening a lot more often at West.

There is an expectation that students will behave at school, said Bolton, the board member. A classroom cannot be a free-for-all space where anything goes. But at some point, Bolton said, “in a room full of adults and children, the adults have to assume most of the responsibility.”

Adults have to set the tone, Bolton said, establish each school’s culture and ensure that all students – those acting out and those following the rules – are getting what they need to succeed.

Everyone’s problem

Of the nearly 700 suspension and expulsion reports The Enquirer reviewed from West, 95 percent were for minority students. As a school, West is about 87 percent non-white, meaning minorities are taking a disproportionate hit.

But that is hardly a West-only or a CPS-only problem. Statewide in the 2016-17 school year, black students were suspended at a rate six times higher than the rate for white students. Students living in poverty were suspended six times as often as those not in poverty.

Nationwide, black students are three times as likely to be suspended as their white peers.

Dan Losen, director of the California-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies, attributes part of the problem to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” If a teacher is looking at a certain group of students more – consciously or not – the teacher will catch that group doing something wrong more often than a group under less scrutiny.

Teachers and principals need to acknowledge that, even if they are striving to be fair, “if the data suggests they might not be, that’s their responsibility," Losen said. 

Policies sometimes allow for too much individual difference, said Kelly Capatosto, a researcher with the Columbus-based Kirwan Institute. Teachers have a lot of discretion in deciding, for example, whether a student is being “disruptive” or “disobedient,” and that allows biases to creep in.

Intentional or not, it matters. A suspension or expulsion can be the start of a vicious cycle. If a student gets suspended, he falls behind at school. When he goes back, he’s frustrated that he’s behind, so he acts out and gets suspended again. Eventually, he’s so far behind that he doesn’t graduate, at which point he is much likelier to fall into poverty or end up in prison.

“I see this as being something that could have a fundamental difference in students' lives,” Capatosto said, “knowing that one suspension or expulsion can really make or break someone’s career.”

Off the Street

CPS' discipline school is called Alternative to Suspension/Alternative to Expulsion, and the district set it up about a dozen years ago, said Myles, the assistant superintendent.

He stresses that A2S/A2E is not like regular school, and it’s not meant to be. The school has life coaches who do role-playing, trying to help students learn how to make better decisions. There’s also a transition team, meant to help students return successfully to their regular school so they don't end up getting re-suspended right away. 

“We didn’t want to suspend kids to the street,” Myles said. “And this gave them an opportunity to still be in a structured environment, providing work, but still having a consequence for behavior that was not acceptable at school.”

It’s about education over punishment, said Jonathon Futch, who manages the school.

“Nobody wakes up and says, ‘I want to fight or cuss out a teacher today,’” Futch said. What happens is, students run into conflict, they run out of strategies for how to respond, and they act out. Futch’s mission at A2S/A2E is to teach students more and better strategies.

Students give the site mixed reviews. One girl told The Enquirer she just got back from a six-day sentence for fighting. “It was fun,” she said. Another complained about the food. A third said that sometimes, it seems teachers are looking for reasons to send students to the discipline school, just to get rid of them.

Brantley, the girl who was suspended four times from West, said some students don’t even bother going to the discipline school. They just wait out their suspensions at home, taking absences, “because it’s pretty much pointless.”

“Unless you get work from your school, you have to do their work,” she said. “And their work is pretty much nothing.”

There's a "critical difference" between sending students to the discipline school and sending them home, said Elaine Fink, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. Fink regularly represents students up for suspension or expulsion, and by and large, she thinks CPS does a good job.

“I’m not going to tell you it’s a panacea, that the (discipline-school) program works how it should – it doesn’t,” she said. “However, kids get free breakfast, lunch, and they’re safe. With a lot of clients, when they’re put out of school at other districts, they’re not.”

But with West, Fink noticed even before she saw hard data that something was off. The attitude at discipline meetings there seemed different, she said, bent more toward punishment than helping students. With other CPS schools, Fink would feel as if she was on the same team as the administrators. With West, “it felt more like battle.”

“It was an attitude of, ‘Well, to be a student in our school, you’re going to have to prove yourself worthy,’” she said. “It’s a school that needs a lot of change. Needs a lot of help.”

Year after year: An outlier

CPS provided only one year of data on how often students from each site are sent to the discipline school. The Enquirer asked for other years of the report, and school officials denied the request, saying it’s not a record they keep.

Instead, the district provided data on overall discipline referrals for the past five years at each school. That could include anything from, for example, a documented verbal warning all the way up to an expulsion. 

Each year, West is a major outlier, with more than triple the number of overall discipline referrals of any other school in the district.

And that is not the only struggle. On its latest state report card, for the second year in a row, West got straight Fs.

It's ridiculous and sad, said Mike Moroski, but the disparities are exactly what he expects. If the city is discriminatory, its schools will be, too.

Moroski is a former teacher who runs a nonprofit dedicated to educating homeless students. He's also one of 13 candidates running this fall for a seat on the CPS school board. 

Maintaining order and respect in the classroom might be the toughest part of a teacher's job, he said. But, it's imperative to own and face the problem. 

“It’s not easy. It’s not,” he said. But “if teachers can’t handle the environment, or if a principal can’t manage his teachers, then they need to go.”

In the meantime, Moroski said, students suffer.

“They see it, and they know it,” he said. “They know they are treated less than. Kids at West High know they’re treated differently.”

Re-wired brains 

Ken Jump started looking at discipline rates his very first year as West High principal, back in 2013. He noticed four categories driving the numbers: profanity toward staff members, harassment and bullying, violent disorderly conduct and fighting.

“It told me that we were dealing with a student population that really didn’t know how to solve problems without turning violent,” Jump said.

So, he started looking for training that would help his teachers better understand their students and help his students better react to conflict. More recently, Jump turned to what’s called Adverse Childhood Experiences. Essentially, ACEs are non-school factors – poverty, a parent on drugs or in jail, exposure to violence, abuse or neglect – that impact a child’s ability to learn.

If a child has too many ACEs, said Dr. Bob Shapiro, a pediatrician with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, it literally changes his or her biology.

“Their brains are wired differently, and their brains are structured differently, and their responses to what happens in the environment are different,” Shapiro said.

Those changes might help a child adapt and survive at home, Shapiro said, but that can come at the cost of success in school.  It might mean the child has trouble sitting still, remembering details or discerning between what is and isn’t a threat.

Shapiro is part of a project called Joining Forces for Children, and he’s partnering with West High to teach the staff about ACEs, what it means for students and how teachers can help.

It will require a strong effort from the entire school, Shapiro said, but if it’s done well, he’s confident West High will change – fewer suspension, less violence, higher test scores and a higher graduation rate.

But that begs the question: If ACEs are the cause of behavior problems, why would the students at West High have more ACEs than those at other CPS schools?

Jump said he doesn’t know. He grew up on the West Side, but he thinks students living there now are facing different challenges than what he faced growing up. He thinks their lives are more difficult. More complicated.

Jump is no longer principal at West. He retired this past year, and Carlos Blair, the former assistant principal at CPS’ Clark Montessori High, took over.

Blair did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story, but Jump is confident that with a little more time, if Blair sticks with the ACEs training, West High will change.

“There’s a really solid foundation laid at Western Hills high school,” Jump said. “I am very hopeful.”