ARE BLACK STUDENTS BEING SINGLED OUT IN SCHOOL DISCIPLINE?

Time magazine article reveals that school children are being jailed for school discipline problems and most of those children are ‘children of color’

“The Worst ‘School-to-Prison’ Pipeline: Was it in Mississippi?” is an article by Elisabeth Kaufman published December 11 in Time magazine. The article points out that school children are being turned over to the police and jailed for disciplinary problems, many of them minor, instead of being handled within the school system. And the article indicates that most of those arrested are ‘children of color.’ While Kaufman writes that such arrests are a ‘nationwide phenomenon,’ her article focuses on Meridian, Mississippi.

The City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, the Mississippi Department of Youth Services (DYS) and local Youth Court judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young are defendants in a U.S. Justice Department civil rights lawsuit accusing them of violating the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendment rights of Meridian public school children.

Here is an excerpt from Kaufman’s article on the ACLU’s take in this matter:

__” Policies that funnel misbehaving children directly from school to juvenile detention and even adult courts are cropping up all over the country, a result, says the American Civil Liberties Union, of unforgiving and often irrational zero-tolerance laws that criminalize infractions of school rules and normal childhood behavior, of the wide-spread practice of turning what used to be routine school discipline over to police and school safety officers, and of high-stakes standardized testing programs like the No Child Left Behind Act, which encourage educators to raise their schools’ scores by getting rid of low-achieving students.”

Here are some PACOVILLA Corrections blog responses to the article:

Jeff ‘Paco” Doyle says, “That ‘students of color’ may be ‘over represented’ in these cases is likely as Earth shattering as reports Nigeria repeatedly elects black Africans as president.”

Bob Walsh says, “Rules are there to serve a purpose. Slavish following of the rules is not an end in and of itself. A certain amount of brains, compassion and flexibility help. Obviously some of those qualities were lacking here.”

And Greg ‘Gadfly’ Doyle says:

“Having worked with a school district as a police officer and, later, handling the juvenile offenders case load as a detective, I can attest that teachers were NOT geared to handle the types of disciplinary issues that come to school from the very chaotic homes they serve. If the allegations are true, there is a serious breakdown in existing law pertaining to the handling of juveniles in this scenario. And there are remedies in the law that do not require federal interference by the U.S. DOJ.

But the red flag for me in the report is the reference to the Bush 43 school initiatives program. In California, in particular, school administrators routinely cook (falsify) their books to meet the standards, without incarcerating students, and the State and feds do little or nothing to correct the fuzzy math. The author’s attempt to draw conclusions in the article to a federal scholastic achievement initiative based on an outrageous school discipline policy is specious, as well as feeble grandstanding for the current Administration.

As I recall, the most common discipline issues on campuses that were relegated to police response were fights, weapon and drug possession, assaults on teachers, and death threats against staff. All of those issues were crimes according to the penal code. And the statistical citation the author used regarding Black students being twice as likely to be disciplined or arrested should come as no shock considering the national statistics on adult incarceration rates of Black males, based on the overall population of Blacks in this country.

I wonder what the population of “students of color” in Mississippi is in this particular news story. If the population largely consists of “children of color,” then it would not be a race issue, but a bad administrator and school policy issue. As we all can attest, stupid administrators and bad policies abound.”

I think Greg hit the nail right on the head. There is a good chance that 80 percent or more of the children in those Meridian schools were black. Here in Houston, there are a number of schools in which the enrollment is around 80 percent black or Hispanic, depending on which neighborhoods those particular schools serve. And, of course, whenever students in minority predominant schools - whether in Meridian, in Houston or wherever - are arrested, the chances are good that most of them will be ‘children of color.’ That makes it a demographic problem, not a racial problem.

And Bob had a very good point too. When school authorities turn students over to the police for minor disciplinary problems, they are “lacking” in “brains, compassion and flexibility.”