Rock Island Today

Black students, constituting 8.6% or 180 of Moline Senior High School's total student population of 2,100, accounted for 60 out of the 292 total suspensions (20.5%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging one suspension per three students, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, Moline Senior High School's 1,114 white students, who make up 53% of the school population, received 100 suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly one suspension per 11 white students, which is definitively lower than that of Black students.

Multiracial students at Moline Senior High School behaved worse than whites, but better than Blacks, with 28 suspensions for 123 students in the 2021-22 school year - an average of roughly one suspension per four multiracial students.

In contrast, Asian students, who make up 2.4% of the student body at Moline Senior High School, had the lowest suspension ratio with an average of one suspension per 51 Asian students, totaling one suspension. This rate is definitively lower than that of Black students, establishing them as the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the 292 total suspensions at Moline Senior High School in the 2021-22 school year, 110 were in-school suspensions and 182 out-of-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, 112 student suspensions at Moline Senior High School were for violence-related offenses and two for those including drugs.

The most common infraction causing suspension was violence offenses, tallying 112 cases - 38.4% of the total infractions.

During the 2021-22 school year, Moline Senior High School reported 718 students - equivalent to 34.2% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 819 students, or 39% 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 57.7% of all students who were chronically truant, and 53% 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	631	103	0.16
Black	180	60	0.33
Asian	51	1	0.02
Multiracial	123	28	0.23
White	1,114	100	0.09