700 arrests at Connecticut schools this spring bring scrutiny ...
By Lisa Chedekel,
Special to the Register,
December 14, 2011
Read Full Report at ….. http://www.newhavenregister.com/articles/2011/12/14/news/doc4ee80104e0519523750184.txt?viewmode=fullstory
As a
fifth-grader at a New Haven magnet school in 2009, Jacob was watching a lot of
“Ed, Edd n Eddy” shows on TV — a slapstick cartoon
that features adolescent equivalents of the Three Stooges.
Maybe too many shows, his mother now says.
That October, she received a call saying her 10-year-old son was in the
principal’s office with a police officer who was preparing to arrest him for
giving a younger student — a girl — a wedgie on the
school bus. His parents were dumbfounded.
“It was just surreal. You’re going to arrest a little boy over this?” said his
mother, who asked that her name not be used to protect her son. “It still
brings up such anger and even tears at this point.”
A C-HIT review of data collected by the Connecticut judicial department
suggests that Jacob’s case, which was later dropped, is not unusual, especially
in inner-city or overcrowded schools.
From March through May of this year, more than 700 arrests were made in Connecticut schools,
two-thirds of them for minor offenses such as breach of peace or disorderly
conduct, according to data obtained from the Court Support Services Division
(CSSD).
In New Haven, 10 arrests were made in schools —
far fewer than the numbers in Hartford and Bridgeport. The New Horizons
School, with fewer than
100 students, had three arrests, making it one of the top 10 arrest-heavy
schools in the state, per capita. Only three arrests were recorded at high
schools — two at Wilbur Cross and one at Hill Regional Career —- during the
March to May period.
In Hartford, 87
arrests were made in schools, including 54 at grade K-8 schools. Similarly in Waterbury, 59 arrests
were reported, more than half at elementary and middle schools. Offenses run
the gamut from possession of tobacco, to swearing at a teacher, to
fist-fighting.
The arrest data, which provides only a preliminary snapshot since the state
began collecting it last spring, “blows out the myth that kids get in trouble
after school or over the summer, when they’re idle,” said Abby Anderson,
director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, which has been working
to reduce school-based arrests. “If you look at how kids get in trouble, it
makes sense: They get in trouble as a group — especially in overcrowded,
under-resourced schools.”
Connecticut
is one of a handful of states trying to tackle school-based arrests, which
experts say fuel recidivism in the criminal justice system and often are used
in place of interventions that can lead to better outcomes for children. School
arrests have become increasingly commonplace in the post-Columbine era, with
many districts imposing “zero tolerance” policies on student misbehavior. Zero
tolerance, originally coined in the 1980s for strict drug-seizure policies, has
been expanded to include punishment for fighting, swearing, disrupting class,
disobedience, truancy and other forms of misbehavior. Continued...
In Connecticut, juvenile
justice advocates have begun addressing the issue one district at a time,
starting this school year. Pilot programs are in place in three communities —
Manchester, Willimantic and Stamford — through which the school districts have
partnered with police, the courts and community groups to stem arrests by
developing a formal, graduated protocol on discipline, creating alternative interventions,
and re-training school-based police, known as school resource officers.
In New Haven,
“It is our policy to avoid arrests whenever possible,” schools spokesman Chris
Hoffman said. The schools introduced a new program this year — a juvenile review
board process in which a student found to have committed an offense must make
amends such as apologizing to the victim and other forms of restitution,
Hoffman said.
The schools also work with a social services agency that looks at whether the
behavior is related to a family issue. If that is the case, services are
offered to deal with the issue, he said.
New Haven schools have a zero tolerance policy for certain offenses such as
having a weapon in school, or physically attacking a teacher, he said.
In Bridgeport and Hartford, the Center for Children’s Advocacy is working with
a national group on a Disproportionate Minority Contact project that identifies
schools that are heavy on arrests, then presents that data to school leaders
and police, in an effort to encourage alternative interventions.
In the courts, Bill Carbone, head of the Court
Support Services Division (CSSD), has directed his staff to
begin screening all police summonses of juveniles and kick back those that are
deemed insufficient or inappropriate for prosecution.
Carbone said he began looking closely at school-based
arrests last year, after a review of juvenile court cases found that 41 percent
of re-arrests were occurring during the school day. A closer look revealed that
the bulk of those arrests were for minor incidents, including carrying
cigarettes, refusing to take off a hat, talking back to a teacher, even wearing
pants too low, Carbone recounted. Such offenses can
be labeled as breach of peace or disorderly conduct.
“These are the things that happened back when we were in school,
that would typically be handled by a trip to the principal’s office and some
kind of school discipline — not through the courts,” Carbone
said.
He said recidivism rates suggest that children who are arrested once are more
likely to re-offend.
“All the research says that when you send a kid to the court system, it doesn’t
act as a deterrent. It actually escalates the risk of more misconduct,” Carbone said. “By handling these incidents this way, we may
be increasingly steering these kids on the wrong path. ... It caused us to step
back and say, ‘OK, something different has to happen here.’” Continued...
Strategies To Stem
Arrests
Nationally, Connecticut
is ahead of the curve in wrestling with the school arrest issue, juvenile
justice advocates say. Similar efforts have been made in counties in Georgia and Alabama,
driven by juvenile court judges there, and in cities such as Denver
and Baltimore,
driven by parents and community leaders. In July, the U.S.
departments of Justice and Education announced an initiative to address “the
rising rates and disparities in discipline in our nation’s schools” by
encouraging new strategies to stem the “school-to-prison pipeline.” But with
many districts grappling with budget cuts and test-score pressures, the effort
has been slow to gain momentum.
In Connecticut, preliminary data suggests that
the pipeline runs strongest in inner-city schools and some larger suburban
schools: The schools that reported the highest arrest rates from March through
May were located in Waterbury, Hartford,
New Haven, Manchester,
Bloomfield and Meriden.
Even within districts, arrest rates swing widely from school to school,
indicating that discipline is building-based, not town-wide. Hartford Public
High School had 15 arrests from March
to May, for example; Hartford’s
Bulkeley High had only three.
One school might arrest a child for bringing a Boy Scout knife to school;
another might confiscate the knife and contact parents, Anderson said. There is no statewide policy
on the role of police in schools. Some towns refer youths who commit minor
offenses to community Juvenile Review Boards, in order to divert them from
juvenile court; others have no such boards.
Close to 75 percent of Connecticut
schools had three or fewer arrests last spring, CSSD data shows, indicating
that the school-to-court trend is concentrated in certain places.
A sampling of police reports collected by CSSD shows that at one Connecticut school, a
boy who became “embarrassed” in a chorus class after being yelled at for not
singing loudly enough threw a French fry at another boy who had made fun of
him. The other boy threw a French fry back. Both boys then stood up and spit at
each other. A teacher broke up the fight, but at least one boy was arrested on
charges of interfering and resisting arrest.
At Middletown High School in September 2010,
17-year-old Zahrod Jackson was Tased
by a school resource officer and arrested for sixth-degree larceny, breach of
peace and interfering with an officer, after he allegedly took a Jamaican patty
from the school’s cafeteria without paying, then tangled with the officer.
While the arrests follow no clear pattern, data suggests that special education
and minority students make up a significant portion of those who land in Connecticut’s juvenile
courts. A study published in 2011 found that in a sampling of juveniles held in
Connecticut
detention centers, 60.2 percent were identified as either needing special
education services or having learning disabilities.
“From what we see, a lot of these kids are undiagnosed special education
students, or they’re in failing school systems,” said Martha Stone, executive
director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy, which represents juveniles in
the court system, while working on systemic reforms. Continued...
The center —
working with school, police, court and community leaders — has collected arrest
data on schools in Hartford and Bridgeport, where the student body is largely
minorities, and has presented those findings to school administrators in hopes
of stemming arrests for minor offenses. The 10 schools with the most arrests
have been receptive to finding alternatives, Stone said. Milner School in
Hartford, K-8, had 17 school-based arrests from March to June; that number had
dropped to two from September through early December, data shows.
“I think that by shining the light on the issue, school by school, the data is
driving some alternative interventions,” Stone said.
Reforms Move Ahead
The Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance is guiding
similar efforts in Manchester, Willimantic and Stamford. The three
communities were chosen because they expressed a willingness to re-think school
discipline, said Lara Herscovitch, the alliance’s
senior policy analyst.
The alliance brought in two judges who had led juvenile reform efforts in their
Georgia and Alabama counties to consult on the Connecticut efforts. Community teams in the
three towns worked through the summer to develop detailed protocols on
discipline, and school resource officers, teachers and school support staff
received training.
The cost?
“There’s really not much money needed,” Herscovitch
said. “It’s about collectively deciding to do things a different way.”
The new protocols adopted by the districts — with help from the Connecticut
Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee and others — offer detailed discipline
guidelines, depending on the nature of the offense.
In Manchester,
there are four disciplinary tiers, ranging from minor misbehavior that is to be
handled by teachers, to chronic or more disruptive behavior that calls for
social workers and guidance counselors to become involved, to serious behavior
posing safety concerns that has administrators taking action. But instead of
the old system of suspensions, expulsions and arrests, the schools now have a
variety of alternative programs in place, including a substance abuse program,
a community service program, a school safety review board and a “SAFE Center,”
run by the youth services bureau, which works directly with troubled children
and families.
Serious incidents — those involving injuries, threats of violence, weapons or
drugs — are still referred to police, said Heidi Macchi,
outreach social worker for the Manchester schools. She said staff training has
been a key component.
“Our staff members work very hard now to de-escalate a situation,” she said.
“Before, we could have a situation where a staff person tells a student to take
off his hat, the student refuses, the staff member may get up closer, the
situation could escalate. That’s the kind of thing we’re working to avoid.”
Macchi said the changes stirred some debate, with
some school staff members worried that students would not face adequate
consequences for bad behavior.
“It’s a huge buy-in. But there are ways, other than arrest, for students to get
the message — more productive ways,” she said.
In Willimantic, a similar formal discipline policy has been put in place at Windham High School and Middle School. The
addition of a full-time school resource officer at the high school, as well as
staff training, has helped to reduce arrests, as the emphasis has shifted to
“de-escalation,” said Alexandra Lazzari, assistant
principal at the high school.
In one incident in October, Lazzari said, a group of
female students was involved in a clash during class changeover time. A few of
the girls were arrested, but the school resource officer defused the situation
before it became a full-blown fight, she said.
“You still get the kind of behaviors where it’s appropriate to arrest or
expel,” Lazzari said. “But when you have a (school
resource officer) who actually knows these kids, knows the families, knows the
dynamics, it plays out very differently than when you just call in the police.”
The number of Connecticut schools that have resource officers on-site has
declined in recent years because of budget cuts, said South Windsor police
Officer Caleb Lopez, president of the Connecticut School Resource Officer
Association. He said most officers use arrests as a last resort, especially
when other interventions, such as local Juvenile Review Boards, are available.
But many towns lack such alternatives, he noted.
Lopez said some schools have high arrest rates for valid reasons: Officers are
weeding out students who pose a threat to safety, or
school administrators want to make sure that students face consequences for
disruptive behavior.
“Sometimes it’s like, ‘I really don’t want to arrest this kid, but there’s no
other way to hold that kid accountable,’” Lopez said.
Anderson said changing the way Connecticut handles school discipline is a
“slippery slope” because it involves not just the criminal justice system, but
education policy. The state, with its local school districts and police
departments, has no uniform policies on training for school resource officers,
disciplinary rules or diversion programs. Judges have limited authority. And
there is little incentive to keep troublemakers around, when they drain school
resources, crowd classrooms, and don’t help test scores, she said.
“In some schools, administrators have essentially abdicated all disciplinary
actions to the police,” Anderson
said. “In others, they handle all but the really serious incidents
themselves...
“When you have such local control, it’s hard to make systemic change. That’s
one of our challenges in Connecticut.”
Lisa Chedekel is senior writer for the Connecticut Health
Investigative Team (www.c-hit.org). The story was published under an agreement
between C-HIT and the New Haven
Register.