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  1. #1
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    School police increasingly arresting American students

    School police increasingly
    arresting American students




    Criminalizing youthful behavior

    Texas Appleseed

    Austin, TX. � A growing police presence in Texas public schools is coinciding with increased Class C misdemeanor ticketing and arrest of students for low-level, non-violent behavior that historically has been handled at the school level � sending more youth to court and increasing their chances of academic failure and future justice system involvement, according to the third in a series of reports on Texas� �school-to-prison pipeline� released today by the public interest law center Texas Appleseed. [Link: Report , see Executive Summary for findings/recommendations.]

    �We are strongly recommending that Chapter 37 of the Education Code be amended to eliminate Disruption of Class and Disruption of Transportation as penal code offenses for which students can be ticketed, and to clarify that arrest of students be a last resort reserved for behavioral incidents involving weapons and threatening safety. This would go a long way toward helping check the move of student discipline from schools to the courthouse,� said Texas Appleseed Deputy Director Deborah Fowler. The increase in ticketing comes at a time when overall juvenile crime rates are low, she said.

    Also of major concern is the broad discretion given to school police officers to use pepper spray, Tasers and other types of force � and the lack of transparency around some schools� �use of force� policies, Fowler said. �These types of force have been shown to cause physical and psychological harm to adults, and the impact on children can be even more devastating,� she said. While many school districts make their use of force policies publicly available, others have sought and used an Attorney General�s decision to keep such policies from parents and the public. Texas Appleseed filed suit last year against San Antonio ISD and Spring Branch ISD to compel full disclosure.

    �School-based policing is one of the fastest growing areas of law enforcement,� Fowler said, �yet school police officers receive little training specific to child development or working in school environments, and there is little to no review of ticketing and arrest practices at the school level to determine their impact and effectiveness in improving student behavior and no required reporting of this data to the Texas Education Agency.� A body of research across the country indicates that Positive Behavioral Support programs in schools are much more effective in improving behavior, school climate and campus safety, she said. Last month, New York City became the latest to require its school police department to provide data on student arrest and ticketing in response to growing concern about using this approach to address low-level student misbehavior.

    Based on 2009 data from the Texas Office of Court Administration, it appears that at least 275,000 Class C tickets were issued that year for offenses most commonly associated with school-based misbehavior, but poor recordkeeping and reporting makes it impossible to point to a definitive number,� Fowler said. In response to Texas Appleseed�s open records request to the 167 Texas school districts with stand-alone police departments, only 22 districts and four court jurisdictions provided 2006-07 ticketing data � representing almost a quarter of Texas� students. These districts issued close to 32,000 tickets that year, with the greatest number reported in Houston ISD, 4,828; Dallas ISD, 4,402; San Antonio ISD, 3,760; Brownsville ISD, 2,856; and Austin ISD, 2,653. Districts with the highest ticketing rate (per student population) that year were Galveston ISD, 11%; San Antonio, Somerville and Waco ISDs, 7%; and Brownsville and East Central ISD, 6%.

    Juvenile justice officials told Texas Appleseed that a large percentage of their referrals result from school-based arrests, Fowler said. In the 17 districts providing 2006-07 arrest data to Texas Appleseed (accounting for 13 percent of the state�s total enrollment that year), 7,100 students were arrested. The state�s two largest districts with stand-alone police departments, Dallas and Houston ISDs, could not provide any requested student arrest data.

    The data that Texas Appleseed collected reflects these important trends:

    Most Class C misdemeanor tickets written by school police officers are for low-level, non-violent misbehavior that do not involve weapons, yet ticketing can have far-reaching financial and legal impacts. Fines and costs associated with Class C tickets, reported to Texas Appleseed by municipal courts, range from less than $60 to more than $500 per ticket. Failure to pay the fine, complete court-ordered community service or comply with a notice to appear in court can result in the youth�s arrest at age 17. African American and Hispanic youth are disproportionately affected by this practice, and the ACLU of Texas recently filed suit against Hidalgo County after discovering hundreds of teens had been jailed for unpaid truancy tickets issued years earlier. While a new state law (SB 1056, 2009) mandates criminal courts (including municipal and justice courts handling Class C tickets) immediately issue a nondisclosure order upon the conviction of a child for a misdemeanor offense punishable by fine only, the large volume of these cases has created a huge backlog, resulting in Class C misdemeanors remaining on a youth�s �criminal record� accessible by future employers and others.
    Ticketing has increased substantially over a two- to five-year period, and where the child attends school � and not the nature of the offense � is the greater predictor of whether a child will be ticketed at school. Twenty-two of the 26 school districts or jurisdictions supplying ticketing data reported an increase in the number of tickets issued at school.
    African American and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic students are disproportionately represented in Class C misdemeanor ticketing in Texas schools. Of the 15 districts that could disaggregate ticketing data by race and ethnicity, 11 disproportionately ticketed African American students compared to their percentage of the total student population in 2006-07. In the most recent year for which ticketing data is available, these districts reported ticketing African American students at a rate double their representation in the student body: Austin ISD, Dallas ISD, Humble ISD, Katy ISD, and San Antonio ISD.
    It is not unusual for elementary school-age children, including students 10 years old and younger, to receive Class C tickets at school�and data indicates students as young as six have been ticketed. More than 1,000 tickets were issued to elementary school children for a six-year period in those districts for which we have data.

    To follow-up and accentuate yesterday's video on the public
    school/prison system, this news clip elaborates on the increasing
    police presence in schools and the drastic increase in students
    being arrested.

    On the surface you might think that the numbers would be related to
    increased drug usage or violence, and there is that, but look
    deeper and you'll find that much of it is due to a ridiculous and
    ever expanding list of arrestable offenses and increasing police
    presence.

    I, myself, can remember a time when a senior prank was just a
    prank, not a felony.

    The criminalization of youthful behavior promotes both conformity
    and disenfranchisement, so at the end of the day we are left with a
    bunch of mindless automatons (good citizens) or thoughtless rebels
    (who will eventually populate the real prison system).

    School police increasingly arresting American students...

    Video:

    http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/6477.html

    -Goodman Green
    - Brasscheck

    P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
    videos with friends and colleagues.

    That's how we grow. Thanks.


    My opinion is they are doing their best to get the information on all these kids into the system for future use...
    Last edited by kathyet; 01-09-2012 at 12:59 PM.

  2. #2
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    behavior

    A little strange--the behavior of the children is reflective , in most cases of what they have been allowed to do. Parents, today, usually take the aprt of the student. That may be one reason why police come into the school.

    I am sure you younger parents out there are going to give the old "yeah, yeah, the old dudes are telling the way it used to be". Well, yes I am. I did as much as I could get away with. That was very little. My parents backed the teachers and a good grounding was the punishment for going too far.

    We never had anyone bring a gun to school. We did not face the problems that the kids in this age of technology AND DRUGS face. They need MORE discipline, not less and after worki9ng in as school district for 8 years, I tell you the teachers are getting the short ed of the stick. (I am not teacher, I am a techie.)

    And I throw it right in the face of the parents-you too are handicapped by the laws you helped put in place to protect your little angels. Just try spanking one of them and see how quickly they will tell you they know the law and you cannot punish them.

    So, get as angry with me as you will, but unless we give the teachers more authority to punish--and be able to force you to come from work to school and pick your little darling up, there will be no change in their behavior.

    If it seems unfair, then tell me how are you going to get them to behave. It appears one solution is to bring the police in. Can you blame the schools???

    PS I was one of those parents. I was older than most of the parents of my son's friends. When I punished, I let him off the hook , quickly, when he came up to me and cajoled me. Today I have a young man who has a felony conviction, has a hard time finding work. I accept a large part of the responsibility, yet, his tecahers who I knew and was friendly with did not let me know about his problems until it was too late. In hindsight, I asked a teacher I was close with why she never told me of his problems. She actually said, she expected no better from me than any other parent she dealt with--why?? She felt it wouldn't have mattered and that as a parent I really would not do anything to resolve the problem.

  3. #3
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    Plain and simple to me....Parents need to be parents and not leave that job for others to do for them. What has been going on for a long time is exactly that letting others to the parenting job for them, while they are off doing what they want. Your children should be your first priority. It has amazed me for years that people in our society have decided that it is okay for their children to run wild and unsupervised. It also seems many have decided it is the schools responsibility to do this for them and they expect that their children will grow up to be well adjusted adults. Why do we need police in our schools when parents can just become parents and control their children. It has now gotten us to this point. Now we will have police in the schools arresting kids, kids getting records and for what??? If you can't be a parent don't have kids. This makes me sick I can't believe people are okay with this.

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    Cops in the Corridors: Why Your Kids Are Not Safe at School


    A long article appears in The Guardian, a British Left-wing paper.

    The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”

    Police docket? What is going on?

    Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.

    Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.

    In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 “Class C misdemeanour” tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

    It’s not just our problem.

    The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK’s justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a “school-to-prison pipeline”. The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that “charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues” is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

    That is correct. There a solution. Expel them. That is what Joe Clark did in Lean on Me. But this solution is intolerable. Humanist educators have believed for 170 years in the redemptive power of tax-funded education. To expel is to excommunicate. “There is no salvation outside the church.”

    Expulsion reduces state money flowing into local schools. Principals refuse to expel.

    Even the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline in schools: “That is something that clearly has to stop.”

    As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn’t this way when they were young.

    The emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.

    Let’s be clear: the public schools are collapsing. The erosion, 1964-2000, is now accelerating.

    The Left-wing Guardian blames law and order advocates.

    As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas, its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the past two decades.

    “Zero tolerance started out as a term that was used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used widely when you’re referring to some very punitive school discipline measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other,” said Fowler.

    Is this nuts? Not really. The schools are become like prisons. This Right-wing site has a frightening report on the extent of police state monitoring in the schools.

    But most schools do not face any serious threat of violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful childhood behaviour.

    The article does not ask the obvious question: “What is the racial composition of the schools where there is violence?” That would be politically incorrect.

    Students are also regularly fined for “disorderly behaviour”, which includes playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly the weapons used were fists.

    The reality is this: the schools are breaking down.

    Austin’s school police department is well armed with officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for sniffing out drugs and explosives.

    According to the department’s records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy students.

    One anonymous teacher spoke out.

    “There’s this illusion that it’s just a few kids acting up; kids being kids. This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don’t control their children. Their fathers aren’t around. They’re in gangs. They come in to the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They’re doing badly, they don’t want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They can be very threatening,” he says. “The police get called because that way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids.”

    Bleeding heart liberals don’t know what to do about their premier institution for social salvation.

    I do. “Not a brass farthing!”

    Continue Reading on Latest US and world news, sport and comment from the Guardian | guardiannews.com | The Guardian

  5. #5
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    The War On Kids 01


    In 95 minutes, THE WAR ON KIDS exposes the many ways the public school system has failed children and our future by robbing students of all freedoms due largely to irrational fears. Children are... ( plus )


    TagTélé - The War On Kids 01

  6. #6
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    Part of the problem is the schools are raising and feeding the kids. Here they go to school at 7 am for free breakfast and then go home at 6 pm because there is free after school day care even if a parent is home after school. On the weekends the kids get a backpack of food so they don't starve.

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