Tag: school discipline

National. Law Enforcement and Arrests Replace Teachers and School Discipline

This is a great must read article from the Wall Street Journal. With School Boards and Education Departments passing guidance, rules, regulations and laws preventing teachers from intervening or removing students from the classroom for altercations, property damage, verbal disruptions, what did these boards, departments, schools and disability lobbyists (aka advocates) think would happen.

Intervention is going to take place. Either teachers will be given the ability to intervene for common disciplinary problems, or law enforcement will be called.

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody.

Stephen Perry, now 18 years old, was trying to avoid a water balloon fight in 2013 when he was swept up by police at his Wake County, N.C., high school; he revealed he had a small pocketknife and was charged with weapons possession. Rashe France was a 12-year-old seventh-grader when he was arrested in Southaven, Miss., charged with disturbing the peace on school property after a minor hallway altercation.

In Texas, a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume. In Wisconsin, a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law, authorities said. In Florida, a student conducted a science experiment before the authorization of her teacher; when it went awry she received a felony weapons charge.

Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

This arrest wave, in many ways, starts at school. Some jurisdictions are so overwhelmed that they are experimenting with routing schoolchildren into specially designed courts that would keep first-time offenders from being saddled with an arrest record. Others have passed new laws or policies to dial back police involvement in school discipline.

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State Senator Asks Why Are School Police Department Disciplining Students and Not Teachers

A report released today by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Research Institute of Texas A&M University, found that police not teachers were routinely put in charge of disciplining students.

Calling the findings disturbing, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson and state Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire said they intend to investigate solutions to the problem.

“The report tells us that more than 1 in 7 Texas middle and high school students have been involved with the juvenile justice system,” said Jefferson, who said he intends to convene a panel to study the findings.

“We should ask whether teachers and principals, rather than police officers and judges, are best suited to discipline kids who commit minor infractions.”

“I’ve also got to question why school police departments are handling a lot of these things like crimes, and why we’re not letting school officials take care of discipline,” Whitmire said. “If we want our kids to do better in school and reduce their involvement in the juvenile justice system, we in the Legislature need to continue looking into how teachers can be better supported and how the school discipline system can be improved.”

“We see so many kids getting removed from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, often repeatedly, demonstrating that we’re not getting the desired changes in behavior,” Thompson said.

The report, the first of its kind for Texas students, examined in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions and placement of students in specialty programs called the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program and the Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program.

As to Senator Whitmire’s Question: Why Are School Police Departments Handling Petty Crimes, Not Teachers?

The Answer: is because legislative and agency policies have restricted teacher involvement and ability to maintain a structured environment to such an extent that the only option left to teachers is to call the police.

Schools are so afraid of advocates, lobbyists and bad press that teachers are opting out of maintaining a structured learning environment and are simply calling for law enforcement.  This is bad for  the teacher, the school and the student.

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