By arresting fewer students, we create safer schools that put more kids on path to college, jobs and not prison
Here is an op-ed on school safety by Judge Steven Teske of the Clayton County Juvenile Court and Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the national civil rights group Advancement Project.
By Judge Steven Teske and Judith Browne Dianis
In the wake of the horrific school shooting in Newtown, policymakers across the nation are grappling with how we keep our schools and communities safe. Georgia is no exception. Local school districts in Georgia and across the nation are developing plans to create their own police departments.
While the safety of our children is our highest priority, we must not allow isolated acts of violence to result in reactionary policies that, though well-intentioned, actually undermine school safety and the educational outcomes of our children.
Research shows police in schools operating absent a written protocol do not increase safety, and they do not catch early indicators of mental health needs, identify root causes of underlying violence, or use the resources of law enforcement in an effective way. Instead of addressing serious threats to safety, police in schools often respond to minor student misbehavior by criminalizing the young people they were intended to protect.
We saw this in Clayton County. After placing police officers on middle and high school campuses in the late 1990s, school-related arrests skyrocketed. However, the vast majority of cases that reached juvenile courtrooms were for misdemeanors involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disruption. The court docket was consumed with low-risk cases involving kids who made adults mad versus kids who scare us.
Despite the many arrests, school safety did not improve. The number of serious weapons brought to campus increased during this period, including guns, knives, box cutters, and straight edge razors. At the same time, the graduation rate decreased, reaching an all-time low. As more students were arrested, suspended and expelled from our school system, the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased because probation officers were forced to focus on low risk students rather than real threats to safety.
The recidivism rate increased to over 70 percent as high risk kids were receiving less supervision. Our growing reliance on police to handle minor school disciplinary infractions was negatively impacting the entire community.
Fortunately, as policymakers consider school safety proposals, they don’t have to repeat Clayton County’s mistakes. Instead they can look to models from across the country that promote strategies that foster care, connectedness, and support in our schools.
Consider Denver for example: the police department and the school district partnered with the grassroots youth and parent group, Padres & Jovenes Unidos, in reaching a historic agreement which limits the role of police in schools. The agreement also provides due process protections for students and parents, helps ensure our children are on a path to college or career; requires community input on the policing process; mandates training on the role of police; and clarifies the rights afforded to students. These measures protect children and allow police to do what they do best: keep our communities safe.
We applaud this agreement because it unites youth and parents with the police department and the school district in developing a long-term plan to protect our children and truly transform our schools. The plan is similar to a memorandum of understanding developed in Clayton County.
Like Denver, we created a cooperative agreement between government agencies that prohibits referrals to law enforcement for minor acts of misconduct, and instead implements a graduated approach to assigning disciplinary consequences, including a warning after the first offense and a referral to a school conflict workshop on the second offense.
We also created a multidisciplinary panel to assess the needs of students at risk for referral to law enforcement, and to refer them to services outside of the school such as family therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and wrap-around services. This approach worked for Clayton County and we fully expect it’ll work for Denver.
The bottom line is simple: we need common sense approaches to school safety that give parents and teachers the support they need to create safe, high quality schools that place children on a path to college or careers, rather than prison. We also need more collaboration between parents, students, the police department and the school district.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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62 comments Add your comment
Just A Teacher
February 25th, 2013
10:59 am
To say that arresting fewer students would be a positive thing is a no brainer. However, I don’t believe the fault lies with student resource officers or administrators. I think that students should stop breaking the law. Then they wouldn’t be arrested. It’s that simple. Stop sending so many criminals to school, and the number of arrests will decrease.
Mountain Man
February 25th, 2013
11:10 am
“I think that students should stop breaking the law. Then they wouldn’t be arrested. It’s that simple.”
I agree, Just a Teacher. If we enforced discipline at our schools, there would be less students committing these offenses.
Just Sayin
February 25th, 2013
11:17 am
In Texas instead of arresting them for every infraction, they give them tickets. You get in a fight depending on the severity you get a $250-$500 fine. You keep getting written up and ISS $250 fine. You get in a fight and hit the teacher trying to break it up $1000 fine. I can tell you that possibly having to go into the parents purse stops a WHOLE lot of kids from acting up. Yeah you get the true delinquents that will do it no matter what (these are the ones that need to be in alternative schools). If Alternative schools did what they were suppose to do…educate the kid while treating him or her like a criminal (no freedoms) while they were there, I think that we could get parts of the education system back on track. Of course half the problem is that half these kid have some type of diagnosis and a protected by LULAC , the ACLU and every other acronym in the country, so punishing them in any way gets you sued.
Georgia, The "New Mississippi"
February 25th, 2013
11:27 am
This type of excuse making is the reason the charter school amendment passed by a landslide.
Funny
February 25th, 2013
2:55 pm
Yes, let’s keep these young criminals in school so they can ruin the education of others!
gamom
February 25th, 2013
3:17 pm
Ending corporal punishment in schools would help too
Real life
February 25th, 2013
3:24 pm
School fights are not always actions that make adults mad. In the days before such actions were more common at schools my brother was among 4 young men targeted by a group of students looking for a fight at school. And one day they started punching some boys that had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at school. My brother and another friend ended up in the hospital. You can bet this made adults mad. My parents were mad. The parents of the other assault victims were mad. The principal was mad. And the parents of those causing the fight were mad. The group was arrested, charged with assault and were found guilty.
Not all school fights are simply acts that make adults made. For the two authors of this piece to say that shows either unbelievable naievete or the denial of responsibility for which our nation is becoming known.
Discipline needs to be restored in our schools. Unfortunately these ideas do not seem like a good path to that restoration.
home-tutoring parent
February 25th, 2013
5:36 pm
Ron, thank you for your insight.
Now, with respect to single-mom disruptive black students, our top choices include
1. Expel them, so that teachers and wanting-to-learn students can thrive. Not a bad solution.
2. Expel them and put them into military-school/ work-camps. Not a bad idea, but good luck getting that by the communist ACLU.
3. Just keep them in schools, disrupting classes, making it really difficult for teachers to maintain order and prevent want-to-learn kids from learning. This problem is rampant. It is why people who can afford private education flock to it.
4. Set up high-per-capita-cost boarding schools for the poor, to give them a chance. My proposal could prove the proposition that most black people and their slave-owning white great-great grandfathers are stupid, so their progeny are stupid. (Why did you have sex with your slaves and create babies, what were you thinking?)
But it could prove the a lot of “black” kids are smart, and want to work hard. Or it might scientifically prove most “black” kids aren’t that smart, the products of off-base 19th century “genetic engineering experiments”. It could prove that some black kids are worthy of being removed from terrible environments, and they can thrive, while some cannot thrive.
I just watched “Easy Rider” on TMC. Southern white rednecks killed ‘the good guys’. The alternate screenplay was the white motorcyclists rode into Detroit and Chicago, and got killed by “black” street thugs. In either Deep South or Up North, the California white riders would have been identified as “You don’t belong here,” and removed.
Or, not in reality. But why did Hollywood present a completely false picture of the South? What message was Hollywood trying to project?
Teacher2
February 25th, 2013
7:03 pm
Inman Safety at 10:49 am
Good post! It would be the well behaved poor children who would be left behind to fend for themselves. I am aware that fighting back to simply defend yourself results in suspension at most high schools. The students are expected not to push someone off, hit, swing, etc. as a method of defending yourself. You are expected to withstand the violence until someone comes to save you (regardless of how much time that takes until someone arrives). I would offer if those who support the author’s position had children who were being subjected to these “minor” offenses their view would change quickly.
Lee
February 25th, 2013
8:05 pm
“After placing police officers on middle and high school campuses in the late 1990s, school-related arrests skyrocketed. However, the vast majority of cases that reached juvenile courtrooms were for misdemeanors involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disruption. The court docket was consumed with low-risk cases involving kids who made adults mad versus kids who scare us.
Despite the many arrests, school safety did not improve. The number of serious weapons brought to campus increased during this period, including guns, knives, box cutters, and straight edge razors. At the same time, the graduation rate decreased, reaching an all-time low. As more students were arrested, suspended and expelled from our school system, the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased “
Way to ignore the elephant in the room. Changing demographics in Clayton in the 90’s fueled a lot of the increased crime, gangs, weapons, lowering of graduation rates, etc. But, we can’t talk about that because it isn’t politically correct.
LetMeOutside
February 26th, 2013
8:50 am
It’s amazing to me how quickly people will judge something after barely scratching the surface. There is a ton of information on this approach out there if you care to do a little research.
I served as a juvenile probation officer for more than 10 years, and the majority of my cases were low-risk kids that would have done just fine had I never been involved. I had a hard time really supervising the high-risk kids on my caseload because of all the administrative work involved with the cases. Why was this? Because at some point, someone thought it would be a good idea to remove an administrator with a PhD, college-educated teachers, social workers, caring parents and common sense from the process of addressing minor problems in school. Instead, they enacted zero tolerance (i.e., zero intelligence) legislation and rules at the local level, turning many of things we all did as kids into crimes.
This approach, which only deals with disruption, school fights, and other very minor things cut all of that out (rest assured, kids on campus with weapons or who threaten people still take the ride). As a result, the probation caseloads went down, and POs could not only supervise the “thugs” but could do so much more intensively. Those minor offenses are dealt with in a much more common sense way. Do cops really need to be involved in dealing with a kid who refused to follow a teacher’s direction? These people are adults, who happened to have been trained to deal with such disruptions, and there is a whole host of supports at their disposal. Though I suppose the easy thing is to just call someone else to deal with it. When that someone happens to be a police officer, guess what the default response is?
To the folks out there that say just expel them or lock them up and be done with it, that’s an awfully short-sighted point-of-view. Where do people end up without an education? Most often, in prison. Who pays for that? We do. It’s time to wake up. This isn’t about liberal or conservative, this is about doing what is right, for the kids involved with the system, and ultimately for us as a society.
V for Vendetta
February 26th, 2013
9:29 am
Wow. home-tutoring parent is even more racist than Lee.