The Watson Chapel School District has entered into a consent agreement with the United States Department of Justice in a lawsuit that began in 1970 involving allegations against the district concerning alleged discrimination against black people in administering discipline.
Mike Dennis is the lawyer representing the Watson Chapel School District. He said the Department of Justice and the Watson Chapel School District agreed to the consent order.
“The district does not admit they were discriminating against anyone,” Dennis said. “We did not get to the point of ‘was there discrimination or was there not?’”
“The alternative would have been to have a trial,” Dennis said. “It would have cost time and money. As with any compromise, everyone wins. This order was the product of several months of negotiations. We are not at all displeased with this order. It all comes back to the students.”
The agreement states the plaintiff requested and the district provided documents regarding its use of discipline, including policies and procedures, incident reports and data. Department of Justice employees visited Watson Chapel in November 2015 to interview administrators and other employees about its disciplinary practices and the documents the district provided.
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“[The plaintiff] concluded based on these monitoring efforts that during the 2014-2015 school year, the district suspended and expelled black students at high rates, significantly higher than for white students, and that district policies, procedures and practices were responsible for both the frequency of discipline and the disparities,” the consent agreement states. “The [plaintiff] learned during the site visit the superintendent [Connie Hathorn], who was hired after the 2014-2015 school year, was committed to replacing the district’s use of punitive discipline as the primary reason to student misbehavior with more positive approaches, as part of an overall focus on improving student achievement.”
U.S. District Court Judge Brian S. Miller of the Eastern District of Arkansas signed the consent order.
The consent order requires the school district to take the following steps:
*Transition away from using exclusionary discipline such as in-school or out of school suspension, expulsion or transfer to an Alternative Education program as the primary response to student misbehavior.
*Implement an approach to classroom management and student behavior that focuses on positive interventions.
*Foster a positive school climate conducive to student success.
*Keep students in the classroom where they can learn and achieve.
*Address student misbehavior whether it occurs in the classrooms or other parts of the school.
*Use a system of tiered consequences and interventions that only escalates discipline after less-intensive strategies have been tried multiple times without success.
*Emphasize the repeated and consistent use of positive interventions such as redirection, verbal counseling, conferences and reflective essays.
*Involve parents and guardians in addressing behavioral problems.
*Make sure that interventions to change behavior are documented and analyzed for effectiveness.
*Assign responsibility to a school culture and climate specialist who is qualified to oversee implementation of the district’s positive school climate efforts.
In October, Dovie Burl, the district’s school culture and climate specialist said the desegregation lawsuit resulted in the Department of Justice monitoring the district. Burl said the Department of Justice was providing the district with a starting point to resolve any outstanding issues regarding the disciplining of students.
Burl also said students were being suspended for minor infractions, parents were not being contacted before a maximum penalty was imposed, that students and teachers were not building relationships, and that teachers were disrespecting students.
The consent order was signed by Watson Chapel Superintendent Connie Hathorn; Dennis; and James A. Eichner, trial attorney of the Educational Opportunities Section Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The consent order also requires the district to:
*Use a school resource officer to handle offenses that constitute an imminent and substantial threat to physical safety or that are other serious crimes.
*Not use school resource officers to enforce routine school discipline rules.
* Require the school resource officers to provide a written report to the district in a timely manner describing the circumstances in which they became involved in a school-related incident or used their law enforcement powers on school property during school hours during a school-related activity.
Dennis said Watson Chapel educators are already following most of these directives.
At any rate, the lawsuit is not entirely resolved.
“[The court] is assuming everyone does what they are supposed to do,” Dennis said. “The district will file a motion to have it dismissed in three years. It could be done earlier. We are putting things into place.”
Superintendent Connie Hathorn was attending a conference in Little Rock all day Thursday and could not be reached for comment.