The Center for Public Integrity

A California school board has cancelled the proposed expulsion of a sixth-grade boy featured in a Center for Public Integrity investigation into harsh school discipline.   

The Kern County Board of Education voted Tuesday to overturn the 11-year-old’s expulsion for alleged  sexual battery and obscenity. Earlier this year, the boy was accused of swatting a female student on the rear at his school in Bakersfield, Calif. A first-tier expulsion panel and the youngster’s local city school board had both upheld the boy’s proposed expulsion for the rest of the year.  

Earlier this week, the boy’s case was detailed in a Center piece examining the widespread increase in school expulsions arising from “zero tolerance” policies nationwide. Kern County is at the leading edge of an increasing contentioius debate over where to draw the line in exacting schhol discipline.  

In the 2010-11 academic year,  Kern’s schools expelled in excess of 2,500 students, more than any other California county, including Los Angeles, which has nine times the enrollment of Kern. Among Kern’s expulsions were 105 for obscenity, more than one in four of all California’s expulsions for that reason.

“You have laws, but you have to have common sense along with it,” said 35-year Kern County Board of Education member Ronald Froehlich. He said another disciplinary action would have been more appropriate in the boy’s case. “To put this on his record,” Froehlich said, “to carry with him through school, is just too great.”   

The Kern County Board of Education normally faces very few expulsion appeals — only six last year — despite the county’s high volume of expulsions.

In a troubling pattern mirrored elsewhere, black students in North Carolina schools were found to be subjected to far harsher discipline than other students for the same types of minor infractions, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Education Policy Center, a non-partisan research center that sponsors peer-reviewed research.   

For the first-time offense of cell phone use  at school, 32 percent of black students in North Carolina were given out-of-school suspension, school data collected in 2010 showed, while less than 15 percent of white students received that same punishment for the same offense. For a first-time offense of public display of affection, according to the report, almost 43 percent of the accused black students in North Carolina were given out-of-school suspension,  compared to about 15 percent of white students.

“These tremendous racial disparities, when we are looking at first-time offenders for minor offenses, are shocking,” University of California at Los Angeles Civil Rights Project researcher Daniel Losen said Tuesday, when he unveiled the report at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The National Education Policy Center commissioned Losen to prepare the report, “Discipline Policies, Successful Schools and Racial Justice.” It is available on the policy center’s website. The center is housed at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

“People say, `Well, aren’t the black students just misbehaving more?’  We’re seeing real clear evidence that there is bias, racial bias, disability bias, all sorts of bias that may be affecting these rates,” Losen said. Losen has prepared other research showing high rates of suspension and expulsion of African-American middle-school students in certain states, such as Florida.

In December 2010, Washington attorney Jennifer Podkul received a call from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office, asking to speak with one of her clients.

The client was a minor, 17, when Podkul, a legal aid group attorney, happened to meet him during a routine visit to a Virginia juvenile jail. The boy had been sent to the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center, which has an immigration wing, after U.S. Border Patrol agents caught him, unaccompanied by any family members, crossing into Texas from Mexico for the third time.

The first time the boy had crossed into the United States was in 2009, he was 16, with a backpack of marijuana a gang told him to carry. He told Podkul he had asked agents then if he could stay and offered to give them information about smuggling routes.

Instead, the boy told the lawyer, the agents had their own proposal: They told him to go back to Mexico and get more information, including names of smugglers. The request was a direct violation of the intent of 2008 federal legislation designed to help stop abuse of minors by human traffickers, Podkul told iWatch News.

Now it appeared that the IG’s office wanted the boy to cooperate in their own investigation of how the agents had treated him.

“They wanted to show him photos of the agents,” Podkul said, “and to talk to him.”  The boy, she said, had been “terrified of the Border Patrol,” but he had also been terrified of not making his delivery of drugs for the gang that an uncle had allegedly forced him to enter into at 14.

Border Patrol spokesman Bill Brooks, who is based in Marfa, Texas, said he wasn’t aware of the inquiry into Border Patrol agents in Texas that Podkul described. He added that he couldn’t comment on pending legislation affecting the Border Patrol.

Youths incarcerated across Louisiana and the New Orleans metropolitan area are getting dosed with potent antipsychotic drugs even when they have not been diagnosed with the conditions – typically, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia – that the drugs were developed to treat, records show.

Twenty-two percent of psychiatric medications in eight Louisiana institutions investigated by The Lens were of this kind, while just five percent of available diagnoses made in those institutions were for bipolar disorder, and no diagnoses were for schizophrenia. The disproportionate numbers raise the specter of the drugs being used as a means of chemical restraint rather than appropriate treatment, experts in juvenile justice contend.

The drugs also have dangerous side effects such as a rise in serum cholesterol levels and weight gain.

A law wrangled through the state Legislature in 2010 by Rep. Damon Baldone (D-Houma) will set across-the-board minimum standards that juvenile facilities must meet starting in 2013. For now, however, Baldone acknowledges that there are “huge inconsistencies in the different juvenile facilities across the state.”

“It’s a crap shoot,” Baldone said. “Some places have good treatment and others need improvement.”

The Lens set out to investigate the use and possible abuse of psychiatric medications in local youth jails after the newspaper Youth Today ran a nationwide investigation of chemical restraint.

Nearly 60 percent of all Texas public school students were suspended or expelled at least once between their 7^th and 12^th grade years, according to a landmark study released Tuesday by the Council of State Governments.

The analysis, which tracked all Texas students entering 7^th grade between 2000 and 2002, also found that only 3 percent of these disciplinary actions were based on state laws requiring suspensions or expulsions for specific acts, such as carrying a weapon to school.

The vast majority of suspensions and expulsions – 97 percent, the study authors say — were based on local policies or the discretionary decisions of local school officials. And African-American students were 31 percent more likely to be suspended or expelled based on those discretionary decisions than were white or Hispanic students.

Practices for meting out discipline, however, seemed to vary greatly from school to school, even among those with student bodies of identical ethnic mixes. The study is sure to fuel a burgeoning debate over school disciplinary policies and their long-term effects on kids at risk. 

“An important take-away from this study is that individual schools within a state, working with the same resources and within the same statutory framework, have the power to affect their school disciplinary rates,” the report’s authors say.

The Council of State Governments is a 75-year-old nonpartisan organization that provides research on policies affecting the states.

Council researchers also found that once Lone Star  state students were suspended multiple times or expelled, they were more likely to have brushes with the Texas juvenile justice system and not finish school.