Superintendent Karen Molinar addressed the disproportionate number of African American students involved in disciplinary actions.
Chris Torres
ctorres@star-telegram.com
Superintendent Karen Molinar spoke Tuesday at the Fort Worth ISD school board meeting about the district’s plan to reduce the disproportionate number of African American students involved in disciplinary actions.
In Molinar’s report, she showed that African American students make up 20% of the district’s overall enrollment but 35% of the district’s discipline referrals.
“That as a district we have been very concerned about, and we continue to see how our numbers are showing inequality when we look at our African American students receiving more discipline referral rates than our white student as well as our Hispanic students,” Molinar said.
Molinar added that at the end of the 2024-2025 school year, the difference between the number of African American students enrolled and African American students on disciplinary reports was 16% . An assessment at the end of the first half of this school year showed the number declined to 15% . The goal was for it to be a 12% difference by the end of this school year, but Molinar said they will not hit that goal.
Molinar said the data they have now are robust, including not only disciplinary behaviors but also academic issues. The district wants to ask questions about how campuses are using the referral system and how they’re documenting strategic behaviors, including how students are being engaged in academic instruction on a daily basis and what a classroom environment looks like for African American students.
This will allow the district to take a closer look into the classrooms to best support teachers and improve student engagement, Molinar said.
In January 2025, the Fort Worth Independent School District’s board voted to approve a plan that lays out the district’s strategy for the next five years. One of the goals was to reduce inequality in the identification of African-American students in discipline reports relative to the rest of the FWISD’s student population.
For at least the past decade, African American students have represented nearly half of the district’s suspensions, even though they made up only 20-25% of its overall enrollment, according to figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education and data released by the district in response to an open records request by the Star-Telegram.
Fort Worth is not alone, as African American students are more likely to be placed in out-of-school suspension than their white peers across the country. Education researchers say this disparity leads to major inequities in learning, because a single suspension can have a cascading effect on a student’s academic trajectory years afterward.
One of Fort Worth ISD’s solutions was to launch reset centers in 2022 — on-campus rooms designed to give students a place to refocus and work through their problems before returning to class.
The pilot program was first launched at Metro Opportunity High School, Fort Worth ISD’s alternative campus, and African American students still made up an outsized share of the school’s referrals to the center. One hundred of the 170 students who were referred to the reset center were African American, records show, or about 59%. About 47% of the students enrolled at the school last year were African American, according to district records.
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Kamal Morgan covers racial equity issues for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He came to Texas from the Pensacola News Journal in Florida. Send tips to his email or Twitter.