The folks at Public Radio International and The Center for Public Integrity took a magnifying glass
The folks at Public Radio International and The Center for Public Integrity took a magnifying glass to how the Commonwealth handles disruptive youth, and they found show some staggering numbers which are raising some serious questions.
The story starts with Kayleb Moon-Robinson, an 11-year-old autistic boy who kicked over a trashcan in his Lynchburg public school. The police officer assigned to the school filed a disorderly conduct charge against the boy in juvenile court.
Weeks later, Moon-Robinson disobeyed a rule to not leave class and he found himself thrown against the ground in handcuffs by the same officer.
“I thought in my mind — Kayleb is 11,” Stacey Doss, Kayleb’s mother, told PRI. “He is autistic. He doesn’t fully understand how to differentiate the roles of certain people.”
This individual story then opened the door to a what appears to be a systematic problem in a number of Virginia schools – the treatment and handling of kids when they misbehave. And as if you couldn’t guess how this ends already, children of color were significantly more likely to face criminal charges than their white counter parts.
The Center for Public Integrity got ahold of Federal numbers showing just how often Virginia students with behavior problems were given referrals to police or court systems:
1 – The national rate of referrals to law enforcement agencies was six students for every 1,000 pupils, with 19 states surpassing that rate.
2 – Virginia had about 16 referrals for every 1,000 students, followed by Delaware with almost 15; Florida with more than 12; and Wyoming and New Hampshire with nearly 12 referrals for every 1,000 students.
3 – Massachusetts, Ohio, Nevada and Washington, DC, reported the lowest rates of referrals, at two or fewer students per 1,000.
4 – About 26 percent of all students referred to law enforcement nationally were special-needs kids — kids with physical or learning disabilities — even though these kids represent only 14 percent of US enrollment.
6 – In most states, black and Latino kids were referred in percentages that were disproportionate to their enrollment numbers.
7 – Falling Creek Middle School in northern Chesterfield County had a referral rate of 228 kids per 1,000 — 39 times the national rate.
8 – More than half the 3,538 complaints police filed over three years in Chesterfield were for “simple assault” or disorderly conduct.
The rest of the PRI story hits the school-to-prison pipeline pretty hard, and if the numbers are right, they might not be far from the truth.
As for comment from Chesterfield Public Schools, they stayed mum, instead refering PRI to the Chesterfield PD –
“Their sworn officers serve as school resource officers in our schools and are charged with upholding and enforcing the law,” Chesterfield schools’ communications director Timothy Bullis told PRI in an email.
You can hear all of this powerful story and judge for yourself through the imbed widget below:
