Resident tells board equity work has fallen short; district says discipline data were miscoded
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Summary
A Lansdale resident criticized district equity efforts and cited large drops in Keystone proficiency and high middle-school violence rates; district official Dr. Bauer responded that a state-dashboard mapping error misclassified discipline incidents and said the mapping has been corrected.
Jason Lanier, a Lansdale resident who addressed the board during the public-comment period, said he had reviewed historical data and characterized recent results as a failure of the district's equity work.
"I view it as looking at the data as the unequivocal failure of the education and equity," Lanier said, citing what he described as large drops in Keystone proficiency compared with 2015 and higher reported violence rates in North Penn middle schools.
The board invited a staff response. Dr. Bauer, speaking for district staff, said administrators had reviewed Lanier's concerns and found a mapping error in discipline reporting submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of Education dashboards. "He is correct that some of those dashboards say that those rates are higher in North Penn than others, and we have been able to identify the fact that it is a mapping issue with our discipline reporting," Dr. Bauer said, adding that officials had corrected the mapping going forward.
Dr. Bauer gave a concrete example of the miscoding: "Drawing on a bathroom wall, for example, was mapped to, a misdemeanor for graffiti." He said staff will unpack the issue in detail at the Safe Schools Committee and provide a discipline-dashboard update there.
Board members asked that corrected data and the committee's findings be shared so the public can better understand the district's discipline and proficiency reporting. No formal action or vote on policy or personnel resulted from the exchange during this meeting.
