Quincy Reporter

Black students, constituting 6.9% or 131 of Quincy Senior High School's total student population of 1,900, accounted for 96 out of the 732 total suspensions (13.1%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly one suspension per student, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, Quincy Senior High School's 1,515 white students, who make up 79.7% of the school population, received 516 suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly one suspension per three white students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students, making them the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the 732 total suspensions at Quincy Senior High School in the 2021-22 school year, 476 were in-school suspensions and 256 out-of-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, 67 student suspensions at Quincy Senior High School were for violence-related offenses and 14 for those including drugs.

During the 2021-22 school year, Quincy Senior High School reported 619 students - equivalent to 32.6% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 821 students, or 43.2% 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 51.9% of all students who were chronically truant, and 55.6% 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	80	55	0.69
Black	131	96	0.73
Multiracial	150	65	0.43
White	1,515	516	0.34