CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is working to address a problem with disproportionality in discipline when it comes to Black students.
The district set a goal several years back to bring the disproportionality rate of out-of-school suspensions for Black students down from around 31% in June 2019 to 23% in June 2024.
Progress has been made over the years, but the district says it’s on track to miss that goal.
CMS leaders say the percentage of suspended Black students continues to be greater than the percentage enrolled – creating a disappointing disproportionality rate.
As of last semester, that rate is only down from 31% to 29%.
CMS board members have been set on coming up with strategies to fix this problem that address the specific needs of students.
District 3 Vice Chair Gregory 'Dee' Rankin expressed early last year that the last thing they want is to fail their students.
"I keep saying and repeating this, that the school to prison pipeline is a theory, but it’s real," Rankin said. "It starts in the schools, the highest suspension of Black boys, and then from this, it leads to the dropout rate, dropout rate leads you to the criminal justice system."
At a school board meeting Tuesday night, CMS presented some strategies to tackle this issue.
Some of these involve doing a district-wide data analysis on discipline that’s specific to each school and further supporting measures already in place like in-school intervention centers and core behavior specialists.
Contact Destiny Richards at drichards5@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.