By Candace Kelley
Correspondent
Students of color have been losing out because they are tracked at South Orange-Maplewood’s Columbia High School. That’s the basis of a complaint filed by the ACLU of New Jersey and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
“We are trying to create equity in the system,” said Walter Fields.
Fields is a member of the Black Parents Workshop, the group assisted with gathering data for the complaint. Fields says the findings showed patterns of exclusion.
“Students graduate from the same school with high school diplomas of different value,” he said.
According to the ACLU, Columbia High School has some of the worst racial disparities in the state. Their research shows that white students make up slightly less than half of the student body, but 70 percent of the higher-level classes are white. Meanwhile 70 percent of the lower-level classes are filled by students of color.
“Colleges want to see you take difficult courses as possible , so you can be prepared for the rigor of college,” Fields said.
The complaint calls for an investigation into tracking and discipline practices at the school, noting that data from 2011-2012 school year shows that black students had a 15.9 percent chance of being suspended — compared to the overall suspension risk of 10.7 percent and black students are more than 4.5 times more likely to face out-of-school suspension than their white counterparts.
In a statement the ACLU said, “The numbers in South Orange-Maplewood are particularly troubling. We’ve been meeting with officials from South Orange-Maplewood in the hopes that they address this issue and become a partner in building a more democratic, equitable learning environment for all children.”
South Orange resident Janice Evans says that her children went through the same tracking system at Columbia High School. When the school tried to place her daughter in lower classes, she stepped in.
“It required me, my husband, as parents to talk to the school, to talk to the teachers, talk to the principal, to talk to the guidance counselor,” she said.
The complaint sets out options for reform including completely replacing the tracking system for all students then use supplemental teaching where needed and suspending students only in the most extreme cases.
Former teacher Nikkole Salter says she is not surprised about what parents and student are saying. She writes about educational disparities in her play — Lines in the Dust — calling the system a moral failure.
“The American dream is essentially that you will be able to through hard work that you have participate in the economy, and the promise that we will give you access to that and the access that we give you is through pubic education system,” she said.
The school did not reply to our request for comment and has not yet filed a response to the complaint. Fields says it’s now the school’s turn to respond and spell out what they will do to provide access and eliminate disparities in the school.