GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – A rise in expulsion and suspension numbers inside the Green Bay Area Public School District has one board member seeking answers.
Kristina Shelton, an independent school board member appointed in August, immediately had some questions after seeing data that expulsion numbers from last school year alone nearly equal the amount from the past seven school years combined.
“What is this telling us and how could we be doing a better job to serve all our kids?” she asks. “Because if some of our kids aren’t being served in the best way that they can be, then we need to be taking a deeper look at that.”
Last school season 14 students were expelled. A racial breakdown of the students that have been suspended, provided from a review conducted by the Green Bay Press-Gazette of the Department of Public Instruction school suspension data for the 2015-16 school year, shows that 356 of the 1,212 total students suspended were black.
That number equates to twenty-nine-percent of all suspensions, while black students only constitute nine percent of the total student body.
The numbers from the 2015-16 school year are the most recent information that is currently available.
Data such as that stood out to Shelton immediately.
“The data was indicating that there were inequities of who was being impacted by some of our policies and practices around suspensions and expulsions,” she explains.
After being introduced to this information, Shelton took to Facebook to voice some of her concerns. She explains the general message that was posted onto the site.
“I want to dive deeper into some of this data and better understand the issue,” she says. “Who wants to join me and who’s interested in participating in this work?”
Shelton says the response she received was powerful.
“I had a number of community members that came forward and said ‘I do, I really want to be a part of this,’” she explains. “That’s really the point of the group is to as a community take a deeper look.”
She’s referencing the 10-member workgroup, which she is a part of, that was formed quickly after her concerns were made known on Facebook.
The workgroup is made up of various community members with varying backgrounds.
“Some of them are in higher education that do this sort of work from an academic perspective,” she says. “Some of them are doing work at a very grass-roots, localized activism perspective.”
She also notes that some of the members are just concerned parents and individuals involved with non-profits.
Shelton says she also reached out to the local Black Lives United group to see if they had anyone that would be interested in participating.
“I don’t want to have the same people coming every time, I really want to make sure we’re pulling everybody from even our most marginalized communities into the conversation,” says Shelton. “Those voices that have been marginalized we need to raise those voices to the top and give them an opportunity to be a part of the dialogue.”
While the future path of the workgroup remains unknown to even Shelton.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen with this workgroup,” she says. “And that’s the beauty of putting together a workgroup with really passionate people, I think the sky is the limit.”
Shelton adds that they have already been able to identify some objectives for the immediate future.
“In the short term our goals are to prioritize the date and the information that we have,” she says. “And then also look at the policies in the system that the district works through that can impact our suspension and expulsion rate.”
And after the group is better able to analyze the data she hopes that they can come out of the new year with a better understanding of the situation.
“I would love to be able to have some key recommendations by the middle of January to help me as a school board member when I’m sitting at the board table, but also to be able to take some recommendations to the district and the school board as well,” says Shelton. “I think in the long-term we’ll be looking at some larger projects that we feel like really could have a strong impact, a positive impact, on all our students.”
