Illinois Valley Times

Black students, constituting 3.3% or 40 of La Salle-Peru Township High School's total student population of 1,213, accounted for 298 out of the 1,723 total suspensions (17.3%) in the 2021-22 school year, averaging roughly 7.5 suspensions per student, according to the latest student discipline report by the Illinois State Board of Education.

During the same period, La Salle-Peru Township High School's 881 white students, who make up 72.6% of the school population, received 965 suspensions. This translates to an average of roughly 1.1 suspensions per student, which is definitively lower than that of Black students.

Hispanic students at La Salle-Peru Township High School behaved worse than whites, but better than Blacks, with 391 suspensions for 228 students in the 2021-22 school year - an average of roughly 1.7 suspensions per student.

In contrast, Asian students, who make up 1% of the student body at La Salle-Peru Township High School, had the lowest suspension ratio with an average of one suspension per six Asian students, totaling two suspensions. This rate is definitively lower than that of Black students, establishing them as the best-behaved racial group in the school.

Of the 1,723 total suspensions at La Salle-Peru Township High School in the 2021-22 school year, 1,520 were in-school suspensions and 203 out-of-school suspensions.

According to the report, in the 2021-22 school year, 48 student suspensions at La Salle-Peru Township High School were for violence-related offenses and 34 for those including drugs.

During the 2021-22 school year, La Salle-Peru Township High School reported 283 students - equivalent to 23.3% of its student body - as chronically truant, meaning they had a repeated pattern of unexcused lateness or missing classes. In addition, 378 students, or 31.2% 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 62.8% of all students who were chronically truant, and 63.6% 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	228	391	1.71
Black	40	298	7.45
Asian	12	2	0.17
Multiracial	48	62	1.29
White	881	965	1.1