West Cook News

Black students, constituting 58.1% or 254 of Garfield Elementary School's total student population of 437, accounted for 17 out of the 19 total suspensions (89.5%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly one suspension per 15 students, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, Garfield Elementary School's 138 Hispanic students, who make up 31.6% of the school population, received one suspension. This translates to an average of one suspension per 138 Hispanic students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students, making them the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the 19 total suspensions at Garfield Elementary School in the 2021-22 school year, all of them were in-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, two student suspensions at Garfield Elementary School were for violence-related offenses.

During the 2021-22 school year, Garfield Elementary School reported 238 students - equivalent to 54.5% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 232 students, or 53.1% of the student population, fell into the chronically absent category, a broader measure that includes all absences, excused or not.

Black students were notably overrepresented in these statistics, comprising 57.1% of all students who were chronically truant, and 54.5% of the chronically absent.

In a broader context, data from the ProPublica database indicates that Black students are suspended at a rate 4.6 times higher than white students in Illinois—surpassing the already high national average rate of 3.9 times.

However, districts’ officials deny a direct link between these statistics and race. Lisa Small, the Superintendent of District 211, argues that these numbers oversimplify the situation. “Decisions are highly individualized and based on the specific behavior and are not well-suited to a simple numerical analysis,” she wrote in a statement. “They are not a statistic to us, but a developing young adult.”

Illinois ranks 12th in the nation for the highest rate of suspensions among Black students relative to their white peers.

Race	Number of Students	Total Infractions	Infractions Per Student
Hispanic	138	1	0.01
Black	254	17	0.07
Multiracial	41	1	0.02