Montclair Education Panel: Let's Not Become Like South Orange-Maplewood

When the Montclair School District’s Achievement Gap Panel (AGAP) released a recent report about racial disparity in Montclair’s schools, its members offered the South Orange-Maplewood School District as an example… of what not to do.

In their report, the panel referred to the American Civil Liberty Union’s 2014 civil complaint against the district, which charged that the school district’s tracking and discipline practices “disproportionately confines students of color to lower-level classes and punishes students of color and students with disabilities to a greater degree.”

• See related article: NAACP Considers Suit Against South Orange-Maplewood School District

Speaking about the “cost of doing nothing,” Montclair AGAP members wrote that the “South Orange-Maplewood School District is among the New Jersey school districts with the highest racial disparities in tracking and student discipline.”

“The South Orange-Maplewood lawsuit will be a ‘wake up’ call for our community to take deliberate action to focus on our own disparities and create meaningful and sustainable change in our district,” panel members wrote in their report.

• See related article: Black and White: Fixing The Student Achievement Gap In Montclair

What do you think, South Orange? Is the district’s reputation deserved? Share your opinion in the Patch reader poll below.