Indigenous students hit with most suspensions in Winnipeg School Division, report says

More than half the students suspended in the Winnipeg School Division are Indigenous, even though less than one-third of the student population is Indigenous, a new report says.

The report released Tuesday looked at the suspensions and ethnic make-up of students over a three-year period, covering the 2016-17 to 2018-19 school years.

It found 55 per cent of the students suspended were Indigenous. Broken down annually, Indigenous students made up 54 per cent of suspensions in 2018-19, 59 per cent in 2017-18 and 58 per cent in 2016-17.

Of the 35,428 students in the division, 8,625 (26.7 per cent) are Indigenous.

"Part of it is discouraging," said Betty Edel, chair of the Winnipeg School Division board of trustees. "I mean, part of it is not surprising, but now that we have this confirmed, then let's move to the solutions of what we're going to do." 

One of the many things the report found was that lower median household incomes tend to be associated with higher suspension rates.

Edel, who is Métis, grew up in the child welfare system and aged out of care into homelessness. She disengaged from school, not because of suspensions, but because of not enough support, she said.

"I think we just really need to get down to looking at what is going on," she said. "If there's a way out of poverty, it is an opportunity through education, but we need to look at people feeling welcome and included."

One key to making students feel welcome is to deal with the role unconscious bias might play in how they are treated, she said.

"We need to look at the role of racism. We need to look at the role of stereotyping of people. We just need to look at it all," Edel said.

"We need educate all the volunteers and people in the school division about how we look at people and how we think of people could impact how we engage with them. To me, this is a journey of we just need to be open to examining every avenue of why this is the way it is."

The report was done after Edel tabled a motion in 2019 to examine suspension data based on student demographics.

The idea was inspired by a 2017 study that revealed nearly half of all expelled students in the Toronto District School Board are black, even though they make up around 11 per cent of the student body.

That report also revealed an important link between suspensions and education. Disciplined students were more likely to be from minority groups, and suspended students were more likely to earn fewer credits than non-suspended students.

The Winnipeg School Division report found "successful course completion and percentage of credits earned for suspended students in 2018-19 is negatively impacted by the duration of the suspension."

The WSD caps its out-of-school suspensions at five days. A suspension longer than that could occur if circumstances warrant, but a request to the superintendent must be approved and, if possible, educational programming be made available for the student.

Overall, the suspension rate in the Winnipeg School Division has decreased 28 per cent over 10 years. In the three years studied, the number of people suspended made up just three per cent of the entire student body, the report said.

• 2016-17: 1,044 suspensions involving 761 students.
• 2017-18: 1,047 suspensions involving 757 students.
• 2018-19: 1,129 suspensions involving 820 students.

Breakdowns of suspensions by ethnic groups, genders, languages, offences, individual schools and even household income can be found in the full report.

It's important to acknowledge the school division is being transparent and open and "that this was put out in public," Edel said.

"We're open to the discussion of race and how that impacts [people]," she said, calling the report "just the first step" to making things better.

The next steps involve bringing a swath of stakeholders together to determine how to address the problem.

"Now we have the facts of what's going on. We need to figure out the whys — and not internally only, but with the community — so that we can plan our movement forward to deal with the answers we get," she said.

"We need to bring in Indigenous leadership, to bring in elders. We need to bring in parents, we need to bring in community organizations so that we can all work together to support people. We can't do it in isolation from the community. We need new and fresh eyes working with us and making sure that that happens in a good way."

Edel also wants to see an annual update on the suspension data to measure improvements.

"This is our base, this is where we know we're starting from," she said.

Other information in the report includes:

• There are 100 different languages spoken among the student population and just under 170 different ethnicities.
• Southeast Asians are the second-highest suspended ethnic group, and the majority of those are students identifying as Filipino.
• Males are suspended the most; females make up one-third of suspensions.
• Suspensions rates are lower for students as years progress. Those in grades 7, 8 and 9 are suspended the most.