Back before Christmas, we alerted you to a breaking story about a bullying lawsuit now under way in Jefferson County’s Crosby Middle school. One of the state’s most successful and talented lawyers, Teddy Gordon, and three other lawyers filed this suit on behalf of a number of families and their children, alleging serious problems went unchecked at Crosby.

This suit particularly caught my attention because Crosby Middle school is located far from the inner-city, low-income area of Jefferson County. In fact, Crosby is about the most Easterly situated middle school in the district, located in an area of above average incomes. Crosby has notably above district average white student enrollment and well below average poverty rates according to data in Crosby’s 2015-16 Kentucky School Report Card.

Given these advantages, Crosby seems a somewhat surprising place to find serious problems.

So, I got curious and decided to look at how Crosby performed in the 2015-16 KPREP reading and math testing.

I got a surprise when I did that. It turns out that in both reading and math, black students in Crosby scored notably lower than black students in several West End Jefferson County schools, which are located in a far less prosperous section of this enormous school district.

As the graphic shows, Crosby’s blacks only scored 30.4 percent proficient in KPREP reading and 26.6 percent proficient in KPREP math last year. Blacks in all three of the West End middle schools outscored Crosby’s blacks in both reading and math (Note: Shawnee also has high school grades, but the scores shown cover the middle school grades only).

Something nearly as surprising is that the whites in Crosby didn’t do much better than the whites in both Shawnee and Western for reading. In fact, Shawnee’s whites didn’t lag Crosby’s whites by very much in math, either. However, Crosby’s school lunch eligibility rate is only 40.9 percent, while the Kentucky School Report Card databases list Shawnee’s as an astonishingly high 84.1 percent. Given that huge poverty gap, you would expect Crosby to run away from Shawnee, but that isn’t happening.

I was also disturbed to find that Crosby’s 2015-16 white minus black achievement gaps in reading and math are among the very highest of any middle school in Jefferson County. Crosby’s 48.5 point gap in reading is the second-highest in the district. The 49.2 point achievement gap in math is also the second-worst among Jefferson County’s middle schools.

So, there might be a whole lot more going on at Crosby than meets the eye. Bullying may only be part of this problematic situation.