Carbondale Reporter

Black students, constituting 18.6% or 79 of General John A. Logan Attendence Centre's total student population of 424, accounted for six out of the nine total suspensions (66.7%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly one suspension per 13 students, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, General John A. Logan Attendence Centre's 269 white students, who make up 63.4% of the school population, received three suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly one suspension per 90 white students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students, making them the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the nine total suspensions at General John A. Logan Attendence Centre in the 2021-22 school year, all of them were out-of-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, six student suspensions at General John A. Logan Attendence Centre were for violence-related offenses and for an offense including drugs.

The most common infraction causing suspension was violence offenses, tallying six cases - 66.7% of the total infractions.

During the 2021-22 school year, General John A. Logan Attendence Centre reported 77 students - equivalent to 18.1% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 97 students, or 22.8% 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 49% of all students who were chronically truant, and 42.9% 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
Black	79	6	0.08
White	269	3	0.01