RI Progress Report: How To Avoid School Suspensions

It turns out the easiest way to avoid discipline at local high schools is to be white. Non-white students at urban Rhode Island high schools are more likely to get in trouble than their white counterparts, reports RINPR’s Elizabeth Harrison, even as they make up a much smaller percentage of the student body.

In Cranston, for example, black students racked up more than half of the school expulsions while accounting for just 4 percent of the school’s population. And in Pawtucket, Hispanic students accounted for 2/3 of the in-school suspensions even though they make up just a quarter of the student body.

— Speaking of Cranston, the school custodians there recently agreed to a 15 percent pay cut. The move will save about $660,000 a year. Meanwhile, the school committee there spent about a quarter as much just to defend the prayer banner, a battle they had to know they would eventually lose.

— How has Citizens United changed presidential politics? Already in the 2012 campaign outside groups have spent twice as much as they did in the 2008 presidential campaign.

— File this one under solutions to things that aren’t problems: A bill sponsored by Rep. Karen MacBeth, D-Cumberland, would mandate that any driver involved in an accident that causes serious injury to submit to a drug and alcohol test. Even if the police didn’t suspect they were drinking or using drugs.

— Homeless people being used as wifi hotspots at SXSW? That’s worse than we treat the homeless people here in Rhode Island. By the way, one of our contributors, Reza Clifton, will be blogging from the Austin, TX music and think tank expo all week long. Read her dispatches here.

— Classic Rhode Island logic: we hated the idea of having a casino when the Narragansett Indian Tribe thought of it. But as soon as Massachusetts puts a casino plan into action we move ahead with a similar one, but leave the Narragansetts out of the equation. Now the Tribe is suing the state. At least Don Carcieri won’t be sending any state troopers down to Charlestown to settle the dispute…