McLean County Times

Black students, constituting 17.5% or 114 of Parkside Junior High School's total student population of 650, accounted for 141 out of the 276 total suspensions (51.1%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly 1.2 suspensions per student, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, Parkside Junior High School's 418 white students, who make up 64.3% of the school population, received 88 suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly one suspension per five white students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students.

Multiracial students at Parkside Junior High School behaved worse than whites, but better than Blacks, with 37 suspensions for 36 students in the 2021-22 school year - an average of roughly 1 suspensions per student.

In contrast, Asian students, who make up 2% of the student body at Parkside Junior High School, had the lowest suspension ratio with an average of one suspension per 13 Asian students, totaling one suspension. This rate is definitively lower than that of Black students, establishing them as the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the 276 total suspensions at Parkside Junior High School in the 2021-22 school year, 173 were in-school suspensions and 103 out-of-school suspensions. In addition to suspensions, one student was expelled from the school. In addition to suspensions, one student was expelled from the school.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, two student suspensions at Parkside Junior High School were for violence-related offenses and 10 for those including drugs.

During the 2021-22 school year, Parkside Junior High School reported 95 students - equivalent to 14.6% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 131 students, or 20.2% of the student population, fell into the chronically absent category, a broader measure that includes all absences, excused or not.

Black students were notably overrepresented in these statistics, comprising 33.6% of all students who were chronically truant, and 39.8% of the chronically absent.

In a broader context, data from the ProPublica database indicates that Black students are suspended at a rate 4.6 times higher than white students in Illinois—surpassing the already high national average rate of 3.9 times.

However, districts’ officials deny a direct link between these statistics and race. Lisa Small, the Superintendent of District 211, argues that these numbers oversimplify the situation. “Decisions are highly individualized and based on the specific behavior and are not well-suited to a simple numerical analysis,” she wrote in a statement. “They are not a statistic to us, but a developing young adult.”

Illinois ranks 12th in the nation for the highest rate of suspensions among Black students relative to their white peers.

Race	Number of Students	Total Infractions	Infractions Per Student
Hispanic	67	9	0.13
Black	114	141	1.24
Asian	13	1	0.08
Multiracial	36	37	1.03
White	418	88	0.21