Racial Disparities are Evident in Citations Issued to Students at Independent School District 709 in Duluth, MN

Figure 1: 2021/2022 School Year Citations issued to ISD 709 students by law enforcement while at school. Data accounts for 96 incidents that occurred between September 2021 and March 15, 2022. Chart shows percentage of citations issued stratified by race, and is juxtaposed with the racial demographics of the district accessed via ProPublica’s Miseducation Project.

This analysis of citations issued by law enforcement to ISD 709 students while at school was performed with a dataset that contains all citations issued thus far during the 2021/2022 school year, along with the race of the student (Figure 1), the school where the citation occurred (Figure 2), and the type of crime committed. The data was released by ISD 709 to the Duluth NAACP on March 25th, and was subsequently released to the Law Enforcement Accountability Network (LEAN) Duluth for further analysis. 

Figure 1 shows that Black students are overrepresented in the citations being issued by officers, making up 38% of citations issued this school year despite only making up 6% of the school district student body. Native American or Alaska Native students are also disparately represented, making up 9% of citations issued despite only making up 5% of the student body.

Figure 1 uses population benchmarking in order to measure racial disparities. The racial make-up of those being ticketed is compared with the overall racial make-up of the school district. This is an appropriate way to measure disparity as it is unlikely that students are being ticketed at schools other than their own and research shows that students should be equally likely to encounter law enforcement no matter their race or school they attend if there were no disparities. In other words, findings from significant research show that BIPOC students are not inherently more likely to exhibit behavioral problems in school. Thus, a population benchmark disparity analysis is an appropriate way to determine whether BIPOC students are experiencing unnecessarily disparate treatment from ISD 709 and local law enforcement agencies.

Figure 2: 2021/2022 Citations issued to ISD 709 Students by Law Enforcement while at school. Data accounts for 96 incidents that occurred between September 2021 and March 15, 2022. Chart is stratified by the school in which the incident occurred. 

Figure 2 shows that Denfeld High School and Lincoln Park Middle School make up the vast majority of citations issued with 58 and 28, respectively. Alternatively, East High School and Ordean East Middle School have 9 and 1 citations, respectively. While apparent disparity exists between the West and East schools, the disparity becomes more extreme when accounting for the fact that significantly more students attend the eastside schools than the westside schools. Using the most up to date school population numbers from the National Center of Education Statistics, citation per student scores can be calculated. Denfeld High School’s citation per student score is 0.062, more than 10 times greater than East High School’s citation per student score of 0.006 while Lincoln Park Middle School’s citation per student score is 0.046, more than 40 times greater than Ordean Middle School’s citation per student score of 0.001. 

This analysis shows significant racial and geographic disparities in the issuing of citations by law enforcement within ISD 709 schools. While the reason behind this disparity cannot be inferred from this study, these disparities mirror a larger national conversation about the school to prison pipeline. Limited resources, an outsourcing of discipline to School Resource Officers, explicit and implicit biases amongst educators, and “zero tolerance” policies result in students not getting the help they need, and instead ending up in the hands of the criminal justice system. LEAN’s analysis was superseded in Duluth by a 2018 report put together by  ISD 709 students in which students shared disparate discipline data in order to support the removal of police or “School Resource Officers” from their schools. 

Additional research is needed in order to further investigate the cause of the apparent racial disparities in this report. While implicit or explicit biases of educators and law enforcement officers might be implicated by this data, further investigation into existing policies must be assessed as well. Furthermore, this study does not quantify the long term damage that increased law enforcement exposure to Black youth creates in the community. How much lost school time and opportunity loss have occurred due to these disparities? How does this exposure to law enforcement at school shape encounters with the criminal justice system later in life? We

strongly encourage community organizations and officials within ISD 709 to ask these

challenging questions with the hope of addressing these disparities in a way that will ultimately

lead to equitable change.

Published April 5th, 2022.