MANCHESTER — A civil rights group is defending claims that the school district discriminates against minority students and says it will press ahead in its efforts to get the school committee to address the issue.

On Monday, Mayor Ted Gatsas cut short a presentation the group — the state advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — was making to the Board of School Committee.

Gatsas took offense to charges that there was cronyism in faculty hiring decisions and that minority students graduated at a far lower rate than white students, statistics he said strongly conflicted with district and state data.

JerriAnne Boggis, head of the advisory committee, said the presentation certainly did not go as she expected. “But the recommendations and findings we presented, we stand behind them,” she said.

She added: “The mayor raised some valid concerns, but the anger was unexpected. We're going to continue reaching out and study this issue, getting more information and being more specific.”

Superintendent Thomas Brennan said the abrupt ending to the presentation Monday was unfortunate, but he said the Gatsas' response was appropriate.

“I've been working since I've been here to develop strong relationships with many of these constituencies, with refugees, immigrants and minorities. I think that sometimes these issues can ignite rather than unite, and that's what happened last night,” he said.

Brennan said he has met on several occasions with Boggis and other members of the civil rights group, and he said he was surprised the presentation took the tone it did.

Early into the presentation, Gatsas objected to the statistics the group gave for high school drop-out rates for students of color, which it called “appalling.” The group cited statistics from the BoostUp.org, stating that 73 percent of Hispanic students do not graduate from high school in New Hampshire, compared to 27 percent of white students.

The mayor took issue with the figures for not being specific to Manchester, and he noted they were much higher than the drop out rate of around 1 percent touted by the governor and state officials.

The BoostUp numbers come from an education advocacy group called the Alliance for Excellent Education, which uses 2008 figures from a report by the publication Education Week. No information for black students was available.

The state compiles its own data on graduation rates and race for each school district, which it is required to report to the federal Department of Education.

This data shows that there is a difference between the graduation rates of minority and white students in Manchester high schools, but not to the extent suggested by the civil rights group.

According to the state data, Hispanic students had an average graduation rate of 56 percent at the district's three high schools, while white students graduated at a 77 percent rate.

The graduation rate for black students at Central High — the only school for which data was available — was 54 percent.

The graduation rate the state reports to the federal DOE is different than the drop-out rate, according to state Deputy Education Commissioner Paul Leather.

“There isn't a direct inverse relationship between dropouts and graduates,” he said.

Leather said that the graduation rate measures the outcomes of a specific set of students over a four-year period, whereas the dropout rate factors in students who earn non-standard diplomas and GEDs.”

Leather said he is reviewing the data cited by the civil rights groups at the direction of Gov. John Lynch, who has made reducing the dropout rate a cornerstone of his agenda.

“We have asked the Department of Education to look into those numbers, which are much higher than what the state's data shows,” Lynch spokesman Colin Manning said.

Rogers Johnson, who is also a member of the civil rights committee and had once served as director of intergovernmental affairs for the federal DOE, said his group used the data it did because states typically under-report dropout rates.

But Johnson stressed that the clash over the dropout numbers obscured the larger issue.

“We were there to talk about discrimination, about civil rights violations. They never wanted us to get to the main issues,” said Johnson.

In a similar way, Johnson said the mention of “cronyism” during the presentation, in regard to the lack of minority faculty in the district, prevented any discussion of the issue that the district has no policy to recruit minority applicants or track faculty diversity.

Mayor Gatsas considered the charge of cronyism an attack on the entire on school committee, which must approve hiring decisions, and it's what ultimately prompted him to ask the group to leave.

Johnson maintained that job candidates were really vetted at the local school level and that the school committee often just signed off on those recommendations.

Speaking for himself and not the civil rights group, Johnson said he questioned the value of continuing of try to work with the school committee.

“Do you think that even if we write a report and present it the board, they'll let us back in room? No, probably not,” said Johnson, who is also former state representative and, he noted, a Republican.

He added: “I'd like to make the suggestion to take it straight to court and get this information through discovery,” he said. “But what I'm not willing do right of the bat is sacrifice another generation of kids to this program that is awful.”

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Ted Siefer may be reached at tsiefer@unionleader.com.