Is Regulation 616 A Gift For Delaware Charter Schools To Kick Out The Unwanted?

Tomorrow the Delaware State Board of Education will vote on Regulation 616.  This regulation concerning school suspensions, expulsions, and out of school placements (alternative schools) is very controversial.  I wrote in December about the Assistant Superintendent from Smyrna’s very funny letter about this regulation, but many more have come in and they are all very alarming.  The biggest of which is one from the American Civil Liberties Union, as seen below:

I agree wholeheartedly with the ACLU.  This regulation would effectively allow the most at-risk students to be punished without proper due process.  This is not a step forward, but a very awful step back and will end up causing much more problems in the future.

While I didn’t read too much into it at first, the next letter really got me thinking about where this regulation might be coming from…

State Rep. Kim Williams asked a lot of questions and gave many comments about the charter school administrative makeup when it comes to this regulation.  Which got me thinking: Is this a way for Delaware charters to weed out the undesirables and make “counseling out” students even easier?  I hear charter advocates commenting all the time over on Kilroy’s about how charters are so great cause they don’t have the discipline problems regular schools do.  But many charters have certain enrollment practices where they don’t get “those” kinds of students.  And others that do are said to “counsel out” the kids who may have “behavior issues”.  I’ve even heard of some who make behavior issues into a bigger thing because the students may not do well on the standardized tests.

I posted an article last spring about a situation involving due process rights for a student at Charter School of Wilmington.  While nothing really came of it, legally, it did raise a lot of questions about due process rights for students, regardless of the accusation or actual offense may be.

Of course, this regulation would have to pass in order for this to be easier for some charters to do this.  I am very curious where the genesis of this regulation came from.  I sincerely hope our State Board takes all these letters into consideration, especially the one from the Department of Justice asking for more public input on something so important.

And the GACEC…

And the State Council for Persons with Disabilities…

And Jea Street…

And more…

 

 

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