Ways Texas Schools are Creating a Pipeline for the Prison System

At the Juvenile Justice Roundtable meeting yesterday, we spent an afternoon with people who know a lot about the intersection of school discipline and the criminal justice system. Here are some of the takeaways for me:

1. School districts vary widely in how they discipline kids. For example, disrupting a classroom (which can include things like swearing or chewing gum in class, depending on the district) could be handled by a classroom teacher in some places—and could result in expulsion or a criminal ticket in another district. What is fair about that? If you are a kid in school, a parent, or a taxpayer with high expectations of both the schools and the youth in them, not much.
   
2. Some districts expel kids or criminalize them (through ticketing) many times more often than other districts. The clencher: districts don't even have access to basic information about how they compare to other districts in their discipline responses. Thanks to the great research that Texas Appleseed is doing, some of that is about to change. I like it! And I look forward to reading all Texas Appleseed has to say in their soon-to-be-released report.
   
3. Fact: Some kids skip school. Schools don't like it, for one, because they lose state funding based on daily attendance. What normally happens to truant kids? They end up being ticketed and going to court. Some kids shape up when it gets to that point. For many, though, the hard-line approach of ticketing, court appearances, sanctions for non-compliance, probation, etc., doesn't work to get them back in school. It also criminalizes kids for skipping school. Come on, there has to be a better way than that! Thankfully, Fort Worth has found one and is having good results working with parents and kids together to create realistic plans to keep kids going to school without involving the criminal justice system. Thank goodness for people with common sense.
   
4. School police officers are supposed to keep schools safe. When they issue criminal tickets to school kids, the city courts that handle the tickets don't have the normal court process that you and I think of—you know, defense attorney, prosecuting attorney, judge, maybe a jury. On paper, they can. But, in practice, they don't. What this means to our kids—they go to schools that criminalize acting out and then don't even have access to a basic judicial process to resolve the criminal charges.

I am certainly not saying that kids should be able to get away with anything in school. But this school discipline environment that makes criminals out of youth who are doing what they are developmentally driven to do—establishing independence, learning to speak for themselves—has got to go. Let's give our teachers and principals the resources they need to support positive behavior and positive youth development in the school environment. And let's redirect our valuable criminal justice resources into things that actually protect you and me from violent crime.