Grundy Reporter

Black students, constituting 4.4% or 123 of Minooka Community High School's total student population of 2,783, accounted for 29 out of the 294 total suspensions (9.9%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly one suspension per four students, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, Minooka Community High School's 1,936 white students, who make up 69.6% of the school population, received 194 suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly one suspension per 10 white students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students.

Of the 294 total suspensions at Minooka Community High School in the 2021-22 school year, 57 were in-school suspensions and 237 out-of-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, 38 student suspensions at Minooka Community High School were for violence-related offenses and 57 for those including drugs.

During the 2021-22 school year, Minooka Community High School reported 131 students - equivalent to 4.7% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 874 students, or 31.4% of the student population, fell into the chronically absent category, a broader measure that includes all absences, excused or not.

Black students were notably overrepresented in these statistics, comprising 9.4% of all students who were chronically truant, and 32.2% of the chronically absent.

In a broader context, data from the ProPublica database indicates that Black students are suspended at a rate 4.6 times higher than white students in Illinois—surpassing the already high national average rate of 3.9 times.

However, districts’ officials deny a direct link between these statistics and race. Lisa Small, the Superintendent of District 211, argues that these numbers oversimplify the situation. “Decisions are highly individualized and based on the specific behavior and are not well-suited to a simple numerical analysis,” she wrote in a statement. “They are not a statistic to us, but a developing young adult.”

Illinois ranks 12th in the nation for the highest rate of suspensions among Black students relative to their white peers.

Race	Number of Students	Total Infractions	Infractions Per Student
Hispanic	580	57	0.1
Black	123	29	0.24
Asian	29	3	0.1
Multiracial	114	11	0.1
White	1,936	194	0.1