America's Troubled Youth: No Detention, Lock Em Up

[DudeAsInCool]

Beatking continues its series on troubled youth. School sytems have found a new inventive way to take care of scantily clad women and boisterous young men. Instead of detention, it's a trip to the pokey.

Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention

January 4, 2004

By SARA RIMER

TOLEDO, Ohio - The 14-year-old girl arrived at school here

on Oct. 17 wearing a low-cut midriff top under an

unbuttoned sweater. It was a clear violation of the dress

code, and school officials gave her a bowling shirt to put

on. She refused. Her mother came to the school with an

oversize T-shirt. She refused to wear that, too.

"It was real ugly," said the girl, whose mother did not

want her to be identified.

It was a standoff. So the city police officer assigned to

the school handcuffed the girl, put her in a police car and

took her to the detention center at the Lucas County

juvenile courthouse. She was booked on a misdemeanor charge

and placed in a holding cell for several hours, until her

mother, a 34-year-old vending machine technician, got off

work and picked her up.

She was one of more than two dozen students in Toledo who

were arrested in school in October for offenses like being

loud and disruptive, cursing at school officials, shouting

at classmates and violating the dress code. They had all

violated the city's safe school ordinance.

In cities and suburbs around the country, schools are

increasingly sending students into the juvenile justice

system for the sort of adolescent misbehavior that used to

be handled by school administrators. In Toledo and many

other places, the juvenile detention center has become an

extension of the principal's office.

School officials say they have little choice. "The goal is

not to put kids out, but to maintain classrooms free of

disruptions that make it impossible for teachers to teach

and kids to learn," said Jane Bruss, the spokeswoman for

the Toledo public schools. "Would we like more

alternatives? Yes, but everything has a cost associated

with it."

Others, however, say the trend has gone too far.

"We're

demonizing children," said James Ray, the administrative

judge for the Lucas County juvenile court, who is concerned

about the rise in school-related cases. There were 1,727

such cases in Lucas County in 2002, up from 1,237 in 2000.

Fred Whitman, the court's intake officer, said that only a

handful of cases - perhaps 2 percent - were for serious

incidents like assaulting a teacher or taking a gun to

school. The vast majority, he said, involved unruly

students.

In Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Florida, juvenile court

judges are complaining that their courtrooms are at risk of

being overwhelmed by student misconduct cases that should

be handled in the schools.

Although few statistics are available, anecdotal evidence

suggests that such cases are on the rise.

"Everybody agreed - no matter what side of the system

they're from - that they are seeing increasing numbers of

kids coming to court for school-based offenses," said Andy

Block, who assisted in a 2001 study of Virginia's juvenile

justice system by the American Bar Association's Juvenile

Defender Center. "All the professionals in the court system

were very resentful of this. They felt they were being

handed problems and students that the schools were better

equipped to address."

According to an analysis of school arrest data by the

Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group in

Washington, there were 2,345 juvenile arrests in 2001 in

public schools in Miami-Dade County, Fla., nearly three

times as many as in 1999. Sixty percent, the project said,

were for "simple assaults" - fights that did not involve

weapons ˜and "miscellaneous" charges, including disorderly

conduct.

Many of the court cases around the country involve

special-education students whose behavior is often related

to their disabilities, Mr. Block and others say.

In an elementary school in northeastern Pennsylvania, an

8-year-old boy in a special-education class was charged

with disorderly conduct this fall for his behavior in a

time-out room: urinating on the floor, throwing his shoes

at the ceiling and telling a teacher, "Kids rule."

"Teachers and school administrators know now that they can

shift these kids into juvenile court," said Marsha Levick,

legal director for the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia,

which is representing the boy and has asked that the

charges be dismissed. "The culture has shifted. Juvenile

court is seen as an antidote for all sorts of behavior that

in the past resulted in time out or suspension."

Experts say the growing criminalization of student

misbehavior can be traced to the broad zero-tolerance

policies states and local districts began enacting in the

mid-1990's in response to a sharp increase in the number of

juveniles committing homicides with guns, and to a series

of school shootings.

While the juvenile homicide rate has since fallen, and many

studies have found that school violence is rare, the public

perception of schools - and students - as dangerous

remains. Experts say zero-tolerance policies have created

an atmosphere in which relatively minor student misconduct

often leads to suspensions, expulsions and arrests.

"The idea that you try to find out why somebody did

something or give a person a second chance or try to solve

a problem in a way that's not punitive - that's become

almost quaint now," said Laurence Steinberg, a professor of

psychology at Temple University and the director of the

MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent

Development and Juvenile Justice.

What has also changed, Dr. Steinberg said, is that

principals are less able to depend on parents to enforce

the discipline schools mete out. "I think in the past the

threat of getting in touch with a kid's parents was often

enough to get a kid to start behaving," he said. "Now, kids

feel parents will fight on their behalf."

In addition, Dr. Steinberg said, schools - particularly

urban schools with large numbers of poor children - have

been forced to reduce or eliminate mental health services.

"In the past a lot of these kids would have been referred

to specialists within the school or the school district.

The juvenile justice system has become the dumping ground

for poor minority kids with mental health and

special-education problems."

The Toledo City Council passed the safe school ordinance in

1968 in response to concerns that schools had become

dangerous. The ordinance allows for the filing of

misdemeanor charges against students for anything from

disrupting a class to assaulting a teacher. Juvenile court

officials say relatively few students were charged with

violating the ordinance before 1995, when Toledo police

officers were assigned to secondary schools.

In 1993, only 314 charges were filed, according to Dan

Pompa, the administrator for the Lucas County juvenile

court. By 1997, he said, the number had more than tripled,

to 1,111.

Arrests in the past year or so include two middle school

boys whose crime was turning off the lights in the girls'

bathroom and an 11-year-old girl who was arrested for

"hiding out in the school and not going to class,"

according to the police report, which also noted, "The

suspect continuously does not listen in class and disrupts

the learning process of other students."

The girl's mother, who declined to be named, said, "I told

them if she didn't want to go to school, put her in the

detention center." The police took her daughter there in

handcuffs, in the back of a police car.

Of the Toledo school district's 35,000 students, 47 percent

are black, 43 percent white and 7 percent Hispanic.

According to Mr. Pompa's figures, minorities account for

about 65 percent of the safe school violations.

These higher rates are "something we would certainly want

to keep an eye on," said Eugene Sanders, Toledo's schools

superintendent.

Ms. Bruss, the schools spokeswoman, said it was the Toledo

district's policy that students be charged with violating

the ordinance only as a last resort. In addition, she said,

most of those cases involve students with long histories of

offenses.

Craig Cotner, chief academic officer for the Toledo public

schools, said he believed part of the problem was that

schools were being called upon to educate a far wider range

of students than before. Thirty years ago, he said,

students who were not performing well were counseled to

drop out, and they easily found jobs at auto plants and

other factories.

"For students who did not fit the mold - whatever mold that

may be - there were many more options," Mr. Cotner said.

"In some cases, those students who found it impossible to

sit for five hours in a classroom could function very well

in a labor environment." Today, he said, those students,

with far fewer options, remain in school, but the school

district has fewer resources to handle difficult students.

With a $15 million budget deficit last year, the district

laid off 10 percent of the teaching force, or 231 teachers.

Class size increased. With a $16 million deficit this year,

more cuts must be made, Mr. Cotner said.

In addition, he said, a significant percentage of the

district's resources must be used to fulfill federal

mandates like the No Child Left Behind law, with its

emphasis on accountability and testing.

Judge Ray of the county juvenile court says he sympathizes

with school officials. "The schools have been called upon

to fix everything that hasn't been working up to this

point," he said. However, he said, juvenile court is not

the appropriate place to solve adolescent problems.

Judge Ray has Mr. Whitman, the court's intake officer, and

other court officers handle minor nonviolent offenses,

offering counseling and referrals to the proper programs.

Mr. Whitman, 50, said he believed that no young person

should ever be written off. "If a kid's not doing well, I

think we need to sit down and find out what we can do to

help him or her out," he said.

Mr. Whitman talked at length with the 14-year-old girl who

had worn the midriff top and with her mother. "She didn't

come across as a major problem at all," he said. "She knew

the shirt was inappropriate. She just wanted to show off a

certain image at the school. Probably she just copped an

attitude. I expect that from a lot of girls."

An official of the girl's school said he could not discuss

her case. He referred a reporter to the principal, who did

not return calls to his office.

The girl's mother, who declined to be named, said she had

not objected to the decision to arrest her daughter. "She

wants to push authority to the hilt," she said.

The girl said of her encounter with school officials and

the police: "I don't like to get yelled at for stupid

stuff. So I talk back."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/educatio...04151b9304187c7

[DudeAsInCool]

TOLEDO, Ohio - The 14-year-old girl arrived at school here

on Oct. 17 wearing a low-cut midriff top under an

unbuttoned sweater. It was a clear violation of the dress

code...  So the city police officer assigned to

the school handcuffed the girl, put her in a police car and

took her to the detention center

In an elementary school in northeastern Pennsylvania, an

8-year-old boy in a special-education class was charged

with disorderly conduct this fall for his behavior in a

time-out room: urinating on the floor, throwing his shoes

at the ceiling and telling a teacher, "Kids rule."

If it was up to me, the administrators would be sent to jail instead of the kids cited above. Pathetic.

[Shawn]

Disgusting.

Has society gotton so shitty that people need to try to crush all individuality out of youth?

And don't even get me going on the 'now treatable' medical conditions like shyness.

[HolyMoly]

In an elementary school in northeastern Pennsylvania, an 8-year-old boy in a special-education class was charged with disorderly conduct this fall for his behavior in a time-out room: urinating on the floor, throwing his shoes at the ceiling and telling a teacher, "Kids rule."

... and that's the problem in a nutshell ... those last 2 words. In any given classroom, I'd hope that the majority of students are there to learn something. As such, schools have a responsibility to that majority to provide an uninterrupted learning environment. However, it disturbs me that schools are getting the police involved. Schools should simply expel unruly students and force the parents to deal with the unruliness problem ... and require parents to vouch for their kids' behavior before they're re-admitted. And if the police are involved in any way, it should only be to detain expelled students who trespass on school property ... or refuse to leave school property after they're parents are told they're expelled.

[Pebbles100]

It is rediculous why police are involved with these kinds of matters. It seems like a complete waste of time for the system in general. Heh, I can remember when I was in middle school, and the girls were wearing those 'shorty-shorts' with their unmentionables hanging out...and most would happen is that they would be sent home.