Milwaukee Public Schools has cut its overall expulsion numbers dramatically over the past decade, but one group keeps getting punished the hardest: Black students. Last school year, district data show Black students made up 48% of enrollment yet accounted for 79% of all expulsions. Not a single white student was expelled, even though white students make up over 8% of the district's population. This isn't a new problem — back in 2011-12, federal civil rights investigators found a nearly identical gap and reached an agreement with the district to fix it in 2018. Now the U.S. Department of Education is investigating again, this time asking whether race plays a role in how MPS decides who gets removed from school.

District leaders point to programs like restorative practices and peer mediation for lowering total expulsions, and that progress is real and worth recognizing. But cutting the number of expulsions isn't the same as closing the gap in who gets expelled. As Angela Harris, an MPS teacher and chair of the Black Educators Caucus MKE, has explained, looking for patterns of racial disparity and potential bias in discipline decisions is not the same thing as using race to decide punishment — it's how a district catches unfairness before it becomes a habit.

Milwaukee Public Schools and its school board need to publicly commit to closing this gap, not just shrinking the overall number — by tracking discipline outcomes by race, auditing how the vague "other" infraction category gets applied, and reporting the results to families every year.

Sign the petition to demand Milwaukee Public Schools close the racial gap in expulsions — because equal treatment can't wait for another federal investigation to force it.