Due to changing roles in a restorative process seeking to address racial disparities in Urbana schools, deans will no longer be used. It's not entirely clear what role the people in those positions will play moving forward it seems. Excerpts from an article in today's News-Gazette:
Owen, for one, is eager to find out what happens in Urbana’s disciplinary process without deans as part of the equation.Full article here with more information.
“The dean’s role is to process and provide consequences for students who receive discipline referrals,” he said. “The role has evolved and, over time, they’ve become a major force in our switch to restorative practices. But then there’s also this kind of contradiction in that the dean is who you go to to set up a restorative circle and prevent a problem from happening.
“The dean is also the person who’s going to be processing the discipline referral and possibly excluding you from school. That kind of conflicting idea makes it difficult.”
Another problem with the current system, according to Owen: The restorative practices haven’t resulted in black students being punished less than their white counterparts.
In fact, officials found, black students were being more harshly disciplined — even in just the first semester of this school year.
“When we got the data for first semester and did a data dig at the end of September, we saw that it was actually getting significantly worse for students of color,” Owen said.
The acceleration of the divide is what Owen said prompted administrators to start seriously considering the removal of the dean position in January...
“We are not firing these individuals and we are not saying they have not done an excellent job,” Owen said that night. “The primary function of dean has been dealing with student discipline. We want to do that in a system that doesn’t have deans because our restorative practices will be so strong.”
Not everyone was satisfied.
UHS math teacher Daniel Bechdel said he knew from analyzing the school’s discipline data that the racial disparity merited some sort of change, but he remained skeptical that eliminating the deans was the best solution.
“I can tell you based on what I looked at, the disparities are difficult to point toward the deans,” he said. “It’s really hard to use the deans as a scapegoat because I don’t know in which part of this they would be responsible for the disparity. The teachers send the referrals to the deans. The deans would have to be singling out African-American students— I didn’t see it.”
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