A forum for parents of Vicksburg Warren School District students to discuss gifted and talented education opportunities for their children turned into a heated argument with Department of Education officials about tactics and questioning of students.
Officials from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights have questioned students this week about their opportunities to enroll in gifted and talented education programs after data suggests minorities are lagging behind in admittance to advanced programs.
Parents say students were interviewed without their permission and often divided into segregated groups for questioning.
VWSD sent home permission forms last week for students to participate in the Office of Civil Rights study. Some students whose parents did not grant permission for an individual interview were interviewed in groups.
Parent Lauren Wilkes said she supports the Office of Civil Rights interviews but opposes their tactics used in questioning.

The school district released a statement this week that read: “The Vicksburg Warren School District is in the process of conducting meetings with the Office of Civil Rights as it relates to a compliance review to ensure that our procedures have no disparate impact on any category of student in the district. We want to make certain that each of our students has access to all advanced educational courses as well as foundation courses that will prepare them for college and careers. There has been no known complaint from anyone that our policies or procedures are not proper. This is a compliance review. We look forward to working with the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that the Vicksburg Warren School District is meeting the needs of all of our students.”
“I don’t have a fundamental problem with the federal Department of Education and their office compiling a review, but they are going to very aggressively require the district be responsible for their actions,” Wilkes said. “We as parents have to hold them accountable for how this investigation is being held. I do not agree with how the interviews with the children were handled.”
That the district receives a significant amount of federal funding looking into racial disparity makes sense, Wilkes said, but details are easily manipulated.
“I would question the methodology the department of education based their need to dig around in our district,” Wilkes said.
In the group interviews, which follow protocol, no personal information was collected, said Terri Russo, an attorney fro the U.S. Department of Education.
“Since we don’t know it, it cannot be abused,” she said.
Data collected by the Office of Civil Rights suggests minorities are being excluded from gifted and talented education, Russo said.
“There was an underrepresentation of African-Americans in the programs,” Russo said.
At Thursday’s forum, Russo declined to release the data to parents, saying that making too much information public could compromise the study.
Data collected by the agency is difficult to find but is available on its web site.
In 2011 — the most recent data available — the percentage of black students enrolled in gifted education lagged behind whites. Of the 5,855 black students enrolled in the district in 2011, 220 — about 3.8 percent — were enrolled in gifted education. About 16.2 percent of white students — 466 — were enrolled in gifted and talented programs.
During that time period, district enrollment was 32 percent white and 65.2 percent black.
An analysis of the 2011 data indicates a slight decrease in the percentage difference between black and white students admitted to gifted programs since 2009. However, it also shows that a far larger percentage of whites are admitted to gifted education than blacks.
Students of other races did not have a large enough sample size in the district or gifted and talented population to make a statistically significant impact.
An analysis of the 2009 data suggests that 13.4 percent of white students were in gifted education that year while 3.3 percent of black students were in the program. In all, white students made up 67.4 percent of the gifted program in 2009 while white students comprised only 35.8 percent of the district’s enrollment.
Parent Katrina Johnson said she felt like a parent must have filed a complaint against the district for the Office of Civil Rights to conduct interviews.
“Some people are feeling left out. I think they’re trying to feel if they’re left out by the school district or their own complacency,” Johnson said.
She added that if parents were more involved, they’d know what was going on in their school with their children.
“Parents don’t know their children as well as they think they do. Some just don’t care. These students know each other,” Johnson said.
Russo said no complaint had been filed.
“No parent filed a case. We are not here looking into auditing any programs. We are here to look at whether or not African-Americans have an equal opportunity to participate in honors programs,” Russo said.
The last department of education complaint against the district to be made public was in 2011 when the mother of an autistic child complained that her son was now allowed to participate in the district’s 2009 enrichment program.

On the web
Department of Education statistics on gifted and talented education in Vicksburg Warren School District for 2011 is available at http://tinyurl.com/VWSD2011. Statistics from 2009 are available at http://tinyurl.com/VWSD2009.

 

 

By Erin Jackson
erin.jackson@vicksburgpost.com
and Josh Edwards
josh.edwards@vicksburgpost.com