Homeowners with houses valued at $250,000 will pay $28 more a year, according to CPS. The move will bring in about $41 million.

In a press release, Board President David Vitale said the money will help the district keep class sizes stable, implement a longer school day and invest in preschool.

“We don't take an increase lightly,” he said.

The decision is one of the first indications of how district leadership plans to deal with the budget deficit, while at the same time resolve difficult teacher contract negotiations and implement new initiatives.

These issues were looming Wednesday at the school board meeting. The meeting featured parent groups, some of whom came to support the teachers union and others who came to put pressure on them to resolve their differences.

Also, groups of teachers, students and parents came to talk about how the school-level budgets were playing out in their buildings. One group was from Clemente High School, a West Side that sits on the border between a gentrifying area and the rough and tumble Humboldt Park.

Clemente High School is on the precipice of change.

Last week, it was awarded a $5.6 million federal school improvement grant to perform a reform method called transformation in which a principal works with existing staff to improve a school rather than firing them as in a turnaround. In the same week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that it was going to be one of the five wall-to-wall International Baccalaureate schools, bringing a high-level, rigorous curriculum to the school.

But these new initiatives weren’t able to save Clemente from being hit by another trend. Surrounded by new, mostly charter, high schools, the school is being drained of its population. Many of the other CPS high schools awarded school improvement grants are grappling with the same situation.

At the board meeting on Wednesday, a cadre of Clemente teachers came to complain about being laid off. Over the past week, some 22 teachers out of about 75 have been told that their positions have been eliminated, said Kevin Hough, who is one of those teachers.

CPS officials said these positions were lost due to a projected enrollment drop of 27 percent over the next year. If the district’s projections are right, Clemente will go from a school of 2,700 in 2005 to a school of 784 in 2012, a decrease of more than 70 percent. The drop was precipitated this year by the removal of the achievement academy, a special program for overage 8th-graders.

Hough said the teachers are dismayed because they were the ones that held the school together as it experienced a tumultuous last few years. “We have seen improvement at the school without any effective leadership,” he said.

CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler said about 800 teachers were laid off across the district due to projected enrollment decreases and program changes, which can result in a shifting of position needs. Ziegler said layoffs at this time of year were down by about 20 percent.

CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey said that he’s heard that principals are taking a wait-and-see approach as they look at the next year’s budget. Though principals have received their funding and submitted their school-level budgets, officials have yet to release the district-wide budget.

With teacher contract negotiations ongoing and a projected deficit of about $600 million, there’s a lot of uncertainty, he said. “I have heard that a lot of principals are coasting,” he said.

In the meantime, some budget decisions are being made. On Wednesday, CPS awarded contracts to the Academy for Urban School Leadership to continue managing two of the first elementary school turnarounds.

AUSL will manage 2006 turnaround Sherman Elementary School for four more years and 2007 turnaround Harvard School of Excellence for another five years. The not-for-profit teacher training organization will get $420 per student or about $350,000 for both schools each year.

While the schools have both made improvements, Ziegler said there’s still work to be done. Both schools have seen 30 percent increases in their ISAT scores, but are still below the district average. Sherman is a Level 3 school, which is the worst rating the district gives.

AUSL spokeswoman Deirdre Campbell said the organization looks at turnarounds as a process, not an event with an end date.

But Valencia Rias-Winstead, a former leader for Designs for Change, said it seems to her that district officials favor AUSL by giving them more chances to improve the schools.

“You should be ashamed,” she said.

Also, the CPS board approved a revised student code of conduct. The new student code of conduct reduces the number of days a student is automatically suspended. For the worst offenses, such as sexual assault, students now will be given a 5-day suspension, instead of 10. For lesser offenses, the number of days is reduced from five to three.

CPS officials stressed that they are encouraging schools to use more corrective and restorative justice. They also are taking steps to take a holistic approach to discipline.

“Teaching positive behavior is much more important than punishment,” said CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

Community and student groups, which worked on the code, said that it was a step in the right direction, but said they worried that it didn’t go far enough in forcing principals to use suspension and expulsion in only the most extreme circumstances.

Students and community groups have been calling for drastic revisions to the code for months, including at a protest last week outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office and a rally today outside City Hall.

The most significant change in the revised code is the scrapping of automatic 10-day, out-of-school suspensions from the arsenal of punishments for even the most serious offenses (which include sexual assault and the use of a weapon). The minimum number of days for suspension in these severe cases is five, although the principal may still apply up to a 10-day suspension.

The revisions also reduce the maximum number of suspension days for other “groups” of less severe offenses. For example, a student who previously would have been suspended for up to five days for Group 2 behavior, which includes offenses such as displaying or publishing obscene or profane materials, can now only receive a maximum of three days of out-of-school suspension.

Principals can also use in-school suspensions as an alternative to, or in combination with, out-of-school suspensions. For example, a principal could now have a student serve two days of his or her suspension out of school and one day in school.

The revisions also call for more use of practices to address misbehavior without punishment, including steps that principals should take to be proactive, such as “redirect to correct behavior” and “intervene to minimize disruption, resolve conflict as necessary to keep students and staff safe.”

CPS Director of Youth Development and Positive Behavior Support Jennifer Loudon said that this revised code provides “additional options” for principals and teachers when considering consequences for student misbehaviors and encourages the use of peace circles, peer juries, mentoring and other practices.

CPS intends its revised Student Code of Conduct to be “corrective, instructive, and restorative,” Loudon said.

“We want to start fixing problems when they are small, and not let them get bigger,” Loudon said.

Leaders from VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) said the revisions don’t go far enough, and the same sentiment was voiced at today’s rally outside City Hall by students, parents, faith leaders and educators.

Although eliminating the automatic 10-day suspension is a step in the right direction, the revisions don’t address the issue of racial disparity in discipline, don’t do anything to hold charter schools more accountable for their discipline practices or provide interventions that kids need, says VOYCE .

 “Hundreds of young people are slipping through the cracks,” says Emma Tai of VOYCE. “There’s an urgency to the issue that we didn’t see reflected in CPS’s actions.”

Extreme measures like suspensions, expulsions, and arrests don’t make our schools safer—and can in fact make things worse, by damaging the trusting student-teacher relationships that are the foundation for a safe learning environment.

They disproportionately impact the educational futures of our Black, Latino and special education students.

And their use is out of control here in Chicago, where every single day hundreds of students are suspended out of school and dozens more are arrested.

As chair of the Illinois P-20 Council, it is my responsibility to put more young people and adults in our state on the path to higher education. But there is simply no way that we can do this while our school discipline system actively forces students out of school and onto the streets, the criminal justice system, or both.

Under pressure from groups like Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), the Board of Education on Wednesday is taking a step in the right direction, voting on a new Student Code of Conduct that puts stronger limits on the use of extended, multi-week out-of-school suspensions.

This is progress—too many students have lost too many days for truly minor, non-violent offenses such as using Facebook or bringing a phone to school. But Mayor Emanuel and his schools team must do more.

In May, I met with two senior officials from Denver Public Schools at a meeting convened by VOYCE. Since working with students and community members to re-write Denver’s discipline code in 2008, they had overseen a series of reforms that ultimately reduced school-based police tickets by 68% and out-of-school suspensions by 40%. Underlying their work was the strong commitment to reducing the disproportionate impact that suspensions, expulsions and arrests have on students of color, particularly Black and special education students.

That same commitment from the top is tragically lacking here in Chicago, where federal data released this year has shown that African-American students are suspended five times more than their white peers—the third highest black-white disparity in the country.

If Mayor Emanuel and his schools team are serious about ending these disparities, they must implement three key changes: First, they can follow the example of Denver by reserving the most extreme punishments—suspensions, expulsions, and arrests—for only the most serious offenses. Then, they must release timely, school-level data on the use of these measures to the public to make sure that progress is made. And lastly, they must hold all our publicly-funded schools, including charters, to the same standards for keeping all our students in school, safe and learning.

As a lifelong advocate for Chicago’s youth, I know that true change requires leadership and commitment. Mayor Emanuel and Board of Education cannot drag their feet with half-measures. They must take a stand against the senseless policies that are forcing our most vulnerable students out of school and into the streets.

Let’s restore common sense to school discipline. It’s what’s right for our classrooms, our communities, and most importantly, our kids.

Miguel Del Valle is a former mayoral candidate and Chicago City Clerk and previously served in the Illinois State Senate for two decades.

But CPS and the Chicago Police Department say the group’s analysis is inaccurate because it is based on data for all juvenile arrests on any CPS-owned property, including arrests that take place during non-school hours.

VOYCE says police made 2,546 school-based arrests between September 2011 and February 2012, according to data supplied by the civil rights organization Advancement Project. The VOYCE analysis pointed out that the arrestees included three 9-year-olds, eight 10-year-olds, and 17 children who were age 11. Of those arrested, 75 percent (1,915) were African-American, 21 percent (540) were Latino and 3 percent (75) were white.

Chicago Police Department spokeswoman Melissa Stratton notes that the data includes all juveniles, including non-students and dropouts, who are arrested on CPS property—including non-school property—at all times of the day and night, including weekends.

More accurate school-based arrest data is difficult to find, however. Stratton said CPS could provide “more accurate information about the incidents that actually took place in the schools during the school day.”

CPS officials, however, said they don’t have data on how many times school incidents result in students being arrested. "When an arrest is made, it is noted as part of the incident, but for actual arrest numbers, we will have to refer you to CPD," district spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus wrote. 

The most common misdemeanor charge was battery causing bodily harm, which 366 people were charged with. Another 358 were charged with “physical contact” battery and 313 with “reckless conduct,” criticized by VOYCE members as a catch-all charge for rowdy students.

The students involved in VOYCE delivered 5,000 petition signatures to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and asked him to attend a May 7 town hall meeting on issues of school discipline and safety.

They complained that in meetings to rewrite the discipline code, CPS officials have not worked with them. Among their demands:

*Limit the maximum suspension time to 5 days, and eliminate suspensions as an option for lower-level infractions

*Eliminate police involvement for misdemeanor-level offenses

*Increase funding for restorative justice programs

*Create a public database of school-based arrests and other disciplinary actions.

Sainvilus says the district does not have the authority to create such a database, because arrests are “the exclusive jurisdiction of CPD.”

CPS officials wrote in a statement that “CEO Brizard is a strong advocate of limiting suspensions and other actions that remove students from the classroom” and noted that new social-emotional supports in schools have led to 28 percent fewer expulsion referrals, 43 percent fewer expulsions and 27 percent fewer arrests on school grounds between 7am and 5pm Monday through Friday.

Officials also say that some VOYCE suggestions have been incorporated into the new student code of conduct. The district has clarified the police notification section of the code, so that principals know they’re not required to call police on students.

“We have told VOYCE that we do not intend to stop all police notification for misdemeanor offenses as VOYCE suggests, because in situations where criminal offenses are committed in schools, police intervention may be appropriate,” the district noted in an email.

At the press conference, VOYCE students held up signs with faces of 25 students, representing “the futures that could have been,” said Kelly High School student Imani Dorsey.

Roosevelt High School student Angelique Wade said that when she was an 8^th-grade student at ASPIRA Haugan Middle School, she was arrested and received a 10-day suspension for starting a fight – the first time she had gotten in trouble, she said.

“I want to go to college, and so I’m concerned about it,” Wade said.

Arrests by age and race

Number of juvenile arrests by statute

They sat through three hours as the committee debated multiple issues, listening attentively and looking proud as Milkie parried with senators who challenged him at every turn. They gathered around at the end of the day, posing for group photos with Milkie in the center.

The senators roundly praised what Milkie has achieved at Noble Street--a safe and secure learning environment, higher test scores and graduation rates than neighborhood high schools, noteworthy scholarship of Noble graduates at the college level.

“When I talk about the right way to educate students, I call it the Milkie Way,” joked Sen. William Delgado (D-Chicago) – even as he offered legislation to outlaw one of the key tactics that Milkie believes has made Noble Street schools so successful.

Student discipline is the central strategy at Noble, discipline demanding that students follow rules that rely on parents for enforcement. What motivates the parents? They are charged fees to cover part of the costs of the school’s disciplinary program.

The fees – labeled “fines” in recent media reports on the policy – are what “engages” the parents most effectively, Milkie told the committee. Delgado’s amendment to SB 637 would prohibit charter schools from imposing “a fine or any other financial penalty on a student as a disciplinary measure.” The committee approved the amendment 6-4, but whether it can pass both the House and Senate is very much in question.

The charge is usually just a $5 share of the school’s cost of holding a three-hour detention after school. But it can be as much as $140, to help pay for a disciplinary program teaching social skills and other subjects, which students with numerous demerits are required to attend.

There are many ways to rack up a demerit at Noble Street. Chewing gum is a four-demerit offense, and so is academic dishonesty, cheating or plagiarism. Eating outside the lunchroom will cost you two demerits, as will talking during a fire drill. Throwing anything in the lunchroom or failing to return a tray will each cost one demerit.

A student with four demerits within a two-week period gets a detention, for which his parents will be charged a $5 fee. Students with more than 12 detentions, or who have been involved in such activities as fighting, bullying, gangs or drug use or distribution, must attend the disciplinary program, conducted after school for 15 weeks or for four weeks during the summer.

All this is explained, Milkie said, in a number of places--the “contract” that a student and his parent sign as a part of the enrollment process, in information sent to parents and in the “Student Code of Conduct and Disciplinary Policy” section of the handbook given to Noble Street  parents.

Do parents object to the fees charged for misbehavior? “Some do,” Milkie conceded. But he noted that Noble’s enrollment has grown from less than 200 students at the beginning to more than 5,000 at 10 campuses today – and more than 8,000 applied for this year’s freshman class.

Because of the safe environment and the academic success that Milkie said are results of the disciplinary policy, “Parents are flocking to us.”

Noble’s students are mostly from poor families, with 87% eligible for free or reduced-price lunches under federal guidelines. They often arrive with behavior issues, Milkie said, but the typical student who may earn 12 or 15 demerits as a freshman usually gets just two or so by senior year. Students respond positively to the disciplinary code, he said, as do their parents.

Delgado explained to the committee that he knows Milkie well, respects him as an educator and is impressed by the successes. But, he said, “We just disagree about this policy.” Many constituents have complained to him about the fines, he said, and asserted that he “could have filled the hearing room” with opponents of the policy.

He also referred to recent media accounts in which students and parents decried Noble’s policy.

No public school is allowed by law to charge such fees, Delgado pointed out, and no research has generated findings that such “financial punishment” has beneficial effects.

“I don’t want to micromanage,” he added, “but we see a problem.”

Committee members Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) and Sen. Iris Martinez (D-Chicago) joined Delgado in vigorous opposition to the fines. “I have also heard many complaints,” Lightford told Milkie.

She agreed that Noble Street has achieved exceptional educational success, but “I just don’t know if [charging fines] is the right thing to do.”

In a response to a question, Lightford learned from a charter school association representative that no other charter in Illinois is known to have such a policy. That information seemed to her more important than any of the successes Milkie said were results of the parental engagement the discipline code and fines promote.

Martinez also told of hearing complaints about Noble’s fines, and she had a complaint of her own. Noble parents had called her in support of the policy after Delgado filed his amendment on March 7. These callers usually “didn’t even know what they were calling about,” Martinez said. “They just called because they were told to call. They tied up my [phone] lines.”

Martinez lectured Milkie about the difficult economy, the high unemployment and economic stress on low-income families. She expressed outrage that the school would collect nearly $300,000 in fines over a three-year period. “What do you do with all that money?”

Milkie said it costs Noble an average of about $19,000 per campus annually to cover the costs of detentions and the summer and after-school programs, but the fees generate only about $16,000 per campus. Parents of misbehaving students should pay the costs of the disciplinary program, Milkie said. Otherwise “the parents of those who do not misbehave will have to pay.”

Sen. David Leuchtefeld, a Republican from the small town of Okawville near St. Louis, strongly opposed Delgado’s amendment. He challenged Delgado, “Isn’t this micromanaging?” Leuchtefeld was a school teacher for more than three decades.

 “We have finally found something that works,” he said. “Why would we want to change it?”

Ultimately, Lightford and Martinez were joined by Sen. Annazette Collins (D-Chicago), Sen. John Mulroe (D-Chicago), Delgado (who was temporarily on the committee in the absence of Sen. James Meeks) and Sen. Susan Garrett (D-Highwood) in voting the bill to the Senate floor.

All four Republicans – Leuchtefeld, Sen. Christine Johnson (R-Sycamore), Sen. Kyle McCarter (R-Highland) and Sen. Suzi Schmidt (R-Lake Villa) – voted against Delgado’s measure. Schmidt had been particularly enthusiastic in support of Noble’s disciplinary policy and successful record.

Whether the bill will pass both the House and Senate and arrive at the desk of Gov. Pat Quinn to be signed into law seems questionable. Getting 30 votes in the Senate will be a challenge. Republicans are likely to be joined by at least a few Democrats in opposition.

Passing the House may be even more challenging. Speaker Michael Madigan has the persona of a leader who values discipline above everything. Noble Street is also favored strongly by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who surely has Madigan’s phone number.

The Leuchtefeld question – “Why would we change it? – is likely to resonate.

Jim Broadway is the founder of State School News Service.

(Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that students, not parents and alumni, came with Milkie to Springfield, and that 12 demerits, not 12 detentions, sent students to a disciplinary program. We regret the errors.)

“As civil rights lawyers, we are exploring our options to challenge this practice,” said Advancement Project staff attorney Alexi Nunn Freeman.

Critics of the Noble Street schools – which include Voices of Youth in Chicago Education and Parents United for Responsible Education – said at a Monday news conference that the practices push students out of school and asserted that Noble does not accommodate families that can't pay.

They also announced the results of a Freedom of Information Act request showing that the Noble Network of Charter Schools, which is a nonprofit organization, collected more than $188,000 in detention and behavior-class fees during the 2010-11 school year -- and nearly $387,000 since 2008-09.

Detention rates were highest at Rowe-Clark Math and Science Academy, which averaged 16 detentions per student in 2010-11 and collected nearly $29,000 from detention fees -- or more than $80 per student, according to an analysis of data provided by Advancement Project. They were lowest at Gary Comer College Prep, where fees averaged less than $4 per student.

Catalyst Chicago and WBEZ reported in fall 2010 that charter schools hold on to fewer students than non-selective magnet schools, and have an expulsion rate three times higher than neighborhood schools. Though some parents appreciate the strict discipline, others feel their children have been pushed out of charters. (CPS policy allows charters to write their own discipline codes.)

The Noble Network, which runs Noble Street Charter School campuses, is one of the district’s biggest charter networks, with 10 campuses serving 6,543 students.

Donna Moore, a parent whose son is in his second year at Gary Comer College Prep, said he racked up more than 30 detentions last year, sometimes being issued one detention – or even a suspension – for falling asleep during a previous detention. Moore says none of the detentions were related to her son being disruptive or threatening school safety.

In addition to receiving detention (and, thus, having to pay a fee) for violating rules like having their shoes untied and bringing potato chips to school, Noble Street students can rack up demerits for failing to sit up, make eye contact, articulate clearly when talking or track a speaker with their eyes.

“My son began to spiral [down] both emotionally and academically,” Moore said, after learning that he would have to repeat freshman year because he had garnered so many detentions.

VOYCE members dressed in chef’s hats to poke fun at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s promotion of Noble schools as having a “secret sauce” for student success.

“Just like the fast-food equivalent, people need to take a closer look at what’s in that secret sauce,” PURE director Julie Woestehoff said. She called the school’s methods “a dehumanizing discipline system that looks a lot more like reform school than college prep.”

Waivers, payment plans for families in need

However, Noble Network officials – including Kimberly Neal, the principal at Muchin College Prep in the Loop – say their schools make accommodations for families who can’t afford the fees. In all, 82 percent of the students at Muchin, and 89 percent of Noble Network students citywide, were eligible for free lunches during the 2011-12 school year, according to CPS data.

“It’s very few, because most of our parents can pay,” Neal says, even if they can’t do it right away. “Throughout the year, most of our parents are working or have some source of income.”

Neal says that the fees are a necessary part of the school’s focus on student success.

“An example we always give our parents is, if you’re late every day to work, would you still have a job?” she says. “We want to teach our scholars the skills needed to be successful in the workforce.”

Michael Milkie, superintendent of the Noble Network, says the group does not keep data on how many parents receive accommodations for the fees and that the network has no specific cutoff for when a family qualifies for a waiver.

He says hundreds of families received payment plans every year. However, only a few receive fee waivers for detentions.

“It’s not many families that have an issue with a nominal fee like that,” Milkie says, though he added that the waivers were more common among students with more than 12 detentions who are required to enroll in a $140 summer behavior class.

 “We don’t have students who are not promoted for inability to pay,” Milkie says.

He estimates that at most 1 percent of the network’s students are retained each year after hitting a set number of detentions (which was 33, and has now been changed to 36).

“We have high expectations for students in terms of academics, in terms of fitness, in terms of behavior. We believe what we’re doing is legal,” Milkie says. “For too long in this city, the students who behaved well have had educational dollars diverted from them to address the behavior of students who behaved poorly. We are diverting fewer dollars from those students who behave well. And therefore, you have very high performance in terms of test scores, attendance.”

A revamp of student discipline?

Several speakers at the press conference said there is a district-wide problem with harsh discipline, and called on CPS to rewrite its discipline code. (CPS says it does not have jurisdiction over charter school discipline rules.)

“Noble schools, like all of CPS, are still in the dark ages when it comes to how they treat students,” the Advancement Project’s Freeman said. “CPS, it is time for a change for all your schools, charter and neighborhood alike.”

VOYCE has been working with CPS in an effort to get changes to the student code of conduct, but organizer Emma Tai said the group was disappointed with the district’s response.

In an email, Chief Family and Community Engagement Officer Jamiko Rose told VOYCE that the goals of the policy revision would be to improve its “readability and accessibility” and increase schools’ “preventive and proactive options” for dealing with low-level violations.

Rose also indicated that the district would try to make changes “at all levels of the organization” to decrease reliance on suspensions, expulsions, and law enforcement and increase the use of restorative justice and skill-building interventions. (Despite being one of the first cities to include restorative justice officially in its discipline code, the district has long struggled with implementing such programs.)

Tai notes that the code already includes significant language about restorative justice for low-level behavior problems. VOYCE had hoped for more substantial changes, such as shortening the length of suspensions prescribed for each offense.

"CPS wants a student code of conduct that is both fair and just and is currently working to revamp its policy with the input of student voices," the district said in a statement. "As part of that process, we have convened a working group to assist us in the development of a new student code of conduct policy that will ensure consistent district-wide expectations, positive reinforcement of appropriate behavior, and tiered supports for students that are struggling with behavior issues."

Data published as a result of the New York City ordinance have led to important revelations, such as the finding that at least one black male student is arrested in school each day, says Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA.

“This information is conspicuously missing from the school report card,” Kaba says. “This is information that we need to hold our system accountable.”

On Wednesday, Project NIA released a report on arrests in schools, but the information was difficult to get and came from the Chicago Police Department and not CPS, whose officials say they don’t keep tabs on arrests.

The report reveals that student arrests are a major concern. Of the 27,000 juveniles arrested in Chicago in 2010, a fifth of them were taken into custody at school. More than two-thirds of those arrested were black and 75 percent were male.

“It clearly shows that black males are being targeted,” says Frank Edwards, a professor of sociology at DePaul University and a volunteer with Project NIA. He says that black students are 1.6 times more likely to be arrested at school than their peers.

Principals have mindset of “needing cops”

Kaba says she’s optimistic that a student safety act could fly in Chicago. She notes that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made data transparency a big push.

But at CPS, the idea might be controversial. Getting student suspension and expulsion information at the school level has always required a Freedom of Information Act request. In recent years, much of the information is redacted because of privacy concerns. 

Also, police have a strong presence in schools and principals are attached to that. Most high schools have two policemen assigned to them every school day. Earlier this year, CPS officials tried to convince principals to give them up in exchange for extra cash. But few principals took the offer.

“The mindset of needing cops is so embedded and cemented,” Kaba says. “That is the environment we are dealing with.”

The number one offense among student arrests is simple battery, which is usually fighting.  Other top reasons include drug abuse violations and disorderly conduct. Few students are arrested for violent crimes.

Project NIA staff are still trying to obtain school-level data from police.

For the most part, the communities with many juvenile arrests also have a lot of school-based arrests. Austin and North Lawndale are exceptions, as they are among the top five communities in juvenile arrests, but not in school-based arrests. Kaba says the situation bears investigation.

Restorative justice still largely untried

In addition to more transparency, Kaba also would like to see more funding for restorative justice programs. The current student code of conduct calls on schools to use restorative justice techniques such as peace circles and peer juries. But the strategies have never taken root in a wide number of schools, since many principals and teachers don’t know how to use these techniques and there’s little money to train them. In addition, some school staff are not convinced that the techniques are effective.

Naomi Milstein, who runs the restorative justice training programs at Alternatives, says that there’s more awareness and desire to do restorative justice. Yet training is hard to come by. Also, since turnover is high in CPS, schools might train one set of staff members but then need to train new people a few years later.

The student code of conduct is currently being rewritten, and Kaba and Milstein would like more explicit directives in terms of restorative justice.

Kaba and Project NIA also are working with state legislators on getting juvenile arrest records expunged. Though most think such arrest records are not accessible, they often show up years later when prospective employers are doing background checks.

Kaba learned this the hard way. A young woman whom she worked with called her, upset that she had been denied a nursing license after attending nursing school--based on a criminal record. At first, the young woman had no idea of the basis of the denial, but then, Kaba says, she remembered that she had been arrested after getting into a fight on her school campus.

“Within 15 minutes of getting to the police department, she was released to her parents,” Kaba says. “She had no idea that she was booked.”

Kaba, who knows the system, was able to get the record cleared up within a week, but she says many  young people don’t have an advocate like her.

“Something like this could cause them to crumble,” she says. “Or it would take a million months to get cleared up.”

If a student finishes his or her work, a table is piled with books to read. There’s also a worksheet they can complete, designed to make them think about their behavior.

At a big neighborhood high school, an in-school suspension room might seem par for the course. But at Marshall, the strategy has been tried before, failed before, and in recent years, didn’t exist.

With the turnaround, however, it made sense to try it again. In the 2009-2010 school year, two-thirds of Marshall’s students were suspended at least once, the second-highest out-of-school suspension rate among the city’s high schools. Out-of-school suspension is a strong predictor of low test scores and high dropout rates, two outcomes the turnaround administration wanted, and needed, to rectify. 

CEO Jean-Claude Brizard also has pinpointed in-school suspension rooms as one strategy to lower out-of-school suspension.
But it’s not at all clear that in-school suspension rooms, at least as they are often implemented in CPS, will have the positive impact that supporters hope for. In fact, the data suggest the opposite.

Over half of CPS high schools had in-school suspension rooms in the 2009-2010 school year, according to the latest figures from the Illinois State Board of Education. But on average, these schools handed down out-of-school suspensions to more students than those without in-school suspension rooms, a Catalyst Chicago analysis found.

One explanation is that schools with in-school suspension rooms have more serious, discipline problems than those without.

Another explanation is that CPS has no standards for in-school suspension rooms, so they are little more than holding cells that offer little or no education or counseling to help change behavior. A Catalyst survey of 53 high schools found that in the 16 with in-school suspension rooms, supervision was provided by a variety of people, from substitute teachers to school deans. Only two schools had counselors who could talk to students about their misbehavior.

At Marshall, problems were evident early on. The room’s first attendant had no real experience working with teenagers.
One day in mid-September 2010, the attendant tells students to follow the rules.

But instead of listening, the two young women repeatedly ask for permission to use the restroom. Two of the young men have their heads laid down on the desk, chewing straws and looking bored. The fifth won’t stop teasing one of the girls. She goes from laughing at his jokes to acting annoyed. 

Then, one of the boys decides he needs a drink of water and gets up. The attendant tells him to sit down and stands before the front door, but the boy bolts out the back. 

Tired and defeated, the attendant picks up his radio and tells the hall security to watch for the boy.

Within two months, the man was fired for mishandling a student.

Creating a good in-school suspension program is a feat. In Brizard’s previous position as superintendent of Rochester, N.Y., schools, he assigned a teacher, a counselor and social worker to each room.

There is no such program in Chicago. If a school provides any significant social support, it is often the result of happenstance.

At Mather High School on the North Side, Cosmin Moraru is a history teacher who had just earned his counseling certificate. About the same time, Mather’s principal received a grant to implement some programs as alternatives to out-of-school suspension.

The principal decided to keep Moraru on, but assign him to man an in-school suspension room.  Moraru developed a protocol, starting with a pre-placement interview with students about their behavior, to make sure they are open to changing it.

On the other three days of the week, Moraru holds in-school suspension. The day starts with a three-hour group therapy session in which the focus is on modeling behavior and discussing how students can change their reactions to situations. After lunch, the students do their homework.

Moraru limits the number of students in the room to 10. The room has a potted plant, and Moraru plays classical music while students are doing homework.

“We try to make it so this is not so much a negative thing, but an alternative,” he says. 

After a year of running the room, he boasts some pretty good results. Eighty percent of students who were sent to in-school suspension never returned and were not suspended out-of-school.

At Marshall, Principal Kenyatta Stansberry never had the same luck finding a person who felt equipped to run the type of in-school suspension room that might have a positive impact, like the one at Mather. Stansberry also didn’t get complete buy-in from teachers for the discipline approach she was trying to implement.

Much of the professional development training conducted in the month before school began centered on how to manage a classroom and build trust with students. Teachers were taught the Boys Town Education Model, which focuses on managing behavior, building relationships  and teaching social skills. The method stresses teaching specific life skills, such as looking a teacher in the eye when asked a question, and having teachers learn ways to talk to students to defuse disruptive behavior.

But within a few months of the school year starting, many teachers had abandoned or modified the techniques. By December, math teacher Sofia Orlowski was darting around her classroom giving students stamps for good behavior.

The freshman-level teachers, upset that students they had sent to the dean’s office were often not punished, created their own in-school suspension room, called “Think Tank.” During periods when they didn’t teach classes, 9th-grade teachers took turns in the Think Tank, where students were required to write a reflection on their behavior, including a letter home to their parents.

Other teachers didn’t see in-school suspension as sufficient punishment. One spring day, Dean Derrick Bass was highly upset that a teacher had emailed Assistant Principal Angel Johnson complaining that a student wasn’t sent home for cursing at her. 

Bass says he already told this teacher that he could send the boy to in-school suspension or try to arrange for a parent-teacher conference. But the teacher is still not happy.

Bass tells Assistant Principal Matt Curtis that even though it is late in the year, he still has to show some teachers the district’s code of student conduct and explain to them the idea of progressive discipline.

“At the end of the day, you can’t give a death sentence for stealing a turkey,” Bass says. “This issue gives me a headache.”

After the first in-school suspension attendant left, Stansberry put a student advocate in the in-school suspension room, with a promise that he would be able to resume his normal duties as soon as she could find a replacement.

About a month and a half later, she replaced the advocate with Lonnie Felters Jr., a physical education teacher who was still working on obtaining his certification to teach in Illinois.

“He has a good relationship with students,” Stansberry says of Felters. “He will be fine.”

Felters started out with a good attitude about the position. 

But by the end of the year, he was not happy. He had shoved a bookshelf against the backdoor to keep students from escaping. The same kids were in there on a regular basis. Many of them were special education students with behavior problems who, by state law, could not be  given more than 10 days of out-of-school suspension.

Most of them refused to do any work and instead spent their day just trying to bother the other students. “One bad apple can ruin it for the whole group,” he said.

Felters says he wishes he could limit the number of students sent to in-school suspension or that there were multiple teachers who could work with students one-on-one. He also says he thought a dean should be in the room so that they could threaten out-of-school suspension and it would be a real threat.

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and dread coming here,” he says. “It is that bad.”

Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email karp@catalyst-chicago.org.

“Rather than punish our children, we want our children to be nurtured and cared for,” he told about 40 members of POWER-PAC, a parent organization, which is part of the not-for-profit Community Organizing and Family Issues.

POWER-PAC held the rally at Wells High School as part of the Dignity in Schools Campaign’s National Week of Action. City council resolutions are not binding, but Burnett said that a resolution puts alderman’s wishes “on blast.”

Though recent numbers aren’t available, CPS has long had a high suspension and expulsion rate. POWER-PAC member Lynn Morton said that in a meeting with CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard he told her she was preaching to the converted in terms of using restorative justice to reduce out-of-school punishment. “We are calling on you, the converted, to give life to your words,” she said.

Now, Hay Elementary has a promising peer jury program launched with the help of the district’s pilot restorative justice program.

Principal Wayne Williams says the peer jury began with strong teacher training and student recruitment.

Williams first met with the Office of Specialized Services about the grant in late February 2009. By March 27, teachers had gone through an introductory training. Later, they got more training, including instructions on how to refer behavior issues to the peer jury.

Next came student recruitment. A social worker for SGA Youth & Family Services, Rebecca Davis—who Williams says was “absolutely pivotal”—went to each 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade homeroom to give a presentation about the program and answer questions.

“It was kind of a sales pitch, if you will,” Williams says. “We got a real good mix. We had a couple of kids who, prior to the training, would have been prime candidates for peer jury cases.”  The training changed that by helping them see things from others’ perspective, “which is not the strength of any adolescent,” Williams notes.

Even though student training did not start until early May, nearly the end of the school year, 26 students participated. “The kids loved it, so we had them fully trained by the end of the year,” Williams says. One or two parents also participated, as did about half a dozen teachers – an indication of strong staff support.

Last year, about 10 to 15 peer jurors heard cases, Williams says, under the guidance of social worker Rebecca Davis.

The school has also used peace circles, targeted toward groups of students that have a high number of conflicts with peers. The first year, 3rd-grade boys were the focus; last year, it was 4th - and 6th-grade girls.

Williams says setting clear expectations for teachers was important. They knew they had to be involved in helping facilitate the circle, and they were expected to translate the training into a weekly class meeting.

Restorative justice became a frequent topic at staff meetings, Williams says. Teachers also brought concepts from the school’s social-emotional learning curriculum, Lion’s Quest, into peace circle discussions.

Although the grant has run out, the peace circles are still taking place in some classrooms. And Williams is working to sustain and spread the program by identifying which teachers are most skilled and having them train the rest.

The peer jury program is still going strong this fall as well. Ten 8th-grade students have returned to the program. Though they are still in the process of recruiting and training 6th- and 7th-graders, they have already heard two cases this fall from students as young as 3rd grade.

Monroe got off to a promising start. Rebecca Davis, a social worker from SGA Youth & Family Services, helped facilitate peace circles in several classrooms and trained about 15 to 20 students to serve on a peer jury, which presided over a handful of mock cases before the end of the school year. School administrators were optimistic about the program’s potential.

“I remember our conversation being, ‘We’re planting the seed and then we’ll be ahead of the game’” for the coming year, Rivera says.

But the momentum was abruptly cut short when Rivera got an email from central office informing him that the program was ending.

“We were left guessing as to why it was discontinued,” says Rivera.

Monroe was one of five schools that received grants after advocacy groups won an agreement from CPS in 2008 to target $300,000 toward six pilot programs in restorative justice, a strategy that aims to lessen conflict through mediation, peace circles, peer juries and other strategies. At the time, preventing school violence was a high priority in the minds of parents, teachers and students.

The pilot program ran until March 2010. But Monroe’s participation was cut short, and several other schools started receiving grant services just weeks or months before the grant ended. As a result, the initiative has so far led to sustained restorative justice programs, targeted toward students, at just two schools: Duprey and Hay, where peer juries have taken hold. (See sidebar.)

At Duprey, a group of six peer jurors has heard two cases this year. Duprey, a former receiving school for students from overcrowded areas, has lost nearly half its student population since the grant ended; this year, it serves just 90 students.

RELATED STORIES

Restorative justice can cut suspensions and expulsions, which disproportionately impact African-American boys in CPS, according to the June 2009 issue of Catalyst In Depth . But ending the racial disparity will take more, says Jim Freeman, director of the Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track program at the Advancement Project. Adults need to re-examine how they interpret student behavior, he says. “Most suspensions and expulsions are issued to students of color by white teachers and administrators.”

Schools have also sought to improve behavior and curb discipline with more social-emotional learning, a program that also never took hold in CPS.

Since June 2010, CPS has not responded to repeated requests by Catalyst Chicago for an interview with staff who oversaw the pilot program and for other information about it, including how schools were chosen. (A Freedom of Information Act request filed in October is still pending.)

Advocates say that the grants could have yielded quicker results if CPS had taken input from the community about which schools were most interested in participating, since experts say teacher and principal buy-in is essential. Nancy Riestenberg, a violence prevention specialist at the Minnesota Department of Education, says that staff who are hostile to peer juries, for instance, can shake young people’s self-confidence and keep them from taking it seriously.

Ellen Schumer, president of Community Organizing and Family Issues, known as COFI, asked the district to make parent, teacher, principal and local school council buy-in part of the grant selection criteria. COFI was asked by CPS in 2008 to submit a list of schools, but the district “did not select any that we proposed,” Schumer notes.

A year later, in late summer 2009, CPS again asked COFI to suggest schools. The group suggested Jenner Elementary, but Jenner was not selected.

“I cannot give you any rhyme or reason why they picked those schools,” says Edith Crigler, associate executive director of the Chicago Area Project, which conducted training for two of the schools. At Whitney Elementary, one of the six schools the district initially selected for the program, school administrators were not interested when she approached them, Crigler recalls.

Two other schools served by Chicago Area Project, Reavis and Reed, were able to spend less than half of their funds before the grant’s deadline. From a $125,000 grant, says Crigler, “I had billed them for less than $50,000.”

From interviews with school administrators and outside agencies that were to provide training, it’s clear that the effort was hindered by insufficient manpower and time.

“To make it work, you need someone to head it up,” says Oscar Reed, who has done extensive restorative justice training in Minneapolis Public Schools and other districts across Minnesota. “(Teachers’) plates are already full.”

At Monroe, “a lot of the teachers were a little reluctant to try something new,” says Dan Silva, the school’s dean, who was largely responsible for overseeing the pilot’s implementation. “They get upset because you’re taking classroom time from them.”

Some teachers were won over by participating in a peace circle held by Rebecca Davis to help them understand the process. She built support by holding more circles with teachers and meetings to discuss the specifics of the peace circles for students.

Teachers were also initially skeptical about peer juries, although they became more open to the idea as they learned more, Silva says.

But by the time Rivera learned that the district was cutting the program, it was too late to figure out how to sustain the effort without money from central office. Without time to come up with another solution, Silva would have been the logical person to keep it going, but as the school’s disciplinarian and a part-time bilingual teacher, he had too much on his plate.
 
Classroom peace circles have been discontinued, but Monroe has instituted weekly advisory periods for team-building activities and meetings. Five teachers, out of about 40, continue to hold peace circles during the advisory time.

At Reed Elementary, Principal Dina Everage says she was not able to meet with the agency that was slated to coordinate services for a peer jury until less than four months before the grant ended. As a result, the staff did not receive any real training.

“Ideally, we would meet in the summer with principals and staff and students, and then get it launched in September,” rather than February, says Andrew Tonachel, the trainer from Alternatives, Inc., who worked with Reed’s peer jurors. “We struggled to get a core group that really could picture what this was, and own it. With more time, and with a different approach initially in terms of doing some team-building, we might have been able to overcome that.”

Emika Canty, a veteran counselor and case manager who started at Reed in January 2010, barely had time to attend the two peer jury trainings each week, let alone do extra work recruiting students and promoting the program. “It was hard with her schedule, and being new to the school,” Everage says.

Canty notes that it is often difficult to find teachers who are willing to volunteer to facilitate such programs. “Adults want to be compensated for their time,” she says.

Students showed up inconsistently, Canty says. They were unfocused, and lacked the coping and problem-solving skills the program needed. After just four weeks, the grant ended, leaving the students without enough skills or training to hear cases.

Everage hasn’t given up, though. Last year, she worked with teachers to identify students with leadership ability and more time available, and got staff from central office to facilitate trainings. And she still hopes to get the program up and running again this year.

“Some of our students have to understand what a program is before they can be active in it,” says Everage, who notes one lesson she learned: Principal involvement is a key factor in peer jury success. Taking a field trip to visit another school’s peer jury program could have helped, she observes, and she could have asked the outside agencies involved with the school to go from classroom to classroom to explain what peer juries do and recruit interested students.

Riestenberg notes that marketing is important. Students should be aware that if they ever get into trouble or are hurt by a peer, “you can ask for this,” she adds.

Meanwhile, time is not on Everage’s side. This year, she has only six teachers. And the school’s phase-out has been sped up: Reed is closing at the end of the year.

Staff and parents at Reavis Elementary say the program has been beneficial, although restorative justice practices have yet to take deep root with students.

Assistant Principal Andalib Khelghati says that a few months after administrators began meeting with CPS in December 2008, the school included a workshop on peace circles in a professional development day. Two teachers got coaching on how to incorporate a morning meeting for students into their classrooms, he says. Reavis even had school-wide community meetings on Mondays and Fridays.

But amid everything else going on at the school, it became difficult for teachers to commit energy toward training, Khelghati says. “We felt the teachers were involved in too many things. It just would have felt too overwhelming.”

The training has reduced conflict among parents, though. “Parents take much more of a ‘let’s roll up our sleeves and help our school’ attitude,” Khelghati notes.

Tracy Occomy Crowder, an organizer at COFI who helped conduct the training, says the initial goal was to get parents involved in the “reflection room,” where students in the Elev8 after-school program can sit and talk with a social worker if they are having behavior problems or don’t feel like participating.

But the reflection room was just getting off the ground, and the training had to happen immediately before the grant ran out. “It was too soon to put those two pieces together,” says Heather Ireland, program manager for Elev8 at Reavis. The training instead became an opportunity for parents to talk about discipline and other things they might want to change in the school.

Parent Charlene Campbell, vice-chair of Reavis’ local school council and member of COFI’s parent arm, POWER-PAC, lobbied with other parents for the school’s Elev8 program to bring the trainers back this year without CPS funding. The group began meeting again in October and training will run through at least mid-December.

“We are using what we learned before to try and set some goals up [and] to establish conversations with the principal so that we can have a good rapport to work towards that goal,” she says.

One of Campbell’s goals: Get parents involved in the reflection room and expand its hours, so it can be used during the school day.

The scattershot implementation of restorative justice has left grassroots community groups disillusioned about the district, says Ana Mercado, a youth organizer at Blocks Together, one of the groups that pushed for the pilot grants.

“We’ve said, ‘If it’s not going to come from the top, we’re going to develop our own pilots and make them work from the grassroots up,” she says.

In March 2010, just as the grant ended, COFI unveiled a “parent-to-parent guide” on restorative justice, a large, 12-page booklet that gives parents specific examples of practices and stories about schools that have successfully adopted them.

COFI held two parent trainings that drew about 100 participants. Some, like Paderewski parent Debra Thomeson, were interested in starting a peer jury at their schools.

At the training, students from Marshall High talked about their peer jury. “They really did a good job selling it,” Thomeson said later. “That’s a great idea to help children feel more like they have a say in what’s going on.”

Alternatives, Inc. is also looking at new ways to get restorative justice programming into the schools. From spring 2009 to summer 2010, the agency’s staff went into seven elementary after-school and summer programs run by the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago to teach students about conflict resolution and restorative justice. The YMCA staff running the programs also received training in using restorative justice to resolve discipline issues. At one high school, Alternatives helped design a peer mediation program. The initiative cost about $90,000.

“At a couple of schools, it took six months before the staff was really open to the idea that we would be able to help them,” says Karen Lambert, a restorative justice specialist at Alternatives Inc. “[But] they were talking to each other and hearing success stories.”

Now that the joint program is over, Alternatives and the YMCA are planning how to expand it and integrate the concepts throughout the school with support from faculty, says Lambert. “For students to hear the same message from the teachers really strengthens the program.”

Parent involvement has shored up longstanding restorative justice programs in CPS, including three that are funded by the Juvenile Justice Division of Cook County courts at Brunson and Key elementary schools and Wells High.

Lynn Morton, a POWER-PAC parent who helped organize the program at Brunson, says it got off the ground in 2005 as an all-volunteer effort, although parents who run it are now paid a stipend of $10 an hour through a state grant. Altogether, she says, the three programs run on about $25,000 a year.

The peace center program serves about 12 to 15 students at a time, who are referred by school administrators, teachers or parents (although some come of their own accord). Students come for about two hours once a week for 6 to 10 weeks. Boys come on one day, and girls on another.

The goal is to give children the opportunity “to feel safe and talk about what’s going on in school, what’s going on in the home, and getting them to see how each one of their behaviors [affects] their community, their school, their classroom,” Morton says.

Parent volunteers are on Brunson’s campus during most school days to work with current and former peace center students who get in trouble.

“If you don’t have the parent and community buy-in, it’s not going to be sustainable,” Morton says. “When there was no funding, my volunteers showed up at Brunson every day that they were scheduled to be there. It’s purely people-power.”

Even so, she hasn’t given up on pressing CPS to do more to bring restorative justice efforts to schools throughout the district. “I’m going to hold out hope,” she says.

Riestenberg notes that it’s a big step forward for Chicago—the third biggest district in the country—to even have restorative justice in its student discipline code.
   
“People watch Chicago closely,” Riestenberg says. “This is the biggest school district that I know of that has it in their discipline code. It’s an essential first step, because now, people have leverage.”

Our newly-released report on discipline in CPS found that black boys are clearly being punished far more harshly than their peers. The suspension rate for black males is up to five times higher than that for other student groups. Black boys make up over 60 percent of all students expelled from school—even though they're only one-fourth of the student population. The racial disparity is similar in suburban Chicago, and in other major cities. But Chicago is the worst: The city is now No. 1 on a list of 10 major urban districts when it comes to suspending students.

Catalyst couldn't obtain a major piece of the puzzle: data on why students have been suspended, which isn't reported by race or gender. Still, as the American Civil Liberties Union's Lori Turner put it, "the numbers alone are troubling." When punishment for one group of students is so clearly out of proportion to their enrollment, something's undoubtedly amiss.

Some of you reading this post might say "Well, so what? If kids are talking back to teachers or being disruptive, they should be kicked out of school." Others might blame poor parenting, saying schools can't be expected to make up for what children aren't getting at home. And certainly, serious offenses such as bringing guns or drugs to school or threatening teachers shouldn't be tolerated.

But kicking students out of school isn't the solution. Too many black boys are already out of school, walking the streets and getting lured into trouble. The strong correlation between school absences, course failures and dropping out makes suspensions even more problematic for African-American boys, who are already more likely to quit school than their peers in Chicago's public schools. As one principal put it, suspensions and expulsions are often "a straight path to jail" for black boys.

So what can be done to solve the problem? As our report found, a mix of factors is at play that give rise to the soaring suspension rate, including racial bias and stereotyping, cultural mismatches between teachers and students, and, in some elementary schools, a lack of tolerance for noisy, boy-type behavior.

Yet the story of three teen-aged boys at Dyett High offers a ray of hope.

As freshmen four years ago, the boys fought often, were labeled troublemakers, got suspended time after time and failed course after course. They showed all the signs of being headed toward dropping out.

Instead, two of the boys have graduated and are headed to college. One hasn't yet earned his diploma, but plans to do so and has a job lined up.

They didn't beat the odds without help, though. And that help came from the school, proving that with sufficient resources, kids can become success stories instead of statistics of failure.

Those were the surface impressions. When he sat down to look at the data, Russell was struck by deeper problems. Most other elementary schools were making academic gains, but Ryerson was not. Just 40 percent of the students met or exceeded state academic standards. Russell found another sign of dysfunction: The former principal had suspended and expelled black boys at three times the district average.

So Russell set two goals: “To offer a good education and to eliminate the extra drama of the fighting and the stealing and the behavior issues.”

Elementary principals, in particular, have received little guidance on how to reverse the trend of tough discipline. In 2006, the district scrapped zero tolerance and shifted toward support of restorative justice, a strategy that relies on teaching students what they did wrong and how they should make amends for misbehavior. But restorative justice—to the degree that it is being used at all—is found mainly in high schools.

For elementary schools, district administrators have said they want to bring in more social and emotional programs to help students improve their behavior. But so far, these programs are mostly pilot initiatives.

Even savvy principals have found that lowering suspensions is a complex, difficult task that entails balancing the need for order against the desire to help children who may be acting out because they are hurt or frustrated.

Russell has had some success on this front by improving the school environment and prodding teachers to change their mindset about how they relate to students. Suspensions of African-American boys at Ryerson have declined about 20 percent.

Russell’s main experiment—and the focus of his doctoral dissertation—is taking place on the third floor at Ryerson. Here, Yvonne German’s 6th-graders are going over their morning essay. The twist: The class is all boys. Russell believes that boys tend to act out more as they get to middle school, and is betting that giving them a place all their own, where they don’t have to impress girls, might help curb misbehavior.

Initially, Russell wanted a male teacher for the class, preferably a black male whom the boys could identify with and look up to. But staffing issues made that impossible, and Russell concluded that as long as other black men—including himself and his assistant principal—were around to serve as positive role models, a good woman teacher could do the job. Cultural understanding, Russell says, is more important than a teacher’s race or gender.

So he approached German to take on the class, thinking that her personal style—she’s a hyperactive woman, half-drill sergeant and half-cheerleader, and the mother of a teenage boy—would be a good fit. On this spring day, Russell’s hypothesis appears to be on the mark.

“Captains, you have nine seconds to collect the papers,” German’s voice rings loudly, above the din of scraping chair legs and boys shifting in their seats. She directs the lesson along swiftly, in seconds rather than minutes, to keep the boys engaged and give them little or no time to misbeha