Last fall, Jeremy Bowen, a 14-year-old student receiving special educational services at Westerly High School in Westerly, Rhode Island, took the courageous step of integrating into mainstream classes. Jeremy struggled with the assigned work, and his mother, Elizabeth Boyer, spent countless hours in meetings with school officials working to revise Jeremy's education plan to provide him with the support and services he needed.
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.
The case of Zachery Christie, the 6-year-old from Delaware who was suspended from school for bringing a camping utensil to lunch, is now a familiar story. Initially, his punishment was 45 days in an alternative school. Fortunately for Christie, the school board amended its policies to readmit him following a brief suspension. Many students are not as fortunate, and disciplinary infractions can result in removal from school, or even criminal charges. In too many cases, this marks the student's entry into the school-to-prison pipeline, which are the policies and practices through which many school children, disproportionately represented by minority students and students with special needs, are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice system.
Today, roughly 5,000 poorly trained and undersupervised School Safety Officers (SSOs) are assigned to New York City public schools. Although ostensibly charged with protecting the safety of students, many students, parents and educators are concerned that these officers instead have caused unrest in city schools.
In January, the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of New York City students against the New York City Police Department (NYPD), which oversees SSOs. It alleges that NYPD personnel routinely violate the civil rights of public school children through the excessive use of force and wrongful arrests.
D.Y. is a 13-year-old girl from the Bronx who dreams of one day being a veterinarian and has always enjoyed school. This changed on the morning of October 7, 2009, when D.Y.'s mother dropped her and a friend off at school. D.Y. and her friend were confronted by two strangers who were being rambunctious, yelling, and acting threateningly toward them. Scared and panicked, D.Y. texted her mother.
I recently completed my first semester at Smith College. You might think that I would no longer marvel at the fact that I am a student at Smith, but you’re wrong. Every time I walk into a lecture hall and see a Smith College banner I am amazed and wonder how I got here.
I was educated in the New York City public schools. Every school I attended provided me with a different experience. In elementary school I received a solid education, supplemented with hand games and double-dutch at recess. Junior high, however, was a big change. Suddenly I was a student in a school filled with metal detectors, locked restrooms, an excessive police presence and constant yelling by administrators. The teachers did their best to teach with the resources they had, but it was difficult - our large class sizes often left students without textbooks or chairs. I knew I needed a change for high school so I applied and was accepted to Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in New York City.
This past December, “Casey A.” — like most seniors — was excited to receive his diploma from the high school at Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Lancaster, California. Challenger is operated by the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) for state wards housed in its youth probation camps. However, unlike most high school graduates, Casey is illiterate and his diploma perpetrates a cruel sham. Rather than being a symbol of Casey’s accomplishments, this diploma is one of the many tools LACOE is using to absolve itself of its legal responsibility to educate and rehabilitate Casey and the other 650 youths under its care.
So went the call for change on the steps of New York City Hall. On October 22, folks from the New York Civil Liberties Union and I participated in a rally at City Hall to raise public awareness about and garner support for the Student Safety Act. The rally was attended by over 100 high-school youth active in the Urban Youth Collaborative, a network of community organizations committed to ending overpolicing in New York City public schools and ensuring that our schools are safe places of learning for everybody. Unfortunately, overpolicing in public schools is hardly limited to New York City schools. The school-to-prison pipeline—a term given by advocates to the convergence of harsh disciplinary policies and reliance on police in schools that pushes children out of educational environments and into the juvenile justice system—is a growing problem all over the country.
