If we were all honest with ourselves, I am sure that we could recall a momentary lapse into delinquency at some point in our childhood, whether it was throwing a temper tantrum over a puzzle piece or being a smart alec to a teacher. These very same delinquencies today can now land a child in jail.

As a former educator in an inner-city school populated almost entirely by black students, I know too intimately the disheartening effects of this course of action on students. Children of color, particularly those with special needs, are disproportionately being funneled into detention centers and alternative schools—a practice known as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline.” I have witnessed first-hand my own student, in desperate need of social services, carted off in handcuffs for an offense that could have been avoided by a little care and concern from the administration. I have encountered ordinary teenagers whose lives were so consumed by the criminal justice system that they barely ever attended school and now boast reading levels so low that they are technically classified as mentally retarded. Once students are propelled down the pipeline, the effects are virtually irreversible—their contact with the criminal justice system brands them with a scarlet letter that creates barriers to re-entry into traditional schools, puts them behind their peers, and haunts them later in life as they may dropout, or be denied student loans, public housing, or occupational licenses. 

Judge Steve Teske of Clayton County, GA, has been a vocal critic about the criminalization of children for minor school infractions, asserting that “[z]ero tolerance is zero intelligence.” While educators often feel impotent in the face of such a daunting struggle, it is refreshing and encouraging to see that the legal world, from litigators to the bench, has adopted the cause and is making strides to reform school discipline around the country. The Washington Post recently published a story about how Judge Steve Teske has used his influence to raise awareness of the “School-to-Prison-Pipeline.” In his days as a juvenile judge in Clayton County, Georgia, Judge Teske witnessed school-based offenses soar from 46 in 1995 to over 1,200 in 2003—95% of which were misdemeanors. This prompted him to meet with educators, law enforcement officers, social service and mental health counselors, parents, and students to encourage them to devise a new protocol for handling minor offenses. Between 2003 and 2010, Clayton County experienced a 70% decrease in school referrals to juvenile court.  

The ACLU has also been instrumental in the School-to-Prison Pipeline reform efforts. Together, the ACLU and NYCLU are suing the City of New York on behalf of middle and high school students in NYC public schools, challenging the unconstitutional policies and practices of NYPD’s School Safety Division. Officers have been known to routinely and unlawfully arrest children for minor violations of school rules that do not amount to criminal activity, and to frequently detain these students off school grounds. Officers are also known to use excessive force against children—pushing, shoving, grabbing and striking them to the point that medical care or hospitalization is required. 

Our country’s growing reliance on zero-tolerance has created a trend in public education to remove and exclude “difficult” children for single occurrences of what is often minor misconduct. This trend, however, really only detracts from the real, underlying issue, which is that many of these children are vulnerable or troubled and need help. School discipline should be about behavior modification and coping mechanisms. Arrest should be a last resort.

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Last weekend, on the day designated to celebrate the abolition of slavery, an anti-abortion group decided to exploit the observance of Juneteenth to spread a demeaning and insulting message to the black community. Through billboards erected throughout the Atlanta area, the group makes the outrageous assertion that a black woman's private health decision is more harmful than slavery. These billboards accuse black women who have made the difficult and personal decision to end a pregnancy of making slavery "seem overly generous."

As an organization dedicated to fighting the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism in Georgia and throughout the country, we at the ACLU of Georgia were stunned and horrified when we learned of the campaign. All women facing an unintended pregnancy — regardless of race — should have the opportunity and support they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families, whether that is continuing the pregnancy and parenting, adoption, or abortion,

No matter how you feel about abortion, we should all be able to agree that a black woman who has had an abortion should not be singled out and degraded like this as a means of advancing an ideological agenda. From forced sterilizations to the experiments at Tuskegee, there is a long and disgraceful history in this country of regulating and exploiting black women's and men's bodies and basic dignity. By suggesting that black women and families cannot be trusted, and their decisions about childbearing must be regulated and controlled for their own good, these billboards are a part of the same pattern of denigration and oppression.

This publicity stunt is distracting from the issues that truly matter. About 35 percent of black children live in poverty. That is more than double the rate for white children. The infant mortality rate for black children in Washington, D.C., for example, rivals that of some undeveloped nations. If those behind these billboards and this hateful rhetoric were truly concerned about the health and welfare of the African-American community, and the meaning of Juneteenth, they would fight to ensure that everyone has access to quality health care; to increase support for programs that build safe schools, safe communities, access to jobs, and basic necessities like food and shelter.

In Georgia, the ACLU has fought zero tolerance policies, criminalization of youth, policing of schools and school disciplinary practices that disproportionately impact our children and feed the School-to-Prison Pipeline. These policies, and others like them that push black children out of school, have to be challenged. The failure to educate black children, the increasing achievement gap, and the increasing poverty rates and isolation of black children are signs of how we value these children after they are born. It sends a message to the child and to the community, and it is devastating.

Where's the billboard about that?

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On Monday, the Rhode Island ACLU filed Boyer v. Jeremiah, a class-action lawsuitchallenging the extremely troubling practices of Rhode Island's truancy court. Ostensibly created to support struggling students and help them stay in school, the truancy court has instead been used to punish students who may have difficulty paying attention in class or doing their schoolwork because of special educational needs, are unable to attend school because of medical or emotional difficulties, or who have family caretaking obligations that cause them to arrive at school late.

Also troubling is the fact that the truancy court operates under a shroud of secrecy. Truancy court hearings are conducted without any stenographic or audio recording of the proceedings, and frequently there are no formal written court orders or directives, creating the untenable situation of a parent or child's word against that of a judge. The files of the students who appear in truancy court are kept under lock and key, inaccessible even to attorneys retained to represent these youths.

In gathering information to prepare the suit, one of our volunteer attorneys, Amy Tabor, needed to get copies of our juvenile clients' truancy court files. Even though she had signed authorizations from the parents to access those files, the court clerk refused to let her see them unless and until she got a signed authorization order directly from the chief judge of the family court. When the chief judge was unavailable, she had to track down a duty judge to provide the authorization. After jumping through all those hoops, Amy returned to the clerk's office only to have the clerk tell her that she could only inspect the files while standing in the clerk's office, and that she would not be able to make copies of them. Since some of the files were quite voluminous, this restriction made it very difficult for Amy to review and analyze the records in any meaningful way.

If the barriers are this great for a trained attorney, we can only imagine how insurmountable they must be for most parents with children called before the court. As such, we are looking not only to the courts, but also to the Rhode Island legislature to vindicate the rights of our clients. House Bill 2010-H 7760 (PDF), introduced by Rep. Michael Marcello, would make explicit that juveniles and their attorneys are authorized to inspect and copy the child's truancy court records at any time. Confidentiality of family court records is certainly critical, but making access an obstacle course for the juvenile's own attorney is completely inappropriate, foremost because it impedes effective oversight of the truancy court's actions and hampers a lawyer's ability to vigorously represent his or her client. We are hopeful that the legislature will recognize this problem and act quickly to fix it.

The attention that our lawsuit has brought to the truancy court's questionable procedures has already had a salutary effect. Within a few hours of filing the suit, we heard from more than a half-dozen distressed parents who had been through similar experiences as our clients. Perhaps most importantly, our efforts made these parents — and many others, we're sure — recognize for the first time that they were not alone in their struggles and mistreatments by the court and that their misgivings about the court, far from being unreasonable, are quite justifiable.

Today, the North Carolina Supreme Court heard the case of two young women in Beaufort County who were egregiously punished for their involvement in a weaponless schoolyard fight. These two African-American students were not only expelled from school, they were also denied access to an alternative school as well as home tutoring for an entire semester, effectively stopping their education for several months. The lawyers for the young women will argue that depriving these students of a semester of school is a violation of their state constitutional right to an education.

In a compelling New York Times article, Erik Eckholm writes about the obvious racial imbalance of out of-school suspensions. He points out,

some 15 percent of the nation's black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.

The decision of who is suspended is, to a certain extent, arbitrary and vulnerable to racism, whether intentional or not. As the ACLU Racial Justice Program discovered in a landmark lawsuit in Winner, South Dakota, racial minority students are often disproportionately sent to law enforcement and more likely to be punished with harsher disciplinary measures.

Students who misbehave should undoubtedly face consequences, but pushing kids out of the classroom for normal adolescent behavior disrupts their learning and development and encourages the school-to-prison pipeline, the disturbing national trend in which children, and disproportionately children of color, are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Our children are being handcuffed, arrested, suspended, and expelled for incidents that older generations were rightfully sent to the principal's office for. These "zero tolerance" policies hurt our schools, our students, and our country, by squandering the potential of so many capable students and telling them that their misbehavior means they are not worthy of receiving the same education and the same opportunities as their peers.