Oak Park–River Forest board hears midyear discipline report, district will submit state-required improvement plan

Oak Park–River Forest School District 200 administrators presented a midyear discipline improvement plan in the Committee of the Whole on Thursday and said they will submit a version of the plan to the Illinois State Board as required by state reporting rules, then return to the board with a fuller analysis.

The plan, which district staff said the board “has seen a year ago,” tracks discipline incidents over a three-year period to examine racial disproportionality in out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Administrators told the board the district recorded 51 discipline incidents in the 2022–23 school year and 22 incidents in 2023–24; staff said those counts are incident records and that staff can pull separate counts of unique students involved upon request.

Why it matters: Illinois requires districts that meet criteria tied to disproportionality to file a corrective/improvement plan. Board members asked whether the document being submitted to the state should also include the deeper, board-level analysis the district customarily presents at year-end.

District officials said the state submission follows the state’s narrower data questions and is intended to show the district’s metric definitions and the strategies the district is using to reduce suspensions. A fuller discipline report with demographic breakdowns, recidivism checks and deeper case-level analysis will be presented to the board later in the year.

Administrators described the district’s theory of action as focused on addressing student trauma and layered supports. Staff said much of the discipline reflected students with histories of trauma and, in many of those cases, connections to Chicago were present in the students’ histories. Board members raised concerns about wording that could be read as attributing behavior to a student’s city of origin and asked staff to reframe language to emphasize trauma and structural factors rather than geography.

Board members requested that the eventual comprehensive report include: - counts of unique students linked to each incident year (staff said they can pull that data and will share it); - recidivism information (staff said recidivism among the out-of-school suspensions in the cited period was “virtually none” and that many incidents were unique students); - an analysis isolating the cohort of students who arrive from outside the district (staff said it is feasible to filter discipline data by prior district or home community and that Evanston was the closest comparative district for demographic similarity); - use of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) screening and MTSS interventions as part of trauma-informed supports (staff confirmed ACEs is one assessment tool used by trauma interventionists).

No formal board vote was taken on the discipline plan at this meeting; staff said the state-format report will be submitted as required and that the board will receive the more comprehensive annual discipline report in a future meeting. Several board members asked staff to synchronize the state submission and the board’s end-of-year report where practical to avoid duplication of effort.

"We will bring this back to the board in two weeks," staff said about next steps to adjust the midyear submission and make modest wording changes based on the discussion.

Ending: District staff committed to providing the board with additional, disaggregated data and a consolidated annual discipline analysis later this year. The state-format midyear submission will proceed on the timetable required by Illinois reporting rules.