In September, Louisiana's Jefferson Parish Public Schools suspended a 4th grader—Ka'Mauri Harrison—for six days because he allowed a BB gun to briefly appear on his screen during virtual Zoom school. On Friday, the school board declined to remove the suspension from his permanent record, according to local news.
They did change the six-day suspension to a three-day suspension plus three unexcused absences, which was entirely unacceptable to Harrison's father, who stormed out at the end of the lengthy meeting:
The Woodmere Elementary fourth-grader said he was moving the BB gun so his brother didn't trip on it when his teacher saw in during a virtual classroom session.
The Harrisons have argued their home is not an extension of Ka'Mauri's classroom. The school system has stood its ground and refused to change his record.
That happened even after a new law was passed—and named in Ka'Mauri's honor—to deal with similar situations.
"Are you aware you were suspended because you brought a BB gun to school?" Chelsea Cusimano, the Harrison family attorney, asked Ka'Mauri as he testified during the hearing.
"I didn't bring my BB gun to school," he answered.
School Board member Simeon Dickerson, a former teacher, asked Nyron Harrison, Ku'Mauri's father, to think of how his teacher felt seeing a gun on her computer screen.
"I know what a BB gun looks like. And you know what it resembles? A real gun. OK? It resembles a real gun," Dickerson said.
I wrote about this story in September, and it's as outrageous today as it was then. Bringing a fake gun to school is not at all the same thing as briefly and accidentally allowing a fake gun to be glimpsed on a computer screen.
During these very difficult and stressful times for parents and families, the last thing schools should be doing is inflexibly applying overly punitive rules. The pandemic is no excuse to broaden the public school system's zone of authority into people's homes.
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]]>Ka'Mauri Harrison is a nine-year-old boy in Harvey, Louisiana. Earlier this month, he was taking a social studies test—during a virtual classroom session—when one of his younger siblings entered the room and knocked over an unloaded toy BB gun. Harrison picked up the fake weapon, which made it briefly visible on screen.
Readers can probably guess what happened next: The district, Jefferson Parish Schools, threatened Harrison with expulsion for having a lookalike weapon in class—as if his home is now an extension of the school. The Washington Post reports that the expulsion was later reduced to a six-day suspension.
"This is an injustice. It's a systemic failure," Chelsea Cusimano, the family's attorney, declared in a statement. "They're applying on-campus rules to these children, even though they're learning virtually in their own homes."
Schools have doled out similarly harsh punishments to other students who inadvertently violated policies that don't make any sense when applied to at-home instruction. Inflexibly taking a rules-are-rules approach to school discipline makes even less sense now than it did when kids were actually going to school. Dealing with Zoom-based learning is difficult enough; kids and parents shouldn't have to worry about what might appear in the background. It's an extra penalty on families that have more kids to deal with or less access to stress-reducing resources.
Note also the difficulty that Harrison's teacher had when she wanted to talk to him about the toy gun. She waved at him to get his attention, but he had the computer on mute because he was taking a test. By the time he could unmute, the video feed cut out. These are the struggles and impracticalities that thousands of children all over the country are dealing with—even in districts where the COVID-19 infection rates are low and in-person instruction could probably resume safely.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has taken an interest in Harrison's case and the broader issue of "blatant government overreach by the school system."
"I have begun investigating this matter and plan to take action in defense of this young man and his family and all families who could suffer the same invasion of their homes and constitutional rights," Landry announced.
That's good news. School districts need crystal-clear instructions from state authorities that they should not make life even more difficult for kids like Harrison.
The post Louisiana School Threatens 9-Year-Old Boy with Expulsion for Having BB Gun During Virtual Class appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Isaiah Elliott, a 12-year-old boy who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is fond of his neon green Nerf gun—which has the words "ZOMBIE HUNTER" written on it.
Last week, during a virtual classroom session, Elliott briefly picked up his toy gun, causing it to appear on screen for just a few seconds. This was noticed by his teacher, who promptly alerted the authorities. As a result, the police paid a visit to Elliott's home and the school suspended him for five days.
The teacher was fairly certain the gun was a toy, according to local news station KDVR. But instead of checking with the parents to assuage any doubts, the school went straight to the cops.
In a statement, the district explained that all school board policies would be enforced regardless of whether "we are in-person learning or distance learning."
"We take the safety of all our students and staff very seriously," said the district. "Safety is always our number one priority."
This explanation—we are just enforcing the policy equally—might make make more sense if the policy itself was logical, but deploying the police to deal with a nerf gun would have been ridiculous even if the incident took place in a physical classroom. The fact that the other students were, in this case, even further removed from the nonexistent danger just makes the situation even more ridiculous.
"For them to go as extreme as suspending him for five days, sending the police out, having the police threaten to press charges against him because they want to compare the virtual environment to the actual in-school environment is insane," said Dani Elliott, the boy's mother.
Another kid, an 11-year-old whose airsoft gun briefly appeared on screen during a Zoom class, was similarly suspended. There are many reasons to oppose virtual learning as the new default for American public K-12 education: Perhaps most importantly, it neglects school's vital role as a form of daycare. But the opportunity for the state to invite itself into the home and make trouble for hard-working parents and innocent children is also a serious concern.
There's one more wrinkle here: Unbeknownst to parents, Elliott's school had been recording the Zoom session. The school did say it would abandon this practice, though it makes little difference to Elliott's parents: They wisely decided to transfer him to a private or charter school.
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]]>Increasing the number of police in schools doesn't make school safer and leads to harsher discipline for infractions, according to a new study in the journal Criminology & Public Policy.
The longitudinal study, published by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat, looked at disciplinary offenses at 33 public middle and high schools in California that increased their number of school resource officers (SROs) in 2013 or 2014, and then compared them over time with 72 similar schools that did not. The study found that increasing the number of SROs led to both immediate and persistent increases in the number of drug and weapon offenses and the number of exclusionary disciplinary actions against students.
While the initial bump in offenses could be explained simply as an effect of increased policing, the boost in recorded crimes and exclusionary responses persisted for 20 months in the schools studied. The researchers say this suggests that rather than deter crime in schools, increasing the number of SROs leads to more "formal responses to behaviors that otherwise would have been undetected or handled informally."
"Our findings suggest that increasing SRO staffing in schools does not improve school safety and that increasing exclusionary responses to school discipline incidents increases the criminalization of school discipline," Denise Gottfredson, professor emerita at the University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said in a statement.
The study's findings come as school districts across the country are reconsidering the use of SROs in the wake of national demands for policing reforms. The number of police in schools has skyrocketed in schools over the past four decades, first in response to drugs and then mass shootings. Police departments and organizations like the National Association of School Resource Officers argue that well-trained SROs act as liaisons between the school and police department.
Earlier this month, Chicago Public Schools slashed its school police budget by more than half. So far, San Francisco is the largest school district to move toward defunding its SRO program. The Oakland school board also voted unanimously to eliminate the district's police department and shift its $2.5 million budget to student support services. Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, Charlottesville, and Portland, Oregon, have also ended or suspended relationships with local police.
Civil liberties groups and disability advocates have long argued that increases in school police and zero-tolerance policies for petty disturbances have fueled the "school-to-prison" pipeline and led to disproportionate enforcement against minorities and students with disabilities. (The study did not find a significant change in criminal referrals and exclusionary actions against special needs students.)
As with policing at large, viral videos of excessive force and small children being arrested have sparked national outrage.
Last week, body camera footage emerged showing police officers in Key West, Florida, trying and failing to handcuff an eight-year-old boy, whose wrists were too small for the cuffs. And an Orlando SRO made headlines last September when he arrested a six-year-old girl.
In February, a school resource officer at a high school in Camden, Arkansas, was relieved of duty after video showed him putting a student in a chokehold and lifting the student off the ground. Last December, a North Carolina SRO was fired after he brutally body-slammed a middle-schooler. In November, a Broward County sheriff's deputy in Florida was arrested and charged with child abuse after a video showed him body-slamming a 15-year-old girl at a special needs school.
Chicago activists who want to defund the school system's police program have cited a 2019 video in which Chicago police officers kick, punch, and tase a 16-year-old girl.
The study recommends that "educational decision-makers seeking to enhance school safety consider the many alternatives to programs that require regular police presence in schools."
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]]>Once-a-century pandemics may place the most acute stress on the infected and those who care for them, but every sector of government and civil society come under strain too. So how has the Fourth Estate performed during these nationally and personally challenging times? The record is decidedly mixed, argue Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on the new Reason Roundtable podcast.
So is the record of the government that those journalists cover. The gang discusses zero-tolerance enforced-distancing madness from Michigan to Mississippi, from Pennsylvania to the beaches of southern California. They also take a peek at proposed post-lockdown surveillance states to come. At least we all have time to read dystopian fiction about pandemics while watching The Prisoner!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Over Time' by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Relevant links from the show:
"No, NYC Is Not Running Out of Burial Space Due to COVID-19," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"U.K. Media Lobby Wants Government To Force Advertisers to Support Coronavirus Coverage," by Scott Shackford
"Donald Trump's Experiment in Radical Press Transparency Is Ugly and Praiseworthy," by Nick Gillespie
"Why You Shouldn't Trust Anyone Who Claims 80 Percent of America's Drugs Come From China," by Eric Boehm
"Religious Freedom Clashes With Public Health Enforcers," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Trump Has Secret Emergency Powers?" by Ronald Bailey
"Banning Alcohol Sales During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is a Terrible Idea," by Baylen Linnekin
"The Surveillance State Thrives During the Pandemic," by J.D. Tuccille
"Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley Will Do Everything Necessary To Combat Coronavirus (Unless It Involves Deregulation)," by Christian Britschgi
"Will Coronavirus Fears Lead to an Assault on Gun Rights?" by J.D. Tuccille
"Florida City Closes Barbershops Because of Coronavirus, but the Cops Are Still Getting Haircuts," by Robby Soave
"3 Ways New York Botched the Coronavirus Response in March," by Matt Welch
"As More Death Data Becomes Available, COVID-19 Looks Less and Less Like the Flu," by Ronald Bailey
"Flawed Economic Policies Will Exacerbate the Pandemic," by Veronique de Rugy
The post What Have the Media Gotten Wrong (and Right) During Coronavirus? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A 10-year-old boy—Gavin Carpenter of Colorado Springs, Colorado—was playing with a toy gun and pointing it at passing cars.
This angered one driver, who stopped his vehicle, berated Carpenter, and followed the alarmed boy back to his grandparents' house. The driver eventually called the cops as well.
When officers from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office showed up, they arrested Carpenter for menacing the driver. This included handcuffing the kid, booking him, and taking his mugshot. He was charged with a felony, and had to complete community service in order to have his record expunged. His family spent thousands of dollars defending him.
That's according to The Washington Post, which detailed the fraught efforts of Carpenter's parents to convince the authorities to relent:
"I knew I did something wrong," Gavin told KXRM, "but I don't think I should have got arrested and taken in a car with handcuffs on and taken to a place to get mug shots and my fingerprints."
His mother said she shared the story on Facebook to warn other parents who might allow their kids to play with toy guns without realizing the possible consequences.
"I couldn't believe they were following through with this," she told KRDO. "I was waiting for the call from the cops saying that they were going to let this go, warn them, tell them it was wrong."
On Facebook, the mother said her family is eager to move away from Colorado Springs when her husband, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army, is stationed at another post in about three months.
This is the criminalization of teenage boyhood in action, and it's as harmful as it is stupid. In what universe is it reasonable to arrest a child for felony public menacing stemming from an incident in which no one was harmed? Carpenter should have been sent to bed without supper, or grounded for a week. We want children to learn from their mistakes, but the punishment should always be proportionate to the wrongdoing.
The only lesson Carpenter is likely to learn from this ordeal is that the criminal justice system is capricious and unfair. That's a worthwhile lesson but not one he should have to experience firsthand.
The post Cops Arrested and Handcuffed a 10-Year-Old Boy for Pointing a Toy Gun at a Car appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Administrators at Pennsylvania's Valley Forge Elementary School called the cops on a 6-year-old girl with Down syndrome who pointed her finger like a gun at a teacher and said, "I shoot you." "She really didn't understand what she was saying, and having Down syndrome is one aspect, but I'm sure all 6-year-olds don't really know what that means," said Maggie Gaines, the girl's mother. "Now, there is a record at the police that says she made a threat to her teacher." School officials quickly determined the girl wasn't threatening the teacher, but they say school system policy required them to call the police.
The post Brickbat: Triggered appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>School officials at Valley Forge Elementary in Tredyffrin, Pennsylvania, called the police on a 6-year-old girl who made a finger gun gesture at her teacher and said, "I shoot you." The girl has Down syndrome and didn't understand what she was saying, her mother told CBS Philly.
The principal and teacher agreed that the girl, Margot, had not intended to make a threat. But they informed the authorities anyway, citing a district policy that mandates safety threat assessments in all such cases.
"I was fine with everything up until they said 'and we have to call the police,'" Margot's mother, Maggie Gaines, told reporters. "I said 'you absolutely do not have to call the police.'"
Indeed, it was completely unnecessary for the school to involve the cops, which had the effect of creating a police report referencing Margot's actions. Unfortunately, district officials follow a policy of automatically calling the cops anytime someone's safety is remotely threatened. Per The Washington Post:
According to SAVVY Main Line, the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District ramped up its threat assessment protocols in 2018 in response to a spate of school shootings nationally and a highly publicized incident where a local middle-schooler was subjected to anti-Semitic threats. At a January meeting, one former school board member said the changes were "driven by events that occurred in our middle schools or high school," and that the intent had never been to involve police when elementary school students made "non-substantive" threats.
Another former school member who had a hand in drafting the current policy testified last week that he never imagined it would be applied to a 6-year-old with Down syndrome.
Lawmakers and policy architects frequently suffer from failures of imagination: They presume their laws and policies will be followed in exactly the manner they intend. But the officials who carry out and enforce said policies do not always exercise good judgment. Instead, they over-comply with the policy and follow it to the letter, which produces absurd results like these.
Margot's situation is a good reminder that unthinking public panic about safety in schools—divorced from any actual danger that is statistically significant—has a cost: It drives bad policy that promotes overcriminalization and invites law enforcement to intervene unnecessarily in disputes between students and teachers. Kids who make mistakes should face proportionate punishment—like a timeout, in Margot's case.
The post School Calls Cops on 6-Year-Old With Down Syndrome Who Made Finger Gun Gesture appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A 12-year-old girl who attends a middle school in Kansas City made her fingers into the shape of a gun and pointed at several of her classmates. These kids had bullied her relentlessly, her mother told The Kansas City Star.
Here's how the authorities at Westridge Middle School handled the incident: School Resource Officer Dana Harrison, the school's police officer, arrested the girl and escorted her off the premises in handcuffs. She was taken to a juvenile detention facility, and will face a felony charge of threatening to commit violence.
"I'm really worried about my granddaughter's future," the girl's grandfather told reporters. He'd been informed, he added, that she could be sentenced to a year in juvenile detention.
According to the police, the girl was asked by another classmate which five people she would like to kill. She then pointed finger guns at several other students—several of whom had picked on her relentlessly, her family claims—and finally on herself.
Neither the school's principal nor the resource officer immediately responded to a request for comment. But other authorities defended their decision to the Kansas City Star.
"The safety of our children in school is paramount, today more than ever," said Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez. "We have all seen cases where tragic incidents have occurred, and the first thing people say is, there were signs, why didn't they see the signs?"
A little girl lashing out at kids who were tormenting her is not a "sign" that the school's safety is gravely threatened. If even a small percentage of bullied kids turned into mass shooters, violence in schools would be an epidemic. In reality, it's not: Serious violence in schools remains rare.
These school authority figures—and others in countless districts across the country—clearly have the Parkland shootings in their minds as they overreact to mundane disciplinary issues involving students. The "sign" that something terrible was about to happen in the case of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz was not that he pointed finger guns at people; it was that he possessed a real gun and had threatened to use it to kill people. And this early indication of his possibly murderous intent did not go unnoticed: Cruz's acquaintances reported him to virtually every agency with authority to act, from the sheriff's office all the way up to the FBI. Parkland is a story, not of common people blindly ignoring some obvious danger, but of stunning incompetence.
What has happened to this Kansas City girl is also a story of government incompetence, albeit of a different sort. As The Kansas City Star reported, the girl is facing a felony charged for making threats. Actually bringing a gun to school would just be a misdemeanor.
When kids fight or threaten each other, the school's job is to teach them better behavior and hand out a punishment that is proportional to the wrongdoing. A 12-year-old girl is a child, still growing and developing. At most she should be clapping erasers or writing an apology essay, not sitting in jail. But the unfortunate truth is that the presence of cops in schools makes it vastly more likely than minor disciplinary matters will be handled by the police—especially during this current, seemingly never-ending moment of hysteria about school violence.
The post A 12-Year-Old Girl Pointed Finger Guns at Other Kids. Cops Handcuffed and Arrested Her. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Maryland eighth grader was suspended for three weeks and did not get to graduate with his class in June. This was his punishment for appearing in the background of a friend's video in which said friend held a disabled airsoft gun. The eighth grader also posed for a photo with the friend, who held him in a headlock with the fake gun pointing at his head. The picture was shared with 13 other friends on Snapchat.
Are you silently giving thanks that social media didn't exist when you were a middle schooler? Me too. The 14-year-old boy later admitted he was trying to look like a "badass."
On Monday his dad—David Bernstein, a nonprofit director—wrote a piece about the incident for The Washington Post. He said he had asked the private Silver Spring school to reconsider the punishment. After all, his son did not threaten anyone with a gun. He did not own a gun. He did not say anything about wanting to kill students, or take his own life, or do anything violent. He was, his dad wrote, just being a "knucklehead."
But the school insisted the incident was "very, very serious" and therefore warranted suspension through the end of the year.
I'm just not sure how serious it is to be in a photo or video that is stupid but ultimately unthreatening and harmless. But anyway, in an email to me, Bernstein added that this was not the first time he was dismayed by the administration's take on things.
"I first realized something was amiss at the school when I received a call earlier in the year about another 'very serious' incident," said Bernstein. "My son had told a friend that he observed a teacher texting while driving. He was then hauled into the principal's office and asked to apologize to the teacher, which he only did reluctantly. 'The teacher was very hurt,' the principal stated. 'And [your son] didn't seem to care.' Confused about the 'crime,' I asked the principal what if my son was telling the truth. 'That's beside the point,' she said. 'He violated our community values by hurting the teacher's feelings.'"
You don't have to be John Grisham to sense something is a little off here. On the one hand, a child is punished for reporting an actual danger: a texting driver. On the other hand, the same child is punished for participating in a video and photo that did not represent an actual danger.
Clearly the school is very worried about feelings and not so worried about reality. It worried that the teacher accused of texting would feel hurt. And it worried that students might feel "anxiety" if they heard about or saw the video or snap.
In this way, the school is tutoring its students in safetyism—the word Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff use in The Coddling of the American Mind to describe the demand for pointless safety measures. The students are being taught to believe that they are literally unsafe when actually they are just uncomfortable—and that the administration is required to respond.
Note that responding doesn't actually make kids any safer, because they were not in any real danger to begin with.
As for the three-week suspension, it seems to mirror the criminal justice system's obsession with longer and longer sentences. Seems like any kid who is told to "reflect" on his actions for three days has done enough reflecting. "Indeed," Bernstein noted in his piece, "multiple studies show that long-term suspensions make for worse, not better behavior."
But of course, Bernstein is dealing with reality. The school is not.
The post 14-Year-Old Posts Picture of Airsoft Gun on Snapchat, School Suspends Him for 3 Weeks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last June the Trump administration abandoned its "zero tolerance" policy on illegal border crossing, which forcibly separated thousands of children from their parents, in response to widespread, bipartisan outrage at the practice. I am still writing about it, because current and former administration officials keep lying about it.
At a congressional hearing yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was repeatedly asked about the family separations, and she once again insisted that they were simply an unfortunate side effect of enforcing the law. The April 6 memo in which then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the zero-tolerance policy "directed all U.S. attorney offices along the southwest border to prosecute all adults who were referred for prosecution," she said. "That's what it did….The consequence of any adult going to jail in this country is that they're separated from their child. That wasn't the point of it. The point was to increase prosecutions for those breaking the law and not except any class of aliens."
Even taking Nielsen at her word, the Trump administration surely was responsible for the completely forseeable consequences of refusing to make exceptions for families traveling together. Nor did Sessions seem much concerned about the suffering inflicted by the new policy. In a speech the following month, Sessions said migrants had no one to blame but themselves if their children were kidnapped by the U.S. government. "If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you," he said. "It's that simple….If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."
But why should we take Nielsen at her word when her mentor and predecessor, John Kelly, explicitly presented family separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration? In March 2017, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Kelly about rumors of "a new initiative that would separate children from their parents if they try to enter the United States illegally." Kelly said he "would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America [from] getting on this very, very dangerous network that brings them up through Mexico into the United States." Blitzer pressed him to clarify: "Are Department of Homeland Security personnel going to separate the children from their moms and dads?" Kelly's response: "In order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network, I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents."
That December, after Nielsen had taken over from Kelly, her staff prepared a memo that presented her with three "short term" options for dealing with the "border surge of illegal immigration." Two of those options, "Increase Prosecution of Family Unit Parents" and "Separate Family Units," explicitly involved taking children away from their parents. Under the first option, "The parents would be prosecuted for illegal entry (misdemeanor) or illegal reentry (felony) and the minors present with them would be placed in HHS custody." Under the second option, Nielsen would "announce that DHS is considering separating family units, placing the adults in adult detention, and placing the minors under the age of 18 in the custody of HHS as unaccompanied alien children." Nielsen nevertheless told the House Judiciary Committee last December that "we've never had a policy for family separation."
After Sessions issued his memo, Kelly, who by then had become the White House chief of staff, again described family separation as a "tough deterrent" in an interview with NPR. "The laws are the laws," he said, and "a big name of the game is deterrence."
The president himself has described family separation in similar terms. "If they feel there will be separation," the president told reporters last October, "they don't come."
Two months later, Kelly blamed Sessions for this policy. "What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation," Kelly told the Los Angeles Times. "He surprised us." Kelly, who left the administration in January, reiterated that claim yesterday during a forum at Duke University, saying the "zero tolerance" memo "came as a surprise" to him and other officials.
Nielsen can deny that family separation was official administration policy, just as she insisted yesterday that the fenced enclosures used to confine children and other unauthorized migrants are "not cages." And Kelly can pretend that a policy he publicly endorsed less than two months after taking over the Department of Homeland Security was actually Jeff Sessions' idea. But Donald Trump for once is telling the truth: Family separation was intended as a deterrent. Nielsen and Kelly have accomplished an impressive feat by managing to be less honest than the promiscuous prevaricator who currently occupies the White House.
The post Kirstjen Nielsen and John Kelly Keep Lying About 'Zero Tolerance' and Child Snatching, While Donald Trump Tells the Truth appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Trump administration took a lot of heat last summer for its "zero tolerance" immigration policy, in which parents who tried to cross the border with their children were separated from their sons and daughters. According to a report released today by the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of Inspector General, the criticisms were actually understated: Thousands more children were separated from their parents than was previously known.
Last April, then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the zero tolerance policy, under which every adult suspected of illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border would be criminally prosecuted. Their children, meanwhile, were held separately in HHS detention centers. On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the family separations. Days later, on June 26, a federal judge ordered the administration to reunify the migrant families.
According to the inspector general report, "HHS has thus far identified 2,737 children in its care at that time who were separated from their parents." But that doesn't take into account separations that occurred before Sessions officially implemented the policy.
"Officials estimated that [the Office Refugee Resettlement] received and released thousands of separated children prior to" the June 26 court order, the report says. These children were "separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the Court, and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children."
"We don't have any information on those children who were released prior to the court order," an official with the HHS Office of Inspector General told reporters today, according to NBC News. That includes their "total number and current status," according to the report.
The separations started in 2017 as a sort of "trial balloon" for the zero tolerance policy, Politico reports, citing an HHS official. While the HHS report says that the children have been released, it's unclear how many are actually back with their parents. "There is even less visibility for separated children who fall outside the court case," the report says.
The post The Trump Administration Separated Thousands More Families Than We Thought appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to have lied after a cargo van holding eight Central American mothers crashed last month.
The eight women had been separated from their children under the Trump administration's infamous "zero tolerance" immigration policy. On their way to an immigration detention center near Austin, where they were going to be reunited with their children, the van carrying them hit a pickup truck. The Texas Observer reports:
According to a police report obtained by the Observer and individual interviews with four of the passengers, the crash occurred as the group was leaving a Sunoco gas station just off Interstate 35. The van's driver was an employee of Trailboss Enterprises, an Alaska-based company that provides transportation for ICE in Central and South Texas. The driver failed to come to a stop and T-boned an F-250 that was entering the gas station, police said.
But ICE spokesperson Leticia Zamarripa told the outlet two days after the incident occurred: "There was no crash."
Zamarripa's claim contradicts not just the police report but eyewitness accounts from the women involved. "The crash was really strong, like maybe we were going to flip," one of the women, identified only as Dilcia, tells the Observer. "We were all trembling with shock from the accident; my whole body hurt," adds Roxana, another of the passengers.
Another ICE spokesperson, Adelina Pruneda, eventually acknowledged the incident, though she insisted it was a "fender bender" rather than a "vehicle crash." But according to the police report, the cargo van sustained "disabling damage" and was towed.
The four women who the Observer spoke with say they reported the incident to an immigration official. One of them also saw a doctor about a leg injury suffered in the crash. All four have since been reunited with their children and released from ICE custody.
It's hardly the first time ICE has released misleading information. Last February, the agency said it had arrested 51 people in an Austin-area raid. Almost a year later, the Observer revealed ICE had actually taken 132 immigrants into custody.
The post ICE Lies About Van Crash Involving Separated Mothers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday, President Trump reversed his hideous policy of snatching kids from the breasts of migrant moms. But he swore he'd
continue his zero tolerance policy on border enforcement. He even wrote that into his executive order barring separations.
This meant that asylum-seeking parents caught crossing the border between ports of entry would still be criminally (instead of civilly) prosecuted and thrown into government cages with their kids—even though first time unauthorized entry is just a misdemeanor akin to a traffic violation.
What is particularly diabolical about criminal prosecutions is that border patrol agents have actually been going out of their way to entrap migrants. Robert Moore of the Texas Monthly found several instances when immigrants tried to surrender at a regular port of entry as required by law but were told that there was no holding space for them, a total lie evidently, and turned away, forcing these parents to find another route. One woman rebuffed was a badly sunburnt mother with a baby and a 16-year-old girl.
Once word got around that authorities were taking away children if they were caught between ports of entry, asylum seekers came up with creative work-arounds. One mom boarded a bus to Texas from Mexico. When a border agent asked her for her documents at the port of entry, she requested asylum. He could do nothing but process her request as required by law. Still, there must be some special place in hell for officials who act illegally in order to force vulnerable individuals into illegal actions in order to entrap them. Talk about disobeying the rule of law!
But the Washington Post reported today that the administration might in fact be backing away from its zero tolerance policy: "We're suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody," one official said. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is denying the Post's report. The DOJ insists that it is continuing to prosecute 100 percent of the cases referred to it by the Department of Homeland Security.
But that's totally misleading. What's happening is that the DHS is no longer referring everyone to the DOJ, allowing the DOJ to both claim that it is practicing zero tolerance while actually abandoning it. (It's possible that the administration totally botched its internal communication—but who'd have imagined that!) Indeed, why else would federal prosecutors unexpectedly drop charges against 17 immigrants due to be sentenced for improperly entering the country, as AP is reporting they just did in McAllen, Texas.
The DHS statement implies that its suspension is a temporary step to give ICE time to build more detention facilities—read prisons—to house families together. But the truth is that the administration also faces major legal problems if it replaces family separation with family internment.
Under the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement, Uncle Sam can't keep children in immigration detention for more than 20 days. In 2016, a federal judge extended this rule to families as well. But if the administration continues to criminally charge the parents, then it cannot let them leave as required by Flores without running afoul of other laws. If it does not charge them, however, it can't put them in detention without running afoul of Flores. The House is considering legislation that would let it detain families for more than 20 days, effectively overruling Flores, but that is unlikely to pass. So the administration is somewhat stuck. There is something to be said for contradictory laws when they entangle the government in a web of its own making!
The Trump administration claims that its criminal prosecutions of illegal border crossers were meant to stop the practice of "catch and release" because once released, these asylum seekers don't return for their scheduled court hearing. But that might have something to do with just how onerous, fraught, and unfair the asylum process is. There is not a single migrant who would rather stay in the country illegally if they had the option of doing so legally.
The rational and humane response would be to streamline the process and give people a fair shot at getting asylum, not put impossible hurdles in their way. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions is doing the precise opposite: He has reversed long-standing precedent and stopped granting asylum to abused women escaping domestic violence, something that will make the problem of absconding asylum seekers illegally staying in the country only worse—setting the stage for a future amnesty battle. (As I've noted in the past, under Sessions' regime, even conservative darling Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose Muslim family was trying to force her into an arranged marriage, would not have qualified for amnesty).
But if stopping catch-and-release is the administration's real motive instead of incarcerating these people to give the appearance of toughness, then there are other options short of warehousing families in government cages in abject conditions.
And make no mistake: These conditions are brutal, as CNN's pictures last week from a Customs and Border Protection detention facility in McAllen, Texas, showed. There were 1,100 people crammed in 30×30 wire-mesh, chain linked cages. It's a facility ripe for disease and mental breakdown.
There are far more cost-effective and humane methods short of erecting prison camps including electronic monitoring, periodic check-ins by caseworkers at homes where the migrants are staying and bonds. Indeed, about 83 percent of those released on bonds typically show up for their hearings, a rate that could be improved even more when combined with the other methods.
As I've noted before, zero tolerance policies have lead to monstrous results wherever and whenever they've been tried. So there was no reason to expect that the outcome would be any different when applied to the border. In fact, it would be much, much worse given that these policies were invoked by the most powerful administration against the most powerless and vulnerable people: fleeing migrants.
The administration's reversal on child separation was a small victory for good sense and humanity. Totally ditching zero tolerance will be the real victory.
The post Beginning of the End of Trump's Zero Border (In)Tolerance? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today President Donald Trump signed an executive order that purports to end the separation of migrant families while maintaining his administration's "zero tolerance" approach to illegal border crossing. "We want security and insist on security for our country," Trump told reporters at a White House briefing. "At the same time, we have compassion. We want to keep families together. It's very important. I'll be signing something in a little while that's going to do that."
Some 2,300 children have been separated from their parents and held in cage-like juvenile detention facilities in the last month, thanks to the Trump administration's policy of criminally prosecuting every adult detained on suspicion of illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Under today's executive order, those prosecutions will continue, but the defendants with children won't be automatically separated from them. The order says "it is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources."
Until today, the Trump administration had argued both that it had no family separation policy and that the law required it to break up families in order to prosecute the parents. "Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a press conference on Monday.
Trump's executive order maintains this argument while backtracking on the policy it was used to defend. "It is unfortunate that Congress's failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law," says the order, which is titled "Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation."
The court orders to which Trump refers require the government to place immigrant children in federal custody with an adult guardian "without unnecessary delay" (typically within 20 days) and to keep children who are in federal custody in the "least restrictive conditions" possible. Trump's executive order instructs Attorney General Jeff Sessions to request an amendment to these decisions that would allow the government to hold families in detention together while criminal charges against the parents run their course.
Two legislative proposals in the Senate would make any temporary suspension of family separations more permanent. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would bar the separation of families unless there is clear evidence that children are being abused or trafficked. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is sponsoring similar legislation that would prohibit family separation, expand family detention centers, and provide more immigration judges to adjudicate asylum claims. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said legislation is unnecessary, since the president already has the authority to stop family separation.
Trump's executive order gives Nielsen the authority to construct new family detention centers as needed, and it instructs Sessions to prioritize the adjudication of immigration cases involving families. The order leaves open the possibility that some family separations could continue. The government will not detain families together when there is "concern that detention of an alien child with the child's alien parent would pose a risk to the child's welfare" or when "available resources" do not allow it. The three family detention centers the federal government currently maintains are reportedly near capacity.
Trump's order does not say whether families that have already been separated will be reunited.
The post Trump Signs Executive Order Reversing Family Separation Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Zero tolerance policies have been spreading throughout America for the past 40 years, wreaking havoc wherever and whenever
they've been tried. That's because their fundamental premise is that the cause they aim to advance is so righteous that authorities have impunity to go after minor offenses with maximal force.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the results would be deeply ugly now that the world's most powerful leader has deployed a zero-tolerance policy against the world's most powerless people: fleeing migrants.
Zero tolerance became all the rage in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan launched his War on Drugs, and the smallest drug offenses got treated like existential threats to the fabric of American society. This led to mandatory minimum sentencing laws that turned America into the incarceration capital of the world by stripping judges of any discretion in keeping sentences commensurate with the crime. The upshot has been that nonviolent drug offenders like Alice Johnson, whom President Trump granted clemency to this week after 20 years in jail, got a life-without-parole sentence. There are millions like her languishing in jail.
Meanwhile, civil asset forfeiture policies, the other gift of the zero tolerance approach to drugs, handed law enforcement officials the power to confiscate any physical asset they suspected of being used in a crime without bothering to obtain convictions. Despite a massive public outcry, forfeiture spread like wildfire and became a standard part of policing — no doubt because the seized assets are lucrative for law enforcement salaries and budgets.
Reagan, a Republican, invoked zero tolerance policies to fight drugs. A few years later, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, invoked them to fight guns in schools. Soon enough, schools used zero tolerance to fight every classroom ill from drugs to unruly behavior.
Stories of toddlers and teens suspended, expelled, and even prosecuted for the most trivial offenses — like bringing nail clippers and scissors to school — are legion. An eighth-grade girl was booted out for giving a Midol without prescription to a friend experiencing menstrual cramps. An 11-year-old autistic, black kid who kicked a can in anger was handcuffed, charged, and prosecuted for disorderly conduct. The worst hit are poor, minority kids who can't afford expensive lawyers to fight back when expelled or charged, prompting the ACLU to dub such zero tolerance policies for minors a "school-to-prison pipeline."
But none of this compares to the hideousness transpiring at the border, where this administration has unleashed zero tolerance policy against desperate migrants fleeing poverty and violence.
Unlike previous administrations, which handed first-time border-crossers to ICE for deportation, the Trump administration has pledged to criminally prosecute "100 percent of illegal southwest border crossings" before deporting them — despite the fact that immigration prosecutions already constitute half of all federal prosecutions. Even asylum seekers, a group protected by both domestic and international law, are not spared if they are caught between ports.
The point of prosecuting prior to deportation is to create a criminal record against these folks so that if they try and enter again, they can be charged with a felony and thrown in jail, ending so called "catch and release." Previous administrations handed prosecutorial discretion to border authorities so as to target prosecutions to violent criminals and drug smugglers rather than ordinary migrants searching for safe havens or jobs. That's because prosecution triggers the most horrific consequences — completely disproportionate to the offense. Under current law, for example, once someone is branded a criminal, he or she forfeits rights to their children. That's why, once this administration decided to prosecute everyone, it also had to embrace separation as its default policy rather than as a rare punishment aimed at genuine criminals, even if that meant tearing away 18-month-old infants from mothers and sending them off to detention facilities thousands of miles away. And make no mistake: The Trump administration relishes the deterrence value of such barbaric actions, as it has openly admitted. It is ripping about 65 kids from their parents daily.
In theory, criminal prosecution obliges Uncle Sam to extend due process to these migrants, including legal representation and a court hearing. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the architect of the zero tolerance policy, is making a mockery of that requirement.
He has scrapped the Legal Orientation Program that allowed nonprofit organizations to help migrants facing deportation understand the Kafka-esque immigration legal code on which their fate hangs. He also did away with the requirement that immigration judges hold hearings on each asylum case — which basically means that these judges have little information to make determinations independent of the recommendations of detaining agents. This hands these agents, usually no friends of the asylum seekers, even more power, inviting exploitation and abuse.
In addition, Sessions imposed a 700-deportation quota on immigration judges. And to help them fulfill it, he has doubled down on Operation Streamline, the horrendous Bush-era practice of holding mass trials that lump everyone—coyotes and asylum seekers alike—into a single court session.
A few hours before the session, a single attorney is introduced to some 40 handcuffed and shackled migrants whom he has to represent. He usually obtains the same plea deal from all of them to sign away their rights and agree to be deported — never mind that they are often confused and don't understand English, much less America's legal procedures, and have little idea what is happening to them. Then the judge asks them en masse if they plead guilty, they all say "si," and, lo and behold, their fate is sealed.
Such assembly-line justice has bumped prosecutions for illegal entry 448 percent from March 2017 to February 2018, even though border crossings are at an all-time low.
The human toll of all this is simply unimaginable. A reporter at The Intercept attended some of these post-zero tolerance trials in Brownsville, Texas, and describes a heart-wrenching scene in which the presiding magistrate, Judge Ronald G. Morgan, a Bush appointee, became so visibly distraught after a few days of mass trials, he couldn't do it anymore and started to individually question the migrants. Many of them wailed and asked him if their kids would be reunited with them in detention camps now that they had agreed to be deported. He gave them false assurances that they would. But he was so overcome that he told the detention officer in court that if he wanted to "imagine hell" then this is "probably what it looks like."
Zero tolerance policies represent the Trotskyite "by any means necessary" version of law enforcement in which authorities, in their zeal to throw the book at people, are allowed to throw out the rule book without regard to proportionality or due process. They are turning America's southern border into a house of horrors that if allowed to persist will rival the stain of the Japanese internment during World War II.
America can survive the transgressions that zero tolerance policies are designed to address. But it can't survive a government that plays by the rules of neither justice nor humanity.
This column originally appeared in The Week
The post America Needs to Declare Zero Tolerance for Trump's Border Abuses appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Almost every president in the last 40 years has declared zero-tolerance for something or the other to advance his pet cause. For most people, this is a feel-good
slogan that doesn't mean much. That, however, is mistaken.
Zero tolerance is a uniquely horrible approach that has wreaked havoc wherever and whenever it's been deployed whether to fight drugs (Ronald Reagan), school violence (Bill Clinton), or, now, immigration (Donald Trump). (Colleges and companies too have ruined lives and upended livelihoods by taking a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment, racism etc.)
Its fundamental premise, I note in The Week, is that the cause these policies aim to advance is so righteous that authorities have impunity to go after minor offenses with maximal force. It hands those in position of power carte blanche to act lawlessly themselves to make everyone else live by the rules: Rule of law for ordinary mortals, but more power for them, the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen in a democratic republic.
Hence, toddlers who bring toy guns to schools—or non-violent drug offenders like Alice Johnson whose life-sentence Trump just commuted because Kim Kardashian was moved by her plight—get savagely prosecuted while the authorities make out like bandits through civil asset forfeiture laws.
So no one should be surprised that when the world's most powerful leader deploys these policies against the world's most powerless people—migrants—the results are deeply ugly as people fleeing violence and poverty are treated like Pablo Escobar, thrown in detention camps, their kids ripped from them.
Go here to read the whole thing.
The post Trump's Zero Tolerance Cruelty at the Border appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When you look back at your childhood, you might have fond memories of throwing around little "Bang Snap" noisemakers with your friends. Or possibly at your friends, if you were that kind of kid. You might have even brought some to school to share and have fun with during recess. I know I did.
But now we live in a world of school panics. A 10-year-old fourth grader in the Henry County School District in Georgia bought a handful of these little noisemakers to his bus stop, then had three left over in his backpack when he entered Flippen Elementary School. Another student told the principal, who searched his backpack and found them.
They didn't suspend him, which itself would be absurd. They expelled the boy, permanently. Indeed, they expelled him from the entire school district, pointing to a zero tolerance rule "that permanent expulsion is the punishment when a student brings an explosive compound to school," according to Atlanta's WSBTV.
Let's be clear: These toys work by having tiny amounts of silver fulminate combined with gravel, which detonates when stepped on or thrown into a high surface. While it is true that silver fulminate is an explosive, the extremely small amounts of it within these toys are absolutely harmless.
Some of these bang snaps are marketed as being safe for children over the age of 8, so I understand that an elementary school with children as young as 5 or 6 might not want them on the premises. But to treat this boy as though he brought an actual "explosive compound" to school is embarrassingly stupid. His mother now has to try to convince the school board to show mercy and let her boy back in.
As an aside to all Atlanta-based media outlets: "Poppers" are a completely different thing that you should maybe know about. When I saw headlines saying a 10-year-old had been expelled for bringing "poppers" to school, my mind went to a very, very different place.
The post Kid Expelled over Novelty 'Bang Snap' Toys Is Your Stupid Zero Tolerance Story <em>Du Jour</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police in Conroe, Texas, handcuffed and arrested a 12-year-old autistic boy after he played with an imaginary rifle in class. His teacher reportedly felt threatened by the gesture.
The post Brickbat: Imagine That appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For his senior prank, Kylan Scheele listed Truman High School in Missouri for sale on Craigslist. The asking price was just $12,275. School officials suspended him for the remainder of the school year and barred him from taking part in graduation. They say the ad was an "implied threat" because it mentioned a "loss of students coming up." Scheele says he was referring to the graduating class.
The post Brickbat: For Sale appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ken Bone, the nationally beloved undecided voter who asked a question at the second presidential debate in 2016, claims his son was suspended from school and questioned by police after appearing in a photo taken at a gun range.
Bone tweeted the photo, which depicts his son using a weapon appropriately, to Kyle Kashuv on Tuesday. Kashuv, a student-activist and Parkland survivor, is a staunch supporter of gun rights. Kashuv had claimed that police questioned him after he appeared in a gun range photo, and Bone's tweet was supposed to be a message of solidarity. But apparently it landed his son in hot water, too.
Remember this photo from a few days ago? Well, a school administrator saw it and now my son is suspended from school pending a police investigation. pic.twitter.com/tTXSBDo39g
— Ken Bone (@kenbone18) April 26, 2018
In a follow-up tweet, Bone clarified that administrators didn't actually speak with his son; rather, they called the elder Bone at home and informed him of the suspension. The gun range photo was the explicit reason, according to Bone.
Bone's son doesn't have a Twitter account, and it's not publicly known where he attends school, so this news is difficult to verify. But it's easy to believe that school administrators would do such a thing, because the authorities routinely punish students for perfectly benign, constitutionally protected enthusiasm for firearms. Earlier this week, Reason's Declan McCullagh wrote about a Nevada eighth grader who was told he couldn't wear a pro–Second Amendment shirt to school. I've covered cases involving a students who were punished for liking a picture of a gun on Instagram, holding a stick that looked like a gun during recess, and bringing a nerf gun to school. When it comes to guns, all common sense—and all respect for students' civil liberties—goes out the window.
If Bone's son was suspended for no reason other than appearing in a gun range photo, you can add that to the list of ridiculous overreactions.
The post Ken Bone Says His Son Was Suspended from School and Questioned by Cops for Gun Range Photo appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You want more cops in your schools to keep kids "safe"? This is what more cops in your schools looks like: Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, of Volusia County, Florida, has arrested 30 children in two months for alleged "threats." Oh, and he's complaining that he's not arresting nearly enough kids.
Here's an example of a "threat" that got a 14-year-old girl arrested at a Volusia County school: She tapped on a school employee's shoulder and said "Bang, bang." His deputies have also arrested a child as young as 11. There may be more to it than Fox News is reporting, but what that 14-year-old is said to have done is not a crime or a threat for which anybody should be arrested. The report notes that under Florida law, some of the teens Chitwood's office has arrested will be charged as adults.
Chitwood has complained about the cost of responding to 90 calls per day from people who say they saw threats in school, but he's also worried that schools are not calling the police enough, opting instead to handle matters internally. Not calling the cops, he says, is "a big mistake." More people should be overreacting more often, so that Chitwood's over-worked deputies can arrest more kids for dumb reasons. But despite his insistence that he wants to be called more by schools, the ratio of calls to arrests suggests that schools are already calling him too often. Over this two-month period, he's apparently logged thousands of complaints that clearly did not turn out to be connected to actual criminal threats. Why is he asking for more of them?
"For us in law enforcement, we don't want to lose the momentum after Parkland. We lost it after Columbine and Sandy Hook," Chitwood laments in the Fox interview. "There was this initial outrage and then everybody went back to their normal life."
People went back to their "normal life" because mass violence incidents at schools, while horrific, are also rare, and schools are not any more dangerous than they used to be. People in Volusia County shouldn't go through life constantly worrying that somebody's going to shoot up or blow up schools, because they aren't likely to. Volusia County citizens should, however, be disturbed by Chitwood's desire to investigate, torment, and punish even more school students, potentially ruining their lives and saddling them with criminal records.
As a practical matter, residents should also be concerned that Chitwood wants to increase the size of the "threat" haystack police have to search through to find actual dangerous people. You may recall that authorities were warned on multiple occasions about the behavior of the Parkland, Florida, school shooter before his deadly rampage. The problem was not a lack of complaints, but an inability to sort and prioritize potential threats. How much better will Chitwood fare at this task considering he and his team are incapable of distinguishing actual criminal threats from childish behavior?
Punishing a bunch of teens in the name of "doing something" doesn't make schools safer. It ruins lives.
The post This Terrible Florida Sheriff Thinks Schools Should Be Arresting More Kids for Dumb Reasons to Stop Shootings appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, students around the country skipped classes as part of a National School Walkout to protest gun violence.
This is the latest attempt by survivors of the recent mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, to keep the public focused on school violence and on the various gun control proposals they believe would deter it. Invoking Columbine is meant to remind people that such attacks have been happening for decades, and to imply that this is because national leaders have continually failed to implement solutions.
But Columbine should teach us a different lesson: The press, the public, and policymakers are often ignorant, and doing the wrong thing can be just as counterproductive as not doing anything. In the wake of Columbine, so-called experts completely misdiagnosed the causes of the crime, and they decided to implement "safety" policies that gravely undermined students' rights without making schools any safer.
On April 20, 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, marched into Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, and murdered 12 students and one teacher. They had planned to use explosives to kill many, many more, but their bombs failed to detonate.
Desperate for answers, the media quickly seized on "bullying" as its preferred explanation: Harris and Klebold were unpopular kids who had been brutally mistreated by their classmates, until finally they snapped and decided to shoot up the school as an act of revenge.
The journalist Dave Cullen has done excellent work debunking this and other myths associated with Columbine. No, Harris and Klebold weren't notably victimized by bullying. No, they didn't want revenge on specific students—they didn't specifically target jocks, Christians, popular kids, or any other group of students during their rampage. No, they weren't part of a cult. Neither comic books nor violent video games nor goth culture were responsible for the attack.
Harris, according to Cullen, was a true psychopath: He enjoyed hurting people because he hated them and thought himself superior. Klebold was depressed and suicidal, and he largely followed Harris's lead. As Cullen wrote in Slate many years ago:
What [Harris] was really expressing was contempt.
He is disgusted with the morons around him. [His diaries] are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority.
These distinctions might not seem like they matter much. But partly because of these fundamental misunderstandings, nationwide efforts to stamp out bullying intensified after Columbine. At the same time, zero tolerance policies—already growing more prevalent in the years immediately prior to Columbine, thanks in part to the 1994 Gun Free Schools Act—became even more popular, giving schools all sorts of means for expelling problematic, "bullying" kids. It's no wonder that by 2006 the school suspension rate was double what it had been in the 1970s. These trends were already underway before Columbine, but the massacre made them seem more necessary and intensified the push for them.
Schools also continued to employ more and more school resource officers to police hallways and classrooms. The federal Community Oriented Police Services office doled out hundreds of millions of dollars from 1999 to 2005 so that schools could hire cops. Columbine is not solely responsible for this, but the public's massive, sudden post-Columbine terror about violence in schools ensured that SROs and zero tolerance remained popular. This terror was largely unjustified, given that school violence—like most kinds of violence—was falling over this time period. But these policies were anything but harmless: Students have increasingly had to endure prison-like conditions.
Ignorance about the relatively low likelihood of school shootings is just as widespread today. I spoke with dozens of kids at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., last month. Many told me that they were afraid of dying in school. According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of teens are worried about a school shooting. Here's how Vox highlighted this news:
A majority of American teenagers are now worried about being the victim of a school shooting—something that is no longer an uncommon occurrence in the United States.
But this is wrong. School shootings are no more common than they used to be, and might even be less common.
The media's exhaustive reporting on school shootings might make them seem more common, or especially deadly: The Washington Post recently reported that "in 2018 alone, there have already been 13 shootings." But many of those were accidents—a gun going off by mistake—and in nine of the incidents, no one was killed. Columbine-style violence remains blessedly rare.
Such widespread ignorance about school violence should make us skeptical that tragedy will inspire good public policy. It's certainly worth having a discussion about whether there are specific policies that might reduce gun deaths—particularly the most common kinds of gun deaths, which are suicides, not school massacres. But anyone making such a proposal must reckon with the fact that since the '90s, as it has become easier for most Americans to obtain a gun, America has become safer for both adults and kids.
The post The Hidden Legacy of Columbine: Ignorance About School Violence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is debating whether to rescind Obama-era instructions to discipline fewer minority students. Would she be right to do so?
It's complicated. Thanks to zero tolerance policies, many schools are too quick to suspend, expel, or arrest kids for less-than-perfect behavior. But the previous administration's efforts to combat overzealous punishment were clumsy, and some critics argue that they undermined order in classrooms where harsher disciplinary measures might have been warranted.
Advocates for rescinding the guidance made this argument during a closed-to-the-press meeting with the secretary on Wednesday. Among them was Eileen Sofa, whose son was sexually assaulted in school. Sofa's story, reported by The Weekly Standard, is compelling:
Schools like San Diego's Lincoln High, which earned its reputation for institutional laxity long before [Obama-era Education Secretary Arne] Duncan's guidance, only found fresh incentive to avoid documenting and responding to student-on-student abuses when the federal rule took effect four years ago.
Lincoln had been under investigation already last summer when a teenaged boy with special needs followed a more severely impaired, non-verbal classmate into the restroom and raped him. An aide who found the boys together in a bathroom stall drew up a detailed report—but the school classified the assault as a lesser offense, an "obscene act," which the victim's mother, Eileen Sofa, believed for more than a year was a far milder indignity than what had really been done to her boy.
It took a devoted teacher of her son's, Nate Page, to expose the truth. When he learned what had happened, that the rapist was not expelled and the police failed to follow through, "Nate was livid," says Nicole Stewart, a former Lincoln High vice principal who resigned in protest. "He is the entire reason that [Channel 7 reporter] Wendy Fry and Eileen Sofa know, or knew that anything had happened."
But past the point of exposing the school district's inaction and publicizing the case, Page found he couldn't ignite the outcry Sofa's son deserved. "He put together teams of people willing to talk about bad practices at Lincoln, specifically talk about the rape case. He had professors, he had doctors, he had lawyers," Stewart recalls. But with a non-verbal victim and an unwilling school administration, justice eluded them. "Nate was so defeated, he committed suicide in September."
Other advocates of rescinding the guidance tell dramatic stories of teachers helpless to confront violence in the classroom. Students are hitting teachers and suffering no consequences because schools are afraid the feds will open an investigation, according to The New York Post. The Obama-era policies have been blamed for the mass shooting in Parkland: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) claimed that the guidance "arguably made it easier for schools to not report students to law enforcement than deal with the potential consequences," the implication being that school authorities did not properly deal with Nikolas Cruz because they were operating under federal constraints. The Broward County school board and the sheriff's department—run by the blame-dodging Sheriff Scott Israel—had made an agreement to suspend and arrest fewer students.
These examples make the guidance seem incredibly counterproductive. And yet schools probably aren't any more violence-prone than they were before its implementation. "If you take a step back, what you will find is that the overall rate of violence in schools is declining," Stephen Brock, a professor at California State University, tells The Atlantic.
The fact that schools are actually very safe is something many conservatives seem to grasp better than many liberals—when the subject is shootings. But when the designated scapegoat is "Obama" rather than "guns," it's the right that suddenly frets about an epidemic of violence in schools and it's the left that's worried the right's solution will threaten individual rights, undermine due process, and cause disparate harm.
Speaking of which, it's well-documented that racial minorities are disciplined at disproportionate rates. A Government Accountability Office study released last month found that "Black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school." That's a serious problem, since suspended students are more likely to suffer other problems down the road: commit crimes, not attend college, etc.
Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, makes the best case for rescinding the guidance anyway. (Disclaimer: I am a member of the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which makes recommendations about what issues the committee should investigate.) In a USA Today op-ed, Heriot writes:
If there was ever an issue best handled locally, it's school discipline. Teachers and principals know far better than federal bureaucrats whether their students have been misbehaving and what to do about it. No, they're not perfect. That's why we elect school boards to keep tabs on them. But they'll make far fewer mistakes if they're allowed to use their common sense than if they're forced to dance to the federal government's tune.
Even when the edicts of distant bureaucracies are superficially reasonable, by the time they reach the foot soldiers on the ground, they get garbled. If the federal government instructs school districts, "Don't discipline a student unless it's appropriate," they will naturally understand it as "Don't discipline a student unless you are confident that you can persuade a future federal investigator, whose judgment you have no reason to trust, that it was appropriate." Administrators therefore require teachers to document in excruciating detail the circumstances of a student's misbehavior before disciplinary action can be taken. By the time the directive reaches teachers, they hear it as: "Just don't discipline so many students; it only creates giant hassles."
Heriot is right: There is no way the federal government can instinctually know what the right number of suspensions is. And while local decision-makers are far from omniscient on these matters, they are more likely to understand what kind of disciplinary regime a certain school needs. Many of the most onerous zero tolerance policies originated at the federal level before trickling down to school districts. The Gun-Free Schools Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, prompted most states to swiftly establish mandatory expulsion policies for students who brought weapons to school. Within a few years, large majorities of schools had zero tolerance policies—not just for weapons, but for alcohol and tobacco possession as well.
The federal government is also largely responsible for the massive increase in the number of discipline enforcers in schools: The feds have spent billions of dollars subsidizing the hiring of school resource officers. Such cops can now be found in two-thirds of the country's public middle schools and high schools. (For a more detailed look at how federal policy shaped the zero tolerance movement, read my article from the March 2017 issue of Reason, co-authored with Tyler Koteskey.)
It's possible that schools would have marched lockstep in this direction on their own, but no one can deny that the feds played an important role in the overdiscipline problem. At best, the Obama-era guidance could be seen as an off-target attempt to fix earlier mistakes. A better corrective would have been to cancel the relevant grant programs and repeal laws that precipitated this crisis, though this approach would have required congressional cooperation, and the Obama administration often preferred to govern by executive fiat.
Given the reality of the current situation, it's possible that repealing the guidance and letting schools address disciplinary issues as they see fit is the correct course of action. It's also possible that this will unleash a wave of absurd and unnecessary suspensions, and that minority students will be the principal victims.
Since every school is different—and every child has different needs—it should be doubtful that any federally designed policy would strike the right balance. Probably the best thing DeVos could do would be to promote local school choice initiatives, which provide more education options while increasing the likelihood that each family finds the right program for their kid. And of course she can push to rescind the federal programs that fueled the zero-tolerance era in the first place.
The post Why the Federal Government Can't Mandate an Ideal School Suspension Rate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Zach Cassidento was hauled out of class, arrested and suspended by Connecticut's Amity Regional High School for "disrupting the educational process" after posting a photo of a birthday present to Snapchat. Cassidento received an airsoft air gun as a gift. His post contained no threats but it still upset another student, who reported him.
The post Brickbat: The Greatest Gift of All appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Pennsylvania State Police were called in after a 6-year-old boy at Newport Elementary School made "violent hand gestures" toward someone else at the school. Police said they are treating it as a terroristic threats investigation.
The post Brickbat: So Immature appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of the Parkland massacre, the most vocal Democrats have called for stricter gun controls. The most vocal Republicans have called for making schools more like fortresses: hiring more armed cops, installing more metal detectors, intensifying surveillance of students. On Friday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott split the difference—he called for gun controls and for tightly secured schools.
Scott wasn't exactly blazing new ground here. One force lighting the fire for bringing armed cops and intrusive surveillance into American education, after all, was the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994. Gun control and militarized schooling have long gone hand in hand. To treat them as opposed approaches, you have to ignore the last quarter-century of zero tolerance policy.
Do they have to go hand in hand? Not per se. Schools can certainly try to be either gun-free or gun-friendly without erecting a TSA-style police state. There have been plenty of schools that have rules against firearms but haven't hired a gun-toting enforcer. And there have been plenty of schools where pretty much any adult who wants can have a gun on the premises. (In all the recent discussion of arming teachers, few have bothered to point out that more than a dozen states already allow instructors to bring guns to school.)
But when politicians produce public policy for an entire state—or an entire country—a host of forces tend to draw gun restrictions together with armed enforcement of gun restrictions. More broadly, it isn't unusual for firearm controls to be packaged with other law-and-order measures, both inside and outside America's schools.
That's the dynamic at play in Gov. Scott's office right now. And if the Democrats run the table in November, take both houses of Congress, and decide to push for stricter gun laws than Florida's Republican governor is willing to endorse, the same dynamic will probably be at work in any Schumer-Trump compromise we see. It's not like Chuck Schumer is a civil libertarian, after all. And Trump's positions on gun control are opportunistic and have long been prone to changing. He's already backing a bump stock ban, "comprehensive background checks" (whatever he might mean by that), and raising the age at which a civilian can buy a semi-automatic rifle. Don't be surprised if someday he goes further.
The post Gun Control and Militarized Schools Have Long Gone Hand in Hand appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Louisiana high school student was banned from school and had his home searched by deputies entirely because he made a joke out loud in a math class that the square root symbol looks like a gun.
That's it, folks. A kid at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Louisiana, observed that if you kind of squinted, the square root symbol looks like a weapon. Then the social media rumor mill went to work and eventually this whole silly thing morphed into allegations that he was going to shoot up the school. Allen Parish Sheriff Doug Hebert has acknowledged in an interview with KATC that the student "did not commit a crime. He did not commit anything remotely criminal, nothing to remotely suggest any intent to do actual harm."
That should have been where the entire embarrassing incident ended, with a sheepish observation that the current climate of fear caused an overreaction that was understandable but still nevertheless an overreaction. And of course, the teen deserves an apology for being subjected to such an overwhelming response that assumes the worst of him with absolutely no evidence at all.
But that's not what is happening. Instead, KATC reports that the kid faces an expulsion hearing. Furthermore, not a single authority figure in their reporting, nor KATC's reporter, wants to even acknowledge that this was an overreaction. In fact, the school district is putting into place policies that are going to guarantee future overreactions.
Imagine not realizing (or not caring) how this system is going to result in manipulation and abuse:
Any student accused of talking about guns or school shootings will be investigated by three entities: the school board, the sheriff's department, and the district attorney's office.
If an incident like this occurs again, [Superintendent Michael] Doucet explained the protocol.
"The first thing we're going to do is remove that student from the premises with proper authority. Then, we're going to have a home visit done by detectives of the sheriff's department, and if no charges are filed, we're going to conduct a threat assessment on the student," Doucet said.
Gee, I hope those kids in Allen Parish don't have any enemies.
At the end of the piece, Doucet admits what's really happening here. It's administrative ass-covering. If something bad happened because they didn't treat this incident seriously, he says, then parents would get angry with him.
It's reminiscent of how the Transportation Security Administration will freak out at any jokes about bombs or guns, yet has a terrible record for assessing risk at airports. Any suggestion that schools should adopt airport-like security absurd and self-defeating.
Security theater isn't just bad because it treats everybody like criminals or threats. It's also bad because when you spread resources thin attempting to investigate inconsequential things, sometimes you miss the big things. The young man accused of the school shooting in Florida did more than just make a quip. He had a lengthy, documented history of troubling behavior.
Chasing down every single kid muttering the word "gun" is a terrible response designed for school administrators to declare that they're "doing something," even if what they're doing is screwing over their own students, censoring speech, and not actually making schools safer in any way.
Watch KATC's report below:
The post A High School Student Faces Expulsion for Noticing the Square Root Symbol Looks Like a Gun appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Modesto, California, family is fighting to have a suspension removed from their 5-year-old son's permanent record. Jackson Riley was suspended from kindergarten at the Great Valley Academy for making terroristic threats. He told a teacher there was a bomb in his backpack and it would explode if he took the backpack off. His father said he wasn't threatening anyone. He just has an active imagination. "In his mind, he's being this hero that's preventing you from being exploded from an imaginary bomb in his backpack," he said.
The post Brickbat: Somebody Set Us Up the Bomb appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A mom simply trying to find out whether her 9-year-old child was being bullied is facing felony charges for sticking a recording device in her child's backpack.
Sarah Sims of Norfolk, Virginia, is telling the media that her daughter's elementary school, Ocean View Elementary, was not doing anything about her child's mistreatment, and administrators were not responding to her concerns. So she used a recording device to try to document evidence.
The device was found and confiscated. Then, remarkably, weeks later, Sims was charged with using a device to intercept oral communications and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That first charge is actually a felony and could lead Sims to prison time.
Take note: Virginia's recording laws do not require both parties to know and consent to having oral conversations recorded. Only one side needs to know. So if the child was aware of the device, it's a bit unclear why the mother is being charged with violating the law.
It's possible that maybe the recording device picked up other nearby conversations not involving the girl, but we don't know because the device has not been returned and the mother is not able to listen to the contents. Regardless, though, even if the device did pick up other conversations, this is an absurdly harsh way to have responded to what has happened.
The school refuses to comment on what happened, saying they don't discuss "pending legal matters." That's the kind of thing that organizations say when they're a party to a lawsuit, which is not the case here. The school is not responsible for prosecuting the mother and the "pending legal matters" are not theirs. So instead, it looks like the school has decided to facilitate the mother's punishment as an authoritarian response to trying to look after her daughter's safety in a way that the school didn't appreciate and might have ultimately made them look bad.
There are a number of good reasons why a school would have a policy forbidding the use of recording devices. But this went far beyond the enforcement of a policy to trying to get a parent criminally prosecuted. There were many ways for the school to handle this situation and they deliberately made the worst choice.
And that's a good as reason as any as to why parents desperately need better school choice. Fortunately Sims was able to get her hands on a lawyer who was confident enough to take this story to the press, and it's now gotten national attention on CNN. What might have happened to Sims had the media not gotten involved? Would she have felt forced into some sort of plea deal that ended in an admission that she had done something bad and let the school to continue to ignore the situation?
Now that there's media coverage, don't be surprised to see the case get dropped before the January preliminary trial. This case highlights how lack of decent educational competition allows school administrators to treat parents and students poorly and get away with it. The easier it is for parents to take their children somewhere else when the schools are not responsive to problems, the more likely administrators will actually handle problems properly rather than try to punish their way out of it.
Watch an interview with the mom at CNN here.
The post Mom Faces Wiretapping Charges for Trying to Protect Child from School Bullies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Officials at Florida's Maude Saunders Elementary School suspended a first-grade student for bringing a dangerous weapon to school. A butter knife. They discovered the weapon when the girl used it at lunch.
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]]>Middle-school student Zachary Bowlin didn't bring a gun to school. He didn't say the word gun. He didn't do anything wrong, or dangerous, to merit a 10-day suspension from Edgewood Middle School in Trenton, Ohio.
Bowlin "liked" a picture of a gun on Istagram. That's it. He didn't do this during school hours, with school resources, or on school property.
But, according to the aptly-named Superintendent Russ Fussnecker:
Students are also subject to discipline as outlined in the Student Code of Conduct that occurs off school property when the misbehavior adversely affects the educational process.
As the Superintendent of the Edgewood City Schools, I assure you that any social media threat will be taken serious including those who "like" the post when it potentially endangers the health and safety of students or adversely affects the educational process."
The school apparently interpreted the photo's caption—the single word "Ready"—as a threat to attack, even though the photo didn't make reference to school at all. (Furthermore, the pictured weapon is an airsoft gun.)
"I liked it, scrolling down Instagram at night about 7, 8 o'clock I liked it," Bowlin told FOX 19. "The next morning they called me down [to the office] patted me down and checked me for weapons."
The school eventually cancelled the suspension, though district officials have given no indication that they believe they acted rashly. Administrators should not have the power to punish students who engage in constitutionally-protected speech, especially in their own homes.
The post This Kid Was Suspended for 10 Days Because He 'Liked' a Picture of a Gun on Instagram appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hoke County Schools in North Carolina are safe once again now that administrators have disciplined a public menace: 5-year-old Caitlin Miller, who was holding a stick and pretending it was a gun.
The rogue even confessed her dastardly crime to local reporters.
"I was playing with my two friends Chloe and Adelyn," admitted Miller. "Chloe was the queen, and Adelyn was the princess, and I was the guard."
A guard needs a weapon, and Chloe chose a stick that happened to resemble a gun. The school was not pleased. Officials claimed she had "threatened to kill her classmates," according to ABC News, and suspended her for one day:
"The Hoke County School system said Caitlin posed a threat to other students when she made a shooting motion—a violation of school policy, officials said. …
The Hoke County School school system defended its policy in a statement and said it would "not tolerate assaults, threats or harassment from any student."
At least this is a win for gender equality. Little boys are ritualistically punished for typical boy behavior on the playground: now the same is happening to little girls.
But schools should not punish kids for having imaginations, period. While it's appropriate to discipline truly disruptive behavior, there's nothing wrong with kids engaging in some very light make-believe violence. A little girl should be allowed to pretend she's a princess or a stick-wielding guard.
If the stick-gun was actually a problem, why not simply tell Caitlin to put it down, or stop pointing it at her classmates? If she persisted in causing a disturbance, then her teachers could punish her. Instead, they overreacted, because too many members of the public school bureaucracy are condition to treat routine examples of kid behavior as dangerous or even criminal.
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]]>An Illinois preschool is teaching a 4-year-old boy quite the lesson. Officials suspended him for a full week—and also called the Department of Children and Family Services on his parents.
That lesson: it's wrong to be a typical boy.
His mother, Kristy Jackson, wrote about the incident in a Facebook post that subsequently went viral. The boy, Hunter, was learning about guns and gun safety from his grandfather, a police officer, according to Jackson. He must have picked the shell casing off the ground and smuggled it into school, unbeknownst to his parents.
When Jackson came to the school—A Place for Growth—to pick up Hunter, she was told he had brought a bullet to school. Mom was hastily escorted to the principal's office, where she soon discovered that the school's administrators know less about guns than a 4-year-old: what Hunter had in his pocket was a shell casing, not a bullet.
"He never hurt anyone, or threatened anyone," wrote Jackson. "This could literally happen to ANY CHILD who happened to find one on the ground and thought it was cool. He does not have access to ANY weapon in our home. This could have been handled by explaining appropriate behavior at school."
Hunter was expelled for 7 days and informed that if his "enthusiasm for guns continued," he would be expelled.
School officials told local news that it wasn't just the shell casing: Hunter was also being punished for pretending that his toys were guns. I consider that incredibly normal behavior for young boys, but A Place for Growth considers it so dangerous that a call to the authorities was warranted.
"As a provider of early childhood education, we are charged with introducing a curriculum that is appropriate for every child in a classroom," school President Sarah Jarman wrote in a subsequent letter to parents. "The introduction of firearms safety into the classroom is not included in our curriculum. We view and understand that it is a very personal decision that each parent has the right to make."
Little boys pretend to shoot each other all the time. It's literally what they do. It does not mean they're going to turn into deranged killers when they grow up. It means their imaginations are working properly.
A Place for Growth can crack down on this kind of behavior if it really wants to. But the Jacksons do not need a visit from child services. Let kids be kids, and let their parents parent them as they see fit.
The post 4-Year-Old Brings Shell Casing to Preschool. Principal Suspends Him for 7 Days, Calls Child Services. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's pick to replace the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, once dissented in a ridiculous 10th Circuit Court of Appeals case that involved the arrest of a 13-year-old for burping in school.
The majority upheld the school's decision to call the cops and have the teenager arrested for making fake burping noises while in gym class. Gorsuch, however, was not persuaded that the law permitted the state to intervene in such a trivial disciplinary matter.
The case was A.M. v. Holmes. According to The Washington Post's summary of the case, a seventh grader "generated several fake burps, which made the other students laugh and hampered class proceedings." The gym teacher called the school resource officer, who then arrested the teen. The teen's mother sued the officer and school officials on grounds that her son had been unlawfully arrested. The court sided with the school, but Gorsuch dissented:
If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what's a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal's office? Maybe. But then again, maybe that's too old school. Maybe today you call a police officer. And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now compliant thirteen year old to the principal's office, an arrest would be a better idea. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option and they offer ninety-four pages explaining why they think that's so. Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded…
Often enough the law can be "a ass — a idiot," Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist 520 (Dodd, Mead & Co. 1941) (1838) — and there is little we judges can do about it, for it is (or should be) emphatically our job to apply, not rewrite, the law enacted by the people's representatives. Indeed, a judge who likes every result he reaches is very likely a bad judge, reaching for results he prefers rather than those the law compels. So it is I admire my colleagues today, for no doubt they reach a result they dislike but believe the law demands — and in that I see the best of our profession and much to admire. It's only that, in this particular case, I don't believe the law happens to be quite as much of a ass [sic] as they do. I respectfully dissent.
Over-criminalization of inappropriate kid behavior in K-12 schools is actually a huge national problem, as Tyler Kotesky and I pointed out in our recent feature for the print edition of Reason magazine, "Why Are Cops Putting Kids in Cuffs?" Over the past several decades schools have increasingly hired school resource officers to enforce discipline, which has resulted in more and more misbehaving teens being sent to jail instead of the principal's office. This is a problem, because kids are much less likely to finish school, go to college, and become productive members of society after exposure to the criminal justice system.
It's a problem mostly in need of legislative solutions, so Gorsuch's inclusion on the Supreme Court probably won't make much of a difference. But it's encouraging to know that if a school zero tolerance case came before the Court, Gorsuch would be more likely to defend teenagers' rights and push back against creeping criminalization of normal kid behavior.
For more on Gorsuch, watch Reason TV's interview with Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett.
The post Read Neil Gorsuch's Epic Dissent in a Case Where a 13-Year-Old Was Arrested for Burping in School appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When 14-year-old Ryan Turk cut ahead of the lunch line to grab a milk, he didn't expect to get in trouble. He certainly didn't plan to end up in handcuffs. But Turk, a black student at Graham Park Middle School, was arrested for disorderly conduct and petty larceny for procuring the 65-cent carton. The state of Virginia is actually prosecuting the case, which went to trial in November.
Chief among the many ironies of this story is that Turk didn't actually steal anything: He participates in Virginia's free lunch program, which entitles him to one complimentary carton of milk each day. On the afternoon in question, Turk had forgotten to claim his drink during his first pass through the line, so he went back. That's when the trouble started, for a very specific reason: A police officer spotted him and misunderstood what was happening. A police officer. In the cafeteria.
Graham Park Middle School is among the roughly 43 percent of public schools in the U.S. with a School Resource Officer (SRO): a cop specifically assigned to patrol the school. SROs exist ostensibly to keep students safe and classrooms crime-free. But the staggering increase in their ranks over the last several decades has produced thousands of questionable suspensions and arrests. Many due process advocates and education reformers now wonder if the presence of so many cops is actually undermining school discipline.
It shouldn't fall to law enforcement to scold unruly kids: That's a job for teachers, principals, and parents. Unfortunately, bad incentives—including state laws that limit school disciplinary options and federal programs that explicitly subsidize SROs—give schools plenty of reasons to keep hiring cops. Getting rid of those incentives would improve things, but the best solution might lie outside traditional schooling entirely. For students around the country, school choice reforms—which engender new and different ways of thinking about discipline—are already offering a vision for a saner system.
Because there's got to be a better way to teach a kid to wait his turn in the lunch line.
'My Life Could Be Completely Ruined by This' Turk's case stands out because of how petty the state's behavior was, but outrageous examples of police interference in schools aren't hard to find. Take William P. Tatem Elementary School in Collingswood, New Jersey. On the last day of classes last spring, a third-grade boy said something about brownies that another student interpreted as racist. It's likely the kid was talking about chocolate desserts rather than dark-skinned classmates, but that's something the school should have worked out on its own. Instead, it called the cops to investigate an unintentionally offensive remark made by a 9-year-old.
"There was a police officer with a gun in the holster talking to my son, saying, 'Tell me what you said,'" the boy's mother, Stacy dos Stanos, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "He didn't have anybody on his side."
The investigation did not end there. Collingswood police interviewed the boy's father and referred the case to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency, which handles instances of child abuse.
Before the 1970s there were almost zero cops in schools, and teachers would have laughed at the idea of expelling kids for the kind of behavior that routinely gets students in serious legal trouble today.
It was not the first time something like this had happened in Collingswood. Superintendent Scott Oswald confessed to reporters that administrators at his various schools were in the habit of calling the cops as frequently as five times per day. This in a district that contains only 1,875 students.
School officials had fallen into the habit of reporting virtually every infraction of school rules—even "simple name calling"—to the authorities. Parents were furious. Why were schools outsourcing student discipline to the police?
"The reality is, cops are blunt instruments," says education reform advocate and editor of Dropout Nation RiShawn Biddle. "Cops are there to arrest people. It's what they do. Putting a cop in a school means you are subjecting your students, your children, to the possibility of being arrested and all the things that come with law enforcement."
Collingswood teachers, at least, had to take the extra step of calling the cops. Such is not the case for schools, like Ryan Turk's, that already pay a designated SRO to roam the halls. Last May, in Superior, Wisconsin, a parent called Superior High School's principal to inform him that several male students were circulating nude images of her 15-year-old daughter on their cellphones. The daughter, "Kim," had sent the photo to one boy via Snapchat; this student then saved a screenshot of the photo and passed it along to his friends.
Violating another student's privacy is a more serious abridgment of school rules than taking a milk carton or mentioning brownies, and it would have made sense for administrators to discipline the people involved and teach them a lesson about respecting personal boundaries. Instead, the principal asked his SRO to handle things. The officer, Tom Johnson, began by interrogating the teens and collecting their phones. They mostly cooperated, unaware that they had committed a cardinal error when dealing with law enforcement: not lawyering up first.
In the course of his investigation, Officer Johnson also interviewed a 17-year-old male student, Austin Yabandith. Austin was Kim's boyfriend, and he was heartbroken to learn that she had sent a sext to someone else. Johnson asked Austin if Kim had sent him photos as well. Austin said yes, they had exchanged nude texts. They were sleeping together too. Kim's parents were OK with it—they had even supplied the young couple with condoms, according to Austin.
Johnson then asked Austin if he could borrow his phone.
"They said that all they were going to do was delete the photos from the phone so I blindly signed a paper allowing them to access it," Austin explained in a distraught email last September. A few weeks later, Johnson arrested Austin for sexual assault of a child, sexual exploitation, and possession of child pornography. The sexual assault charge alone carries a possible maximum sentence of 40 years.
Austin, unfortunately, was the victim of a sort of loophole in Wisconsin law. The state's age of consent is 18, meaning that both he and Kim were guilty of underage sex. But state law permits prosecutors to charge 17-year-olds as if they are adults. And while some states have "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions to sex offender laws—which essentially legalize sexual relations between teens of a similar age—Wisconsin makes no distinction between a 17-year-old keeping nude pics of his 15-year-old girlfriend and a 55-year-old stranger doing the same thing with shots of a grade schooler.
"I'm scared," Austin says. "My life could be completely ruined by this."
He wouldn't be the first. Marion County, Iowa, tried to prosecute a 14-year-old girl for taking PG-13 pictures of herself after the school caught 30 children engaging in risqué photo sharing. Public paranoia about the exaggerated dangers of teen sexting has hit moral panic levels, persuading schools that someone must do something—and who better than the police?
But that's a serious abrogation of responsibility on the part of schools. Teachers, counsellors, and principals are supposed to be the experts. It's their job to mediate disputes between kids and teach them good behavior, so that they learn from their mistakes. A student who is expelled or arrested for an error in judgment, on the other hand, might not get another chance.
"If the police intervene and have to get involved, there's a good probability that there's going to be an arrest," explains Chet Epperson, a retired Rockford, Illinois, police chief who is critical of the notion that law enforcement should handle school discipline. "We think that juveniles should be treated from a rehabilitation standpoint. Well, that sort of runs counter to having cops in schools."
Putting police in charge of high school students' sex lives also runs counter to current trends in the higher education system. Over the past five years, the Education Department has repeatedly informed university administrators that they, not the cops, are responsible for the well-being of students. In fact, according to the department's Office for Civil Rights, campuses must set up their own extralegal court systems to adjudicate sexual assault disputes. If the university becomes aware of a dispute, it must investigate the matter and discipline the perpetrator—even in some cases where the victim never filed a formal complaint—or else face a potential loss of federal funding. Nowhere in the office's guidance does it recommend outsourcing these disputes to law enforcement. The agency only suggests calling the cops if the victim wills it. As a result, sexual harassment and assault allegations involving college students are primarily handled internally by administrators ill-equipped to make appropriate determinations about due process and basic fairness.
So the government is getting it exactly backward. College students are adults, and the criminal justice system is an appropriate vehicle for dealing with them. K–12 students, on the other hand, are kids. When kids screw up, it usually makes more sense to send them to detention than to literally detain them in jail.
Making Schools Safer, But Not Saner It wasn't always this way. Before the 1970s there were almost zero cops in schools, and teachers would have laughed at the idea of expelling kids for the kind of behavior that routinely gets students in serious legal trouble today.
What changed? The violent crime rate in the U.S. rose 80 percent between 1975 and 1989. In response, school districts in California, New York, and Kentucky adopted "zero tolerance" policies mandating automatic expulsion for fighting, drug use, and gang activity. The idea was to keep violence out of schools by removing the most problematic students. Between 1973 and 2010, the national suspension rate doubled. By the 2009–2010 academic year, more than 1 in 10 American secondary school students reported being suspended at least once.
The biggest shock to the school discipline paradigm came in 1999, when two students perpetrated a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The massacre touched off a national panic about violence in schools, even though schools continued to be comparatively safe places for young people—and even though the nationwide crime wave had already been receding for years. From 1992 to 2002, school crime actually halved. But the idea that police should play an important security role in schools became more entrenched than ever.
A principal driver is the federal Department of Justice's Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) office, created in 1994. Its COPS in Schools grants, active from 1999 through 2005, gave out $753 million to nearly 3,000 school districts and law enforcement agencies to hire school police. The office currently runs the COPS Hiring Program (CHP), which has given over $1 billion to hire and retain police officers since 2010. School resource officers feature heavily in this funding—in 2016 they were the second-most common CHP grant recipients. All told, the COPS office has helped hire more than 7,000 SROs since 1996, according to its own 2016 estimates.
In the 1996–1997 school year, fewer than 20 percent of public schools had school resource officers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the most recent data, for 2014, that number has more than doubled, with police in over 43 percent of public schools, including nearly two-thirds of middle and high schools. The New York Police Department's Division of School Safety employs over 5,000 uniformed school security officers, nearly the size of the entire police forces of Boston and Baltimore combined.
Federal laws have had an impact on school discipline as well. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act, which mandated that schools expel students for gun offenses in order to be eligible for federal funds. Since then, the law has been expanded to apply to other weapons, too. By 1997, zero tolerance policies were in vogue nationwide: 94 percent of schools had them for firearms, 87 percent for alcohol possession, and 79 percent for tobacco possession or on-campus violence.
Administrators thus lost the ability to apply discretion in cases where a stern warning might have sufficed. And prohibitions on "lookalike" weapons have become commonplace as well, leading to punishments for the silliest of infractions. Schools have suspended students for possessing nerf guns, paintball equipment, fishing gear, powder that looked like drugs but wasn't, and much else. A Massachusetts school suspended a 10-year-old boy for pretending his hand was a laser gun.
Unsurprisingly, these silly punishments infuriate parents. But unless they can afford private schooling, they have little recourse. Students must attend the public school assigned to them based on their zip code: That's how the system works. Don't like that your district expels kids for eating their pop-tarts too aggressively or arrests teens for sharing selfies? Too bad.
Right to Remain Silent? As U.S. schools filled with cops, administrators grew used to relying on police to address disciplinary issues. Having a cop on hand could be beneficial in extreme cases where a student becomes a safety threat. But Epperson, the former Rockford police chief, also wonders if the presence of a police officer could negatively impact school morale.
"It's like a cop in a bank," he says. "First thing you think when you walk in is this place may have been robbed at some point. What's the message if I see a cop in the school?"
What's more, there is little evidence this punitive approach actually reduces crime. "It's never been proven to be effective," says Biddle. On the other hand, students who are suspended or expelled are more likely to suffer problems at home, abuse drugs, and get into fights, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The same report found little evidence that suspension or expulsion even acts as an effective deterrent against disruptive behavior in school.
The trend of using school police, metal detectors, and surveillance systems to handle misbehavior also undermines students' constitutional rights. "To teach students in poor communities that the Constitution allows their privacy to be invaded by the police because they have writing on their backpack, or a bandanna in their pocket…is troubling," the Harvard Law Review opined in 2015. Young people get the idea that public safety is a broad and malleable pretext, and that students don't have the right to object to mistreatment. Such abuses are even more egregious when wielded against a group of people with no political power and limited legal recourse.
How well will students appreciate the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights if school police officers conducting searches or interrogations routinely deny them those protections? Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan said as much in his 1981 dissent in Doe v. Renfrow, arguing that "schools cannot expect their students to learn the lessons of good citizenship when school authorities themselves disregard the fundamental principles underpinning our constitutional freedoms."
The Supreme Court originally didn't even recognize students' Fourth Amendment rights, arguing that schools had a duty as "surrogate parents" to provide safety. This changed in 1985 after the Court established that schools needed to have "reasonable suspicion" that a student was violating laws or school rules to conduct warrantless searches. But reasonable suspicion requires a lot less to go on than the standard probable cause that applies to adults. Especially when something as innocuous as suspicion of breaking a minor, non-safety-related school rule can be used as an excuse for a search.
This can have particularly serious consequences for kids who are already working from behind. Students who act up in more subjectively defined ways, such as disrespecting a teacher or being too loud, are increasingly likely to earn court referrals where detentions once sufficed. This has caused some to wonder if we've unwittingly created a "school-to-prison pipeline." At the same time, zero tolerance laws can often remove the discretionary powers principals once had to settle disciplinary issues. Such policies normalize the experience of going to court—worrisome enough even before you get to their disproportionate application against minority students.
In the past decade, studies from Yale, Johns Hopkins, the National Education Policy Center, and others have found that students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBT students are all significantly more likely to be punished with suspension even though they typically commit offenses at similar rates as their peers. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, schools with higher percentages of low-income kids are more likely to have police.
Schools Should Compete for Kids Changing the rules of the game requires federal, state, and local reforms. With little evidence that police in schools make students safer and plenty that they facilitate harm to students' liberty and well-being, the Department of Justice should end the cops program's SRO grants to districts. Taxpayers should not be on the hook for billions that promote unjust school conditions and put kids at greater risk of future involvement with the criminal justice system. And students should feel like they can talk to school officials when they have problems without forfeiting their constitutional rights and winding up in the back of police cars.
But in order for school staff to take their proper role in school discipline, they need discretion. Zero tolerance laws at the federal and state level need to go. Like mandatory minimums for adults, zero tolerance ordinances are heavy-handed solutions to non-existent crime waves. A principal shouldn't feel legal pressure to expel a student whose misbehavior could be dealt with less harshly.
Funding for traditional public schools is only narrowly connected to actual students and leaves the principal without much say over how resources are used. Districts often determine funding through a complex system of calculating a school's average teacher salary to determine how many staff positions it can hire. These positions are usually only based on rough enrollment quotas. On top of that, most public principals only control 5 percent of their schools' funding, because the districts give them resources in special funds they have to use for specific purposes, like reading enrichment or buying textbooks. Or hiring police officers. The result is a confusing, inefficient system that makes it hard to hold anyone accountable.
A promising alternative is student-based budgeting. Imagine putting each child's individual education dollars in his or her backpack. Wherever children choose to go to school, their "backpack funding" follows them. Beyond a baseline amount, different kids get extra funding "weights" to help them overcome additional obstacles they may face, like living in poverty, needing to learn English, or having a disability. Most principals operating under student-based budgeting also get much more control over how dollars are spent, letting them use their local knowledge to determine the best priorities for their students.
If we want to improve disciplinary outcomes, centering the money on the kids in the system, rather than the professional adults, is a good way to start. Charter schools and private schools already get money for every child they enroll and lose money for every child who leaves. When we extend that same accountability to traditional public schools, there's potential for those new incentives to change the way administrators treat kids.
A principal who is on the fence about expelling a student might handle the matter differently if he understands that there's a direct financial benefit attached to the student's enrollment in his school. Thus, student-based budgeting could raise the priority level of students' long-term welfare.
'There Are No Calls to the Police on Any Child' More than 30 districts nationwide use student-based budgeting, and more could be adopting it soon thanks to a federal pilot program in the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act. There's not yet a lot of research on the budget formula's impact on discipline—and where zero tolerance laws constrain principals, incentives can only go so far. But where school leaders have more leeway, student-based budgeting has the potential to help our school system see more disruptive kids as customers to be worked with, not liabilities to be cast aside.
Baltimore undertook an early experiment in such budgeting, implementing its formula in 2009. In just two years, the city's juvenile crime rate took a nosedive, with juvenile shootings and arrests down 67 and 58 percent, respectively. The city's school outcomes improved as well, with suspensions and truancy decreasing by over a third, dropouts plummeting by 56 percent, and graduation rates even improving by 12 percent. Juvenile arrests, unfortunately, have started to tick back up in the last two years—a reminder that reforms can only do so much while zero tolerance policies remain in place.
Like traditional public schools under student-based budgeting, charter and private schools only get money for students that enroll. Some critics point to anecdotal cases of high suspension rates in some charter networks. These concerns aren't unfounded, but they ignore the wide array of school environments that charters make possible thanks to the increased flexibility they enjoy. And several cities with large charter sectors have already implemented reforms to mitigate potential discipline abuses.
Like mandatory minimums for adults, zero tolerance ordinances are heavy-handed solutions to non-existent crime waves. A principal shouldn't feel legal pressure to expel a student whose misbehavior could be dealt with less harshly.
Washington, D.C., uses student-based budgeting to fund its traditional public schools and enrolls over 44 percent of its students in charter schools. To help address disciplinary concerns, the district compiles "equity reports" for both kinds of schools. The reports list suspension and expulsion rates as well as test scores and enrollment over the year, breaking the data down by race, income, English language proficiency, and special education. The reports compare individual schools' data with city averages and are available online, providing parents and school leaders with a valuable source of transparency and accountability not available in most districts. Since the city began compiling the reports in 2012, suspension rates have consistently declined—both in general, and for black, special needs, and low-income students.
New Orleans is another city known for public school choice. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina's destruction, the almost-all-charter Recovery School District emerged. New Orleans has citywide open enrollment, giving students the power to attend anywhere there is space. With its students free to choose from a huge variety of charter schools experimenting in a huge variety of educational models, test scores skyrocketed over the course of a decade.
Less well-known is that New Orleans adopted new expulsion standards in 2012 and 2013 to respond to concerns over excessive discipline. The standards create a three-tiered list of offenses that can get a student referred for an expulsion hearing. Often, the hearings end up facilitating the student and school to work out a plan to address future behavioral issues.
To proceed, schools typically have to show that preventive actions were tried and that a student's behavior wasn't due to a disability. If the student is still expelled, there are several options depending on the offense, including transferring to a different school in the district, enrolling in an alternative school, entering homeschooling with resources for the parents, or sometimes returning to the original school under probation.
New Orleans' expulsions have nearly halved since these reforms were enacted, and a survey of educational and community leaders from the Center for Reinventing Public Education found widespread support for the new system among school leaders, community activists, and school board members, thanks to its speedier processing, greater transparency, and increased consistency.
These cities' approaches are different, but there is a common thread. Both D.C. and New Orleans let school funding follow kids to wherever they attend, and both offer lots of options for those kids to choose from. These conditions then encouraged constructive school discipline reforms.
Of course, not everyone prefers a more gentle approach. Some parents opt to send their children to private or charter schools with sterner disciplinary environments, so long as the discipline is kept within the school. Bolanle Akinola is a Nigerian immigrant and mother of two kids enrolled in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program for low-income children. Akinola's gratitude for the program's existence is palpable. Before the program allowed her 9-year-old daughter to transfer to the private Calvary Christian Academy, the girl was regularly being bullied.
"They beat her," Akinola says of the students at her daughter's old school. As for the administration? "They don't do anything about it."
At Calvary, Akinola's daughter enjoys going to school. She is also comfortable talking to her teachers when she has a problem, because she's not afraid of disproportionately dire consequences—for herself or her fellow students. She trusts school authorities to be strict with other kids, without crossing the line into police intervention.
"There are no calls to the police on any child," says Akinola. "It's just a family. They teach them well."
More choices mean parents like Akinola can take their kids elsewhere if the schools assigned to their zip codes aren't fitting the children's needs, academic or disciplinary. And schools like Calvary have the financial incentive too many public schools lack to create a more positive learning experience.
Many families across the country don't have these choices. They're assigned a traditional public school based solely on where they live, and they can't afford to move to a different neighborhood or to pay for a private school if their children are victims of overzealous school police or administrators.
Everyone deserves access to a wider variety of options. Clapping students in handcuffs isn't the right approach to school discipline, and it certainly shouldn't be the only one.
The post Why Are Cops Putting Kids in Cuffs? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nine students at South Carolina's Eagles Nest Elementary School were suspended after they were caught with Kool-Aid powder mixed with sugar, which they called "happy crack." School officials say that any substance that looks like an illegal drug is banned on campus.
The post Brickbat: Happy Crack appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Florida's Silver Trail Middle School suspended an 11-year-old girl for six days for bringing a child's butter knife to school. Officials discovered the knife when the girl used it to slice a peach at lunch. The Pembroke Pines police department was called in to investigate the matter and turned over its findings to local prosecutors to decide whether to file criminal charges against the girl.
The post Brickbat: Ain't You a Peach appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Twelve-year-old Kyler Davies found a knife in a leather case inside his backpack. He hadn't put it there—his mother bought the bag from Goodwill, and suspects it had been there all along.
Kyler was at school—Coldwater Community Schools in Branch County, Michigan—when he discovered the knife. He promptly told a counselor about it.
He was suspended for one full year.
School officials later decreased the duration of his suspension to 30 days, according to wwmt.com:
The issue wasn't just contained to the classroom; it also spilled over on to the football field. Davies tells us the school tried to keep her son from playing football.
"The school told me he could not go on their property, he could not play; he can't ride the bus with his team because it's a Coldwater bus," she said.
We spoke with Coldwater Rocket Football, the organization that runs the local football program. It is independent of the district and tells us the school wanted the rocket program to kick Kyler off the team, but they refused.
Emphasis mine.
The school is certainly going to extraordinary lengths to punish a child who did absolutely nothing wrong. On the contrary, he did the right thing. We want kids to feel comfortable talking to adults about difficult or dangerous circumstances. They should feel like they can trust their teachers and counselors.
Coldwater is sending the opposite message. The school is teaching children that if they find a knife in school, they should keep it to themselves or pass it off to someone else. Nobody wants to be suspended for weeks for something that wasn't their fault.
There's no upside to overreacting about weapons in schools. It's not as if failing to sufficiently punish Kyler is going to result in a sudden increase in knives appearing in backpacks. Coldwater officials have made a really stupid mistake here—no doubt thanks to the district's zero tolerance policy toward weapons.
The post 12-Year-Old Suspended for a Year After Turning in Knife He Found—It Wasn't Even His appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This might be the most absurd case of a school mishandling a disciplinary issue yet: an elementary school in Collingswood, New Jersey, called the police because a nine-year-old male student allegedly made a racist remark. As a result, the state's child services division has opened a wholly unnecessary investigation into the boy's parents.
It isn't cleared what he actually said—the school, William P. Tatem Elementary, has not returned my request for comment. But a local news story suggests that he did not use the word "brownies" to refer to persons of color. He was actually referring to the chocolate baked good, according to his parents. Given that he made the statement during a class party—it was the last day of school—this explanation makes sense. (His last name sounds Hispanic, if that matters.)
In either case, the school had absolutely no reason to involve the police. Administrators should be perfectly capable of dealing with this sort of thing on their own. His teacher, or principal, could have asked the boy and his accuser about the incident and rendered some verdict. They could have punished him, if punishment was called for.
Instead, a young boy was interrogated by an officer about a harmless comment he made while in school.
It's just never necessary to involve the police in perfectly routine, non-violent, non-criminal disputes between children. The school's decision to do so is indefensible.
But according to Philly.com, these kinds of automatic appeals to police authority are common:
The incident, which has sparked outrage among some parents, was one of several in the last month when Collingswood police have been called to look into school incidents that parents think hardly merit criminal investigation.
Superintendent Scott Oswald estimated that on some occasions over the last month, officers may have been called to as many as five incidents per day in the district of 1,875 students.
This has created concern among parents in the 14,000-resident borough, who have phoned their elected officials, met with Mayor James Maley, blasted social-media message boards, and even launched a petition calling on the Camden County Prosecutor's Office to "stop mandated criminal investigation of elementary school students."
It gets worse. Philly.com is also reporting that "the incident had been referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency." I will be following up with this agency, the police, and the school.
The school turned a non-issue into a police issues, and the cops turned a police issue into a child services issue. All because school officials think it's a police officer's job to tell students to behave themselves, rather than the students' teachers. Truly, it's incidents like these that confirm the suspicions of many Americans (and many Donald Trump supporters) that their country is too politically correct.
The post School Calls Cops, Cops Call Child Services on Boy Who Made Harmless 'Brownies' Remark appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A 7-year-old will not be expelled after bringing two toy guns to his school.
Josiah Green was suspended for 10 days in May after he brought a small water gun and a small Nerf gun to Douglass Park Elementary School. According to Tim Anderson, the Green family's attorney, Josiah had the toys in his pocket when he was caught.
These toys obviously looked like toys, but it did not matter. Josiah found himself at home while his friends were in class.
Portsmouth Public Schools, where Douglass Park is located, has a zero tolerance policy for all weapons, putting toy guns in the same category as handguns, knives, and bombs. A 10-day suspension is mandatory, and can be followed by a long-term suspension or even expulsion.
Thankfully, Josiah was not given any further punishment. The board met with Josiah, his mother, and Anderson on Thursday to hear their argument on the matter, during which the superintendent withdrew the recommendation of expulsion after just 10 minutes.
But how ridiculous is it that Josiah was punished to this extent in the first place? He's only seven, and is still developing his understanding of what right and wrong means. If school officials wanted to help Josiah, they should have talked to him and his mom about the incident rather than treat him like a serious public menace.
On top of that, a new study found that zero tolerance policies do little to curb disruptive behavior. You can read more about it here.
The post School Will Not Expel 7-Year-Old Who Brought Nerf Guns to School appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember the Pop-Tart gun kid? He was 7 years old when he was suspended for chewing his breakfast (not actually a Pop-Tart, as it turned out) into the shape of a weapon and pretending to fire it at his classmates. Now he's 11, and Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Ronald A. Silkworth just upheld his suspension.
In the end, the case hinged on whether the pastry incident was, in fact, the last straw in a long line of disciplinary problems. The Maryland school says yes; the parents say at the time of the suspension they were told that the two day suspension was a direct result of the deployment of food weaponry and that no other incidents were mentioned.
The story got national attention. The Florida legislature even passed a bill specifically protecting the act of "brandishing a partially consumed pastry or other food item to simulate a firearm or weapon."
Last year the Maryland State Board of Education backed the school's narrative, finding that: "The student in this case had a long history of behavioral problems that were the subject of progressive intervention by the school. He created a classroom disruption on March 1, 2013, which resulted in a suspension that was justified based on the incident in question and the student's history."
And, at least according to the state review board decision, the kid's behavior log looks pretty clear—this wasn't the first incident where he disrupted the classroom, and his parents knew that. It also looks like the teachers and school staff were doing their best in a tough situation, offering accommodations to the kid and working with him to figure out strategies for success.
The records strongly suggest that this kid was trouble, but also that he was troubled. He was new to the school and joined the class late. In addition to the incidents of aggression, records contain multiple reports of the boy banging his own head on his desk and walls.
So why did the breakfast gun make the teachers go nuclear? On the day of the incident, before anyone at the school realized this would be a national story, the administration went straight to DEFCON 1, sending a letter home with every child in the school which read, in part, "If your children express that they are troubled by today's incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the importance of making good choices."
But the documentation makes equally clear that pointing chewed up breakfast food at his classmates wasn't the most worrisome thing the kid got up to. The records say that over the span of a few months he left the school grounds during the instructional day, threw a chair, and punched a child in the nose.
Poorly timed pastry-based playacting wasn't his worst infraction, but in the months after Sandy Hook, teachers and administrators decided to treat it like it was. The huge overreaction to the Anne Arundel case was the result of a pattern of bad behavior, too—by school administrators who promote and enforce zero tolerance policies.
The post Judge Upholds Suspension of the Pop-Tart Gun Kid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced Monday plans to "reduce the inappropriate or excessive use of long-term suspensions and expulsions" in schools.
These punishments, according to both national and Massachusetts data, primarily affect black and Hispanic students, as well as those with disabilities. Additional research has found suspended students are also more likely to drop out.
Due to Massachusetts regulations that went into effect in 2014, the department is required to identify schools with the highest percentage of students either expelled or suspended for more than 10 days in a school year. Based on the data collected, 42 schools and districts will participate in this project, including 10 charter schools.
According to a statement from the department, it will work with schools and districts to reduce this rate through forums starting in the fall. While the department is required to recommend models to help reduce these punishments, these forums will also be a chance for education officials "to understand the various reasons that schools and districts suspend and expel students as well as how the agency can be helpful to and learn from schools and districts statewide."
Yet a concern among local leaders is the newness of the regulation, resulting in questions about the accuracy of the collected data. Fitchburg Public Schools Superintendent Andre Ravenelle told the Worcester Telegram & Gazzette there is not enough uniformity among schools with regard to how incidents are recorded and interpreted.
In addition, it is hard not to be a tad skeptical about the state's ability to figure out what's best. Schools know their students better than the state, and giving the department too much of a say regarding changes could be more damaging than beneficial. Forums are fine for discussing the best avenues for addressing problems, but when it comes time to implement new policies, shouldn't schools and districts have the freedom to decide the best approach?
Still, the original idea sounds promising. Schools are supposed to be places where students learn both academic and life lessons, including proper behavior. If kids are continuing to be kicked out of class, it does not provide them the chance to learn and—as research suggests—pushes them towards committing further crime later in life.
The effectiveness of punishments such as suspension has been questioned in recent years, especially as use of these practices has grown. A recent study found while the rate of suspensions and expulsions has increased, student behavior did not improve.
On the other hand, research shows schools that encourage positive behaviors over punishing negative ones not only have a decrease in disciplinary problems, but also an increase in test scores.
The post Massachusetts Will Make Schools Suspend Fewer Students appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new study published in Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis found that the presence of zero tolerance laws in schools results in increased rates of suspensions and expulsions without imprvoving behavior or order.
The study, authored by F. Chris Curran of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, used data collected by the National Center of Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as data Curran collected from researching various state laws.
"Taken as a whole, the results of this study suggest that zero tolerance laws on the part of states are not an effective mechanism for improving schools," wrote Curran.
These approaches have also been linked to increased discipline for black and Hispanic students. One instance Curran notes is a state law which has resulted in a three times larger increase in suspensions for black students as compared with their white peers.
This is troubling, considering suspensions and expulsions hinder academic progress and, as Curran notes in his study, "have been linked to future disciplinary infractions, decreased academic achievement, and school dropout."
Zero tolerance laws are based on deterrence theory. The theory states punishments must be present in society to discourage people from committing crime. As a punishment for an act increases in severity, the chances of someone committing said act decreases over fear of dealing with said punishment, at least in theory.
Federal, state, and local leaders push these laws to punish students for various actions, including bringing weapons onto school grounds and drug-related offenses.
Actions like these are worth punishing, but zero tolerance laws punish students equally regardless of circumstance or the severity of the act in question.
Recent instances of absurd zero tolerance abuses include the suspension of a student over a bubble gun and threatened expulsions of two students over fishing knives left in their cars. The students in these situations were harshly disciplined for relatively harmless acts under a system that should be protecting them.
Rather than keeping students safe, zero tolerance laws keep children out of the classroom for what no sane person would consider threathening acts. Schools are supposed to be environments where children learn about various subjects as well as appropriate conduct. Instead of teaching them the best behaviors, schools that enact zero tolerance policies are forcing students to abide by unfair or ineffective rules that punish innocent mistakes as if they were actual threats.
To learn more about the ridiculousness of zero tolerance laws, you can read past stories written by Reason staff here.
The post Zero Tolerance Does Little To Improve Student Behavior, Says New Study appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Potential safety concern." That's the reason school officials cited for giving a 5-year-old girl a one-day suspension after she brought a bubble gun to school.
The brightly-colored non-weapon is Frozen themed, and has pictures of Princesses Elsa and Anna on it.
The Brighton, Colorado, kindergartner put the bubble-shooter in her backpack, where it escaped the notice of mom. When school authorities discovered it, they suspended her for one day.
Needless to say, the girl's mother doesn't think the punishment fits the crime. The school had this to say, according to myfox8.com:
"The bringing of weapons, real or facsimile, to our schools by students can not only create a potential safety concern but also cause a distraction for our students in the learning process. Our schools, particularly Southeast because of past instances with students bringing fake weapons to school, make a point of asking parents to be partners in making sure students are not bringing these items to school. This includes asking parents to check backpacks."
But toys—especially obvious toys like this one—are not safety concerns. No one could possibly mistake the girl's bubble gun for a real weapon. Cant the school just, ahem, Let It Go?
The post School Suspends 5-Year-Old Girl for Bringing Bubble Gun to School appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There are stupid school discipline stories, and then there's this: a Houston, Texas, public school called the police after a 13-year-old girl attempted to purchase chicken nuggets from the cafeteria using a $2 bill.
The police took the little girl, Danesiah Neal, to the office and told her she could be in "big trouble" for using counterfeit money.
But the $2 bill was real, of course. There aren't very many of them but $2s are out there. They constitute perfectly legal tender.
The police didn't believe it. They called Danesiah's grandmother and insisted the bill was fake, according to ABC 13:
'Did you give Danesiah a $2 bill for lunch?' " the grandmother, Sharon Kay Joseph, recalled being asked. "He told me it was fake."
Finally, the mystery was solved: The $2 bill wasn't a fake at all. It was real.
The bill so old, dating back to 1953, the school's counterfeit pen didn't work on it.
"He brought me my two dollar bill back," Joseph said. He didn't apologize. "He should have and the school should have because they pulled Danesiah out of lunch and she didn't eat lunch that day because they took her money."
That's right: the 13-year-old didn't even receive an apology from the authority figures, even though she was ultimately denied lunch that day, according to her grandmother. Grandma also had this to say: "It was very outrageous for them to do it. There was no need for police involvement. They're charging kids like they're adults now."
This may seem like a small, silly story, but the grandmother has it exactly right: public schools overwhelmingly assume that children's misdeeds represent criminal wrongdoing and should be referred to the police. If little Danesiah had actually been attempting to pass off a fake $2 bill as legal tender, it was the school's job to discipline her, not a matter for the police. And yet law enforcement is routinely brought in to handle the most trivial behavioral disputes in public schools.
Ironically, while K-12 institutions increasingly refer all disciplinary matters to the police, the trend for colleges is the reverse: universities are now encouraged to handle violent sexual crimes themselves, rather than automatically involve the police. These developments could not possibly be any more backward. When there is serious violence in schools, the police should always be called. When kids are just goofing around, let the school—or the parents—take care of it.
Updated at 4:30 p.m. on May 5: I initially claimed that the government doesn't print $2 bills anymore. This isn't true: it still issues them.
The post Little Girl Detained By Police After Trying to Buy School Lunch with Real $2 Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police arrested a Longwood, Florida, 12-year-old girl for pinching a male classmate's butt during school hours. Breana Evans has been charged with misdemeanor battery and was temporarily placed in juvenile detention.
Everybody involved in this story—Breana, her father, the cops, her alleged victim—thinks the arrest is an overreaction. Everybody, except the boy's mom, who alerted police and demanded that they prosecute.
"I regret it because I didn't know it would lead to this," Breana told WPTV.com.
Breana claims she didn't know the boy. She pinched him because that's just something her friends do. Keep in mind that she is 12.
The school resource deputy—that's the police officer who patrols the school—didn't charge her with a crime because the boy didn't want to press charges. Instead, Breana was suspended.
But the boy's mother insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana. She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention.
The state attorney said that Breana will have to complete community service, submit to drug tests, and take classes. If she does all those things, the charges will eventually be dismissed.
Breana's actions were wrong. She should not have violated that boy's personal space. It was appropriate for the school to tell her to keep her hands to herself, and even to give her some light punishment. But a suspension seems a tad overboard, unless the boy was deeply humiliated or scarred. Nothing in the story suggests that this was the case.
Part of growing up is learning to respect other people's boundaries, and schools should play a role in instructing kids to behave like adults.
The police, on the other hand, have no role to play in the lives of non-violent, non-troubled kids who are making typical kid mistakes. It is ludicrous to charge Breana with a crime. She's not a criminal, she's a normal pre-teen. Kids push each other around. They mess with each other. Police should interfere only when such conduct is actually threatening. A kid who repeatedly punches another kid might deserve a visit to juvenile detention. A kid who pinches another kid deserves a time-out.
But given the new obsession with child safety, and paranoia about sex crimes, I'm actually a bit surprised Breana hasn't also been charged with sexual harassment. If Breanna were a boy and the victim a girl, perhaps the authorities would have imposed a harsher sentence. (A 13-year-old boy in Maryland who kissed a 14-year-old girl on a dare was charged with second-degree assault.)
"Lord, lord, lord, what's this world come to?" asked Breana's father. "Kid can't even be a kid."
And that's exactly the problem. When we expect perfect behavior from children, we set them up for failure. If they're not allowed to make mistakes, then they're not allowed to grow up. Putting a kid in jail for a one-off physical encounter is cruel, it's unnecessary, and it betrays a profound naivety about the social development of young people.
The post 12-Year-Old Girl Arrested for Pinching Boy's Butt, Sent to Juvenile Detention appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two teenagers from Escondido, California, can breathe a sigh of relief after authorities decided not to charge them for leaving weapons—fishing knives—in their cars.
The young men, 18-year-old Brandon Cappelletti and 16-year-old Sam Serrato, can also return to classes. They will not be expelled.
In January, a random drug-dog search of the San Pasqual High School parking lot indicated that Serrato and Cappelletti's vehicles contained contraband. Cappelletti had left several small knives in his car after a weekend fishing trip. Serrato also had a knife—one he purchased for protection, with his parents' permission.
It's against the law to bring weapons onto school property—even unknowingly—and the boys should have been let off with warnings. Instead, school administrators removed the boys from school and called the police—subjecting them to criminal weapons charges. These actions imperiled Serrato's chances of scoring a much-needed athletic scholarship, and would have completely derailed Cappelletti's plan to join the Marines.
Their horrifying ordeal is now over: sanity, thankfully, trumped zero tolerance. According to 10news.com:
Lt. Ed Varso said the Escondido Police Department conducted a thorough review of the cases against Serrato and Cappelletti.
"Following the review, and based on the totality of the circumstances, the Escondido Police Department has decided to not submit the cases to the District Attorney's Office, or to the Juvenile Diversion Program," Varso said in a statement. "No charges will be pursued in the case."
This is the best possible outcome: Cappelletti and Serrato didn't deserve to have their lives ruined for harmless mistakes that threatened no one. Many other teens disciplined under ludicrous zero tolerance policies weren't so lucky.
It's against the law for students to leave fishing knives, Swiss Army knives, or pellet guns in the trunks of their cars. But every time I write about a story involving a kid facing arrest and expulsion for inadvertently violating one of these prohibitions, I receive a barrage of emails and Twitter messages from adults who claim wasn't always this way. Most boys, they tell me, carried pocketknives. They went hunting and fishing in the mornings, before classes. They belonged to archery clubs that would meet on school grounds. Their school facilities had smoking rooms.
Times have changed, and perhaps not for the better. Public schools became paranoid about mass shootings and stabbings, and took extraordinary measures to deter all activity tangentially associated with violence. In the process, they have criminalized what was once considered normal teenage boyhood, not so very long ago. It's not clear these policies make kids any safer—but they do make it more dangerous for young men to grow up the way their grandparents, parents, and slightly older cousins did.
The post Students Won't Go To Jail for Fishing Knives, But Zero Tolerance Still Threatens Teen Boys appeared first on Reason.com.
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