Arlington Superintendent Rejects Claims About Racial Data

ARLINGTON, MA – Public school officials are pushing back against claims made by a former data specialist employed by the district. Jean Mike Remy, who worked for the Arlington Public Schools from 2015-2017, posted a video on Instagram Saturday in which he alleged that he was rebuffed by administrators when he questioned the integrity of data involving students of color.

Remy said he was tasked with collecting disciplinary data for state and federal reports during the 2016-17 school year. He described the data as being in "disarray" when he sought to improve it to "make sure we had actionable numbers."

While putting together a Civil Rights Data Collection report, he noticed that of the approximately 1,400 students in the district at that time, 3 percent were Hispanic, black or special education but made up 80 percent of detentions, expulsions and suspensions, Remy said. A comment on Facebook said Remy misspoke, and the percentage of students of color in the district was actually 13 percent.

Remy said he mentioned the data in a private meeting that was attended by Superintendent Kathleen Bodie.

"Rather than take any action with it, I was instructed not to delve too much into the data and, not to 'change the report,' but to not be as in-depth and keep it surface level," Remy said. View the full video here.

In an email to Patch, Bodie called Remy's claim "not accurate." She said the administrators "did delve into the data and have done so for many years."

Though Bodie did not identify Remy by name, she said he worked as a District Registration Coordinator, and also worked with the District Data Specialist on some data reporting, from July 1, 2015 to March 17, 2017. He did not report directly to the superintendent but to the assistant superintendent, she said.

Part of Remy's job was to help the Arlington Public Schools develop better systems to track disciplinary cases and to write the annual discipline report from the data.

"The Arlington Public Schools have long battled the issue of disproportionality," Bodie said. "We are unfortunately not alone in this. School districts around the nation and the Commonwealth have long sought ways to improve its disciplinary policies and the application of such policies so that they do not unfairly affect students of color."

Bodie said the district has been transparent in its efforts to reduce disproportionality in recent years, including implementing programs like "Collaborative Problem Solving" at the high school, which has led to a reduction in non-drug related suspensions.

From the 2017-2018 school year to 2018-2019 – the last full school year report – the total number of suspensions at Arlington High School dropped by 28 percent (from 47 to 34), according to data cited by Bodie. Over the past two school years (2017-2018 and 2018-2019), the number of African American students suspended decreased by 77 percent (from 13 to 3), she added.

"Despite these changes there still remains disproportionality with respect to relative percentages of total student population. In the 2018-2019 school year, the 18 white students suspended represented 1.7 percent of the student population; the 3 black students represented 2.1 percent," Bodie said. "If you combine the categories of black, Hispanic and other/mixed, 12 students were suspended representing 8.6 percent of the total number of black, Hispanic and other/mixed student in the student population. The total number of suspensions per category can differ slightly from the number of students suspended, if the same student was suspended twice."

Bodie called the numbers "encouraging" but said there remains "work to do." She said the data reflects an ongoing effort to address disproportionality, which did not "suddenly become apparent to the district in a meeting or in a social media post."

Bodie pointed to open meetings held by the School Committee and Human Rights Committee going back to November 2014 and said the issue was recently covered at School Committee meeting in January.

"We are proud of the progress we have made, and we are not slowing down," Bodie said.