Schools in Illinois suspend Black students at much higher rates than white students. One school in the south side of Chicago stands out for not doing that. Emily Hays reports in part three of a statewide, three-part series on race in school discipline.
CHICAGO — In the hallway of Kenwood Academy High School, Principal Karen Calloway keeps stopping students to ask them what makes the school unique.
Whether they are studying on couches or switching classes, they say the same thing as the students she had formally gathered for interviews.
“I think Kenwood’s secret sauce is the teachers and the administration wanting the students to do really well,” said junior Carter Elligan.
While that should be the case at any school, it is not always true for Black students in Illinois.
Some schools are handing out so many suspensions that if they were spread evenly, each Black student would have been suspended seven times.
Junior Jabari Carson said he thinks other schools have that kind of data because teachers are buying into stereotypes.
“Some teachers neglect us and think that Black students are inclined to be doomed and terrible students,” said junior Jabari Carson. “They enforce all these stereotypes on us.”
But Kenwood is different, according to Carson and his peers.
Kenwood is big, with more than 2,000 students, most of whom are Black. And the school rarely uses suspensions.
“With Kenwood, they see us as actual humans,” Carson said.
Kenwood sees all students as college-going
Principal Karen Calloway said the school’s one word mission is college, for every student. Kenwood sends students to Ivy Leagues, historically Black universities, state schools, and liberal art schools.
“We are a national leader in scholarship applications. That’s our big tag line. It’s our claim to fame and we do a pretty good job in making sure that we achieve that,” Calloway said.
Junior Aubrey Trotter transferred this year from Mount Carmel High School, a predominantly white private school.
“I was seeking Black excellence. When I came here, it’s all around you, even in the students. The belief your teachers and the faculty [have] in you gives you the extra push to be like, ‘I can do something great,’” Trotter said.
Trotter is in a group focused on Black men excelling in the corporate world, led by a Black man teaching them step-by-step how he made it.
About half of the student body is low-income, meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch or another kind of public aid. That’s more than the state average, but less than Chicago Public Schools as a whole.
“We get every type of student. We get kids who have high mobility rates, who are unhoused. We have the gamut. We have kids whose parents are vice presidents, mayors,” Calloway said.
Kenwood administrators listen to students
One of the best ways to prevent disproportionate suspensions of Black students is to communicate well with students, according to Texas A & M education professor John A. Williams III. He researches inequitable discipline outcomes for Black students.
“Take the time out to explain to them or see what they’re going through and know who they are with an authentic relationship,” Williams said.
He said it is important for teachers to build relationships with students so they feel safe and protected at school.
Williams said that kind of close community existed before school desegregation, when Black students were not often suspended. He said the high rates of suspending students began when schools had to comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision.
The students at Kenwood said their teachers and administrators listen to them – more than at previous schools they attended.
Riyanna Crane transferred in from Hyde Park Academy, a nearby high school also on the South Side of Chicago. She always did well academically, but she was in a conflict-prone friend group.
Her mother warned her to stay away from them, but they were her friends.
They kept getting into conflicts with upperclassmen, and the older students responded by targeting her specifically.
She tried to tell the adults at Hyde Park.
“They would not care. They would just push it away, push it to the side — ‘We can talk about this tomorrow, talk about this next month,’” Crane said.
And one day, she knew there would not be a tomorrow.
“One day I literally came into the office, telling them this is going to happen if y’all let it. This is going to happen, so I want to stay in the office. I want to talk about it. ‘Oh no, you can come back later, you can come back later,’” she recalled.
Before that ‘later’ happened, the upperclassmen jumped her. It was violent. Crane said they stomped on her head, injuring her.
The response from administrators at Hyde Park Academy was to suspend everyone. She said she was suspended for two to three days.
Afterwards, she worked to get transferred to Kenwood. There, she said she found administrators who listen to any problem, no matter how small.
“That’s why I feel like the suspension rate is very low here. Instead of throwing the bad people away, we fix it. We fix what’s going on, we talk about what’s going on, and we resolve it,” Crane said.
Junior Theo Andry had an example of a similar situation starting at Kenwood. During his freshman year, an upperclassman was calling him names in front of others.
Andry did not want to make a bad reputation for himself and affect his extracurriculars and opportunities, so he walked into Principal Calloway’s office.
“Told her, ‘Ms. Calloway, I need you to help me out, because if you don’t, this is what’s going to happen.’ And she [said], ‘Okay, Theo, I got you. Sit right here in my office right quick and we going to get this dude,’” Andry remembered.
He said she spent four periods trying to find the upperclassman.
“It’s not just like, ‘Students, you can talk to the administration.’ No, the administration is going to try to talk to you. The administration is going to want to help you at Kenwood,” Andry said.
The contrast in approaches is not unique to comparisons between Illinois schools. Junior Demetria Flowers joined Kenwood after moving from Texas.
“My whole life I grew up around predominantly white people and white schools, and I felt kind of out of place. When I came to Kenwood, it was almost like a culture shock for me, because everybody was so accepting,” Flowers said.
Flowers felt she could be herself in her clubs at Kenwood, speak about issues she cared about and learn things in class she knows were not taught at her school in Texas.
For example, she learned that the period after the Civil War, Reconstruction, ended poorly, with a rise in white supremacist violence and the end of many rights and freedoms for Black people. She also learned about wars in countries like the Congo that were not covered in her previous school’s world history class.
And she saw the way the administration at Kenwood and her school handled conflicts firsthand.
In Texas, she was new to town and had a falling out with her new friends.
“They kept asking me interrogational questions like I was trying to skip class. I was trying to tell them I just couldn’t go to class because I didn’t want to cry in front of the class,” Flowers said.
When she moved to Illinois, she saw a similar situation start for a friend at Kenwood. The friend who was upset went to the dean of students.
“She gave her this long talk about how she needed to pour more into herself and not focus on the other person that was trying to get at her. Now, she doesn’t talk to that person, but she doesn’t even have any issues with her anymore, because she really got the counseling support she needed from somebody who was older,” Flowers said.
She said that is Kenwood’s secret. When adults listen to students from the start, conflicts that might warrant a suspension never get the chance to develop.
Flowers and the other students IPM News interviewed are all planning to go to college. Their planned majors range from molecular engineering to communications to business, with careers like genetic scientist and chief communications officer on the horizon.