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 Unruly
Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention
by Sara Rimer, New York Times, January 4, 2004
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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."
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