It wasn’t the first time Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter had gotten into trouble at school. A seventh grader at a charter school in St. Louis, she had a long history of disrupting her classes and getting into confrontations with teachers. Several times, the school issued a suspension and sent Curry’s granddaughter home.
In each instance, the school followed state law: The punishment was officially recorded and assigned a set length of time, Curry was formally notified and she and her granddaughter had a chance to appeal the decision.
But one day in February, after refusing to go into her classroom and allegedly cursing at her teachers, the seventh grader was sent home to learn online indefinitely. Curry said she wasn’t given any sense of when her granddaughter would be able to return to the classroom, just that the school and administrators would determine the best learning environment for her. In the meantime, the middle schooler would be left to keep up with her schoolwork on her own, on a district-issued tablet that Curry says would often lock her granddaughter out.
Read more from the Missouri Independent.
