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We care for students as long as we can see them. When they are put-away, we do not give them much thought.
So, if you think Covid derailed “formable student years,” check out the real omnipresent disease that is the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
The term “school-to-prison pipeline” has become a powerful metaphor to capture the processes by which children—typically low-income children of color—are pushed out of the school system and into the criminal justice system.
This disturbing national trend sees children who commit minor infractions are those with histories of poverty, disabilities, abuse, or neglect. Programs that would help them with additional educational and counseling services should be enacted, but instead, these children are punished, singled out, and “pipelined.”
WHAT ON EARTH ARE WE THINKING?
While the exact definitions of suspension and expulsion vary across states and school districts, it is clear that what were intended to be last resort and occasional disciplinary tools have become wildly overused and disproportionately applied resulting in dramatically negative long-term effects.
Zero-tolerance practices are often used for nonviolent offenses and actions that are disruptive. They promote a one-size-fits-all punishment for many behaviors that have caused the school-to-prison pipeline to be crowded.
Zero-tolerance policies sound like a quick fix, but these policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules. Resource officers arrest students for behaviors that would be handled best by the school administration rather than a juvenile court judge.
Teachers feel victimized by these students. The only punishments available to the teacher are to make threats, send the student to the principal, or contact the school’s resource officer.
THE OBVIOUS PROBLEM WITH SUSPENSIONS
Studies show that suspensions and expulsions do more harm than good to students. Keeping at-risk kids in class and learning is difficult. Teachers are under pressure to meet accountability measures, yet they have a unique position to keep students out of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Suspended students lack supervision during the day. Out on the streets, they do not benefit from positive peer interactions, adult mentorships, or the teaching provided for them at school.
Suspending students does not help them develop the skills and strategies they need to improve behavior, which you would say is the reason they are in trouble to begin with. Once a student is suspended, he/she is more likely to be expelled again, repeat a grade, drop out of school and become a part of the juvenile justice system.
STUDENT RESTORATIVE JUSTICE WORKS
Restorative justice is such an important concept that too few people are aware of in the criminal justice reform. It derives from a fundamentally different philosophy from “rules are broken, thus perpetrators must be punished.”
Instead, it takes the approach that all parties involved are people, that when infractions occur, there are responsible parties, and part of the perpetrator’s responsibility is now to help restore whatever was lost by the infraction.
This can take many different forms, but often it has to do with a conference between the injured party and the one who committed said injury.
The reason that this is so important is that by sanitizing the system in a manner that extricates the perpetrator from the person they harm teaches no lesson. It’s a faceless response to one’s actions. And, as such, the person who made the infraction doesn’t feel the human cost of their actions.
REAL PEOPLE
By relying on restorative justice in schools, what you end up with is an opportunity for a student to see what they have done — not simply in terms of stealing or destruction of property, but more so in the light of the person that their actions harmed.
Creating situations in which empathy is the solution has shown to yield positive results. It’s a practice that humanizes the victim and the perpetrator to one another. It lets them know that their actions do not happen in a vacuum; rather everything they do affects someone else. And it’s through this practice does change gets a chance.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached by email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
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