Bucks County Students Of Color Receive Harsher Discipline In Schools: Report

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Students of color in Bucks County school districts are more likely than white students to face out-of-school suspensions and disciplinary action involving police, according to a recent data analysis by the Bucks County Courier Times.

The numbers are pulled from records reported to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, which keeps track of out-of-school suspensions and referrals to law enforcement by school officials along lines of race and ethnicity.

Among the Courier Times' findings from the 2017-18 school year: in the New Hope-Solebury School District, Hispanic students account for less than 6 percent of the student body but 25 percent of out-of-school suspensions; in the Pennsbury School District, which is 6 percent Black, 19 percent of out-of-school suspensions were of Black students; in the Bensalem School District, 12 percent of the student body is Black, and yet Black students accounted for 27 percent of out-of-school suspensions.

"You can bring in a trainer," Jason B. Harris, superintendent of Morrisville Schools, told the paper. "But it takes more than that to help people see the unconscious bias. How do we respond to it so that it is productive and not destructive because it’s been destructive for far too long?”

Read the full story in the Bucks County Courier Times: We looked at school disciplinary data by race. Here's what we found.