Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Student Advocates Worry Wake Suspension Rules Will Put Students Off Track

A picture of a laptop.
Kristoferb
/
Wikipedia
Wake County students on long-term suspension are enrolled in an alternative online education program called SCORE. Some student advocates say this is an inferior education track that doesn't offer other basic services.

The Wake County Board of Education has voted to update its discipline policy.

The changes will limit the number of students in long-term suspension, according to Bren Elliot, Wake's Assistant Superintendent for Student Support Services, adding that principals will have more discretion to transfer students to an alternative web-based education track called SCORE.

"We have a little more than 200 students each year," Elliot said. "They're ending up with a long-term suspension, which means that they have no access to the education during their time that they're suspended [from] school," Elliott said. "So, what we're trying to do is remove any barriers to them having access to an alternative learning program during their suspension."

But Peggy Nicholson, co-director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice's Youth Justice Project, says it isn't clear that a shorter list of long-term suspensions will result in more students staying on track.

"What the proposed change could do is allow Wake County to start reporting really low, long-term suspension numbers, but only because they're just reassigning those students to poorer-quality alternative schools," Nicholson said. "Which is what would have happened to those students even if they had gotten a long-term suspension, and it had been reported as a long-term suspension."

Nicholson cites a North Carolina Legal Aid public records request from 2015 that showed 1 in 3 Wake County students in the SCORE program last year had to repeat a grade.

Read the SCORE report >>>

 

Rebecca Martinez produces podcasts at WUNC. She’s been at the station since 2013, when she produced Morning Edition and reported for newscasts and radio features. Rebecca also serves on WUNC’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accountability (IDEA) Committee.
Related Stories
More Stories