EDITORIAL: Increase discipline at the Clark County School District

The time to rethink the Clark County School District’s discipline policy is now.

The past few weeks have seen a cascade of disturbing stories from district students. There is Maysen Melton, who authorities allege raped multiple girls before being allowed to transfer to Palo Verde High School. There are the two students at West Career and Technical Academy whom police accused last week of making “terroristic threats” to shoot up the school. Last week, Francisco Maldonado, a senior at Legacy High School, allegedly brought a gun to school.

These aren’t just isolated cases.

District statistics show violence toward students and teachers and possession of weapons and drugs have increased by around 50 percent in just four years. Expulsions, reported the Review-Journal’s Amelia Pak-Harvey, are down almost 69 percent in the same time period.

Those two things are directly related.

Flash back to 2013, when a special district committee issued a report on “Overrepresentation by gender, race/ethnicity, or disability in discipline-related action and/or special education placement.” That report based its conclusions on a Vanderbilt study of district discipline. It found that “black students were about 2.7 times more likely than other groups to be excluded (expelled) by action of the school board.” The committee, which included congressional candidate Susie Lee, determined that the top root cause of the disparity was “bias.”

The district’s solution was to push principals to expel fewer students. As Ms. Pak-Harvey reported last year, “Students are no longer booted for assault, arson or having sex on campus.”

As was utterly predictable, this policy has failed and district students are less safe because of it. Ironically, while the number of expulsions dropped, the percent of black students expelled has increased from 33 percent to 45 percent. By the committee’s own standard, that makes them guilty of racial bias.

Unfortunately, that type of policy was then strongly encouraged nationally by a 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter from the civil rights offices of the Departments of Justice and Education. It said a school discipline policy could be “unlawful discrimination based on race” even if it is “administered in an evenhanded manner but has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

Judging the merits of discipline by aggregating statistics instead of whether justice was done in individual cases is always a bad idea. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos should rescind that letter, but the district shouldn’t wait on federal action to fix the violence epidemic it started by restricting discipline. The Clark County School District should scrap its current disciplinary policies and return to its 2011 standards.

The safety of students and teachers depends on it.