Kern High Suspensions Fell Overall; One in Four Foster Youth Were Still Suspended

The districtwide rate fell, but the burden was not evenly shared

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Kern High School District suspended 3,661 of 45,076 students at least once during the 2024–25 academic year, an 8.1% districtwide rate in the California Department of Education's latest certified discipline file.

That was an improvement from 2023–24, when 3,873 of 45,187 students were suspended—8.6%. The number of students suspended fell by 212, or 5.5%, while cumulative enrollment changed little.

The aggregate decline did not reach every reported student group. The largest gap in this review involved foster youth: 132 of 524 were suspended at least once, a 25.2% rate. The prior year, 119 of 510 foster youth were suspended, or 23.3%.

Foster youth were suspended at more than three times the other-student rate

To make a like-for-like comparison, What’s the Scoop With Broach subtracted the foster count and foster enrollment from the district totals. Among students not identified in the foster subgroup, 3,529 of 44,552 were suspended—a 7.92% rate.

The foster-youth rate was therefore 3.18 times the rate for all other students, a difference of 17.27 percentage points. This is a disparity in the certified records, not proof that foster status caused any individual suspension or that students faced identical conduct or circumstances.

CDE says local educational agencies submit and certify these CALPADS records. The file reports cumulative enrollment, meaning a student is counted once at the district level even if enrolled in multiple district schools during the year.

Black students and students with disabilities also faced higher rates

The file shows 485 of 2,396 Black students were suspended, a 20.2% rate. After removing that subgroup from the district total, the rate for non-Black students was 3,176 of 42,680, or 7.44%. The recorded Black-student rate was 2.72 times the non-Black rate.

Among students with disabilities, 736 of 5,745 were suspended, a 12.8% rate. The corresponding rate for students not in that subgroup was 2,925 of 39,331, or 7.44%, making the disability-group rate 1.72 times as high.

Student groups overlap. A student can be Black, in foster care and a student with disabilities, so the subgroup counts must not be added together as if they described separate people.

Defiance-only suspensions fell sharply in the first year of a new limit

Kern High's reported defiance-only suspension incidents fell from 359 in 2023–24 to 18 in 2024–25, a 95% decline. The distinct number of students suspended only for defiance fell from 261 to 18, a 93.1% decline.

The change coincided with Senate Bill 274 taking effect for high school students on July 1, 2024. The law generally barred suspensions based on disruption or willful defiance through July 1, 2029, while retaining limited authority for a teacher to suspend a student from class under a separate provision.

The dataset does not explain each of the 18 remaining incidents, whether they involved the retained authority, a data issue or another circumstance. It also cannot prove the statute alone caused the decline.

Every large-enough school comparison showed the same Black-student gap

The districtwide gap was not driven by a single campus. Among the 17 Kern High school sites with at least 50 Black students and unsuppressed numeric data, every site had a higher Black-student suspension rate than the rate for all other students at that campus. The same was true for the same 17-site group in 2023–24.

The largest 2024–25 Black-student rates in that filtered comparison were at Vista West Continuation, where 23 of 61 Black students were suspended—37.7%—versus 73 of 546 other students, or 13.4%; East Bakersfield, 52 of 141—36.9%—versus 257 of 2,454, or 10.5%; and North, 53 of 144—36.8%—versus 284 of 2,293, or 12.4%.

The 50-student threshold is an editorial stability rule used for this analysis, not a CDE accountability cutoff. Smaller campuses and privacy-suppressed rows were not used to make the all-sites statement, and the school-level pattern does not establish why any individual decision was made.

How the analysis was reproduced

What’s the Scoop With Broach downloaded CDE's 2023–24 and 2024–25 suspension files and selected the district-level Kern High rows with Charter set to All. We used the total, foster, Black and students-with-disabilities categories and divided each unduplicated suspended-student count by that category's cumulative enrollment.

For comparison groups, we subtracted the subgroup numerator and denominator from the districtwide numerator and denominator. The source files do not include the Errata Flag column described on CDE's file-structure page, so this report does not assume an N value or claim that no correction issue exists.

For the school-level comparison, we paired each site's total and Black-student rows, required at least 50 Black students and numeric enrollment and suspended-student fields, and calculated the non-Black rate by subtracting the Black numerator and denominator from the campus total. These data count whether a student was suspended at least once, not the number of days missed. They do not provide individual conduct, discipline history or decision-maker information and cannot establish discriminatory intent in any case.

What families and the district can measure next

The records establish a districtwide improvement alongside persistent subgroup gaps. The next useful public measures are school-level patterns, days of instruction lost, repeat suspensions, alternatives used before removal and whether interventions reach the students with the highest recorded rates.

A lower overall rate is meaningful, but it does not erase a 25.2% foster-youth rate or a 20.2% Black-student rate. Future releases will show whether the gaps narrow, hold or widen.

About the image

The accompanying image is an authentic photograph of a classroom library by Rob, also known as Popofatticus, available through Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

It is general education context. It does not depict Kern High School District, a suspended student, a discipline event or any school included in the data.