Susan Ferriss stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Los Angeles school board cracks down on suspensions for minor infractions

2013-05-16T16:05:03-04:00

Amid a deepening debate over appropriate school discipline, board members of the nation's second largest school district — Los Angeles Unified — took bold steps this week sure to be noticed nationally.

They voted to prohibit out-of-school suspensions of students based on "willful defiance,” a vague label, critics say, that’s become far too handy a vehicle for ejecting students rather than helping them settle down and improve academic performance. The board members also voted to implement a sweeping review and new standards for the district’s sizable police force, which has a history of aggressive ticketing of students.

The landmark provisions are contained in a “School Climate Bill of Rights” the school board adopted in a 5-2 vote on Tuesday.

Los Angeles Unified is the nation’s second largest school district, and with 300-plus police officers, it has the country’s largest school police force. It is the first school district in California to bar “willful defiance” suspensions. These suspensions — and school police citations for more serious criminal allegations — have fallen heavily on black and Latino students in neighborhoods struggling with high dropout rates.

A “willful defiance” suspension can stem from a student violating dress codes to lashing out with crude behavior or language, or refusing to be quiet or perform assigned work.

Separately, hundreds of L.A. Unified students, many of them middle-school students, have also been given school-police citations each month for engaging in physical fights or other “disturbing the peace” charges or for committing other infractions. In some cases, teachers or school administrators have requested that students receive tickets; in other cases, police officers have made the decision.

The new L.A. Unified policy aimed at curbing ticketing and arrests by school police stems from brewing controversy that the Center for Public Integrity has reported on over the last year.

The board’s new mandate strengthens existing requirements that L.A. Unified’s schools embrace other practices, including “positive behavior intervention” methods and “restorative justice” to improve student behavior and resolve disputes among students and teachers. The new order ensures that students can’t be sent home for defiance, but they can be removed from a class and kept at school.

Critics of student suspensions argue that children who act out in class are often are having trouble learning or are troubled by family crises. Kids only fall further behind and more detached from school when they languish at home for days or hit the streets unsupervised, they say.

Judith Perez, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, said her organization supports the new policy’s goals and supports keeping kids in school. But her members are worried about how they’re going carry out their orders without more adult supervisors inside L.A. Unified’s crowded, understaffed schools.

“The district needs to do more than enact a policy,” Perez said. “The first recommendation we are making is an increase in the number of assistant principals and counselors.”

A middle school, she said, can’t even get a second counselor unless it has more than 891 students. She also said that teachers’ contracts don’t allow them to supervise students pulled out of classrooms.

California, as a state, could follow Los Angeles’ lead in ending suspensions for defiance and setting limits on police involvement in discipline matters.

L.A. Unified’s policy mirrors a bill in California’s legislature that would sharply limit the ability of schools statewide to issue out-of-schools suspensions simply for defiance. During the 2011-2012 school year, state data shows, nearly half of more than 700,000 student suspensions in the state were for defiance.

Golden State legislators are considering another bill that would require all schools to set standards for the role of school police and strive to keep police out of routine disciplinary matters. Both bills have already passed through critical first committees.

“I’m a social worker by profession, and we at the Los Angeles Unified School District support the school police. But we cannot have a system that is just punitive and focuses on ‘the gotcha,’ “ L.A. Unified district board president Monica Garcia told the Center.

Garcia sponsored the “bill of rights” because she thought suspensions and aggressive use of school police in some schools was backfiring and failing to improve student behavior and achievement rates.

“What I expect to happen now is more graduation in Los Angeles,” Garcia said. She said L.A. Unified has an opportunity to show national leadership in efforts to stop a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

The board’s new policy declares that: “Studies indicate that suspension does not often result in positive behavior conditioning and furthermore can instead intensify misbehavior by increasing shame, alienation, and rejection amongst students.”

The text of the policy also says: “A study from Texas found that students are five times more likely to drop out, six times more likely to repeat a grade, and three times more likely to have contact with the juvenile-justice system if suspended.”

Garcia said that juvenile-court judges in Los Angeles also appealed to her in recent years to change practices that were leading to increasing numbers of court citations of students.

The judges said that too many students were being sent into the criminal justice system for minor offenses they felt should be handled at school, immediately, rather than with court appearances weeks or even months later.

Last year, the Center analyzed L.A. Unified’s school-police citations and produced reports in collaboration with KPCC radio in Southern California and KQED The California Report.

The analysis found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, L.A. Unified school police were issuing, at times, more than 1,000 court citations a month to students for a range of violations, including tardiness, graffiti, pot or cigarette possession and, especially, for allegations of “disturbing the peace.” The disturbing-the-peace charges stemmed from accusations of a student getting into fisticuffs, threatening to fight or using challenging language.

More than 40 percent of all tickets issued by police during this period were going to students younger than 15. And the numbers of citations issued in Los Angeles far exceeded the tickets that school police were handing out in New York City, a bigger district, the Center found.

A more recent analysis by the Center showed that tickets issued in L.A. Unified have fallen dramatically, the result of pressure from community activists, juvenile-court judges and news reports disclosing how the volume of tickets had ballooned.

But tickets that L.A. Unified school police still hand out to students for disturbing the peace, especially, remain highly concentrated in certain middle schools.

Students at Markham Middle School received more tickets during this time — 47 — than any other school in the district. Forty-one tickets were for fighting, or disturbing the peace. Students at the Watts Learning Center Charter Middle School got the next highest batch of tickets, with 13 out of 33 for fighting. Banning High School was third, with 32 tickets.

The Center’s latest analysis found that between last November and March of this year, about half of all the 1,590 tickets issued went to children 14 and younger.

More 13-year-olds — almost all of them black or Latino — received tickets than 16 or 17-year-olds. Black students, 10 percent of district enrollment, received more than 37 percent of disturbing-the-peace tickets. And 56 percent of black students cited for that infraction were between 11 and 14 years of age.

Manuel Criollo, a community organizer with the Labor-Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, has spent several years working with students, parents, district officials and school police to embrace alternatives to police citations. Starting last summer, school police began referring ticketed students to Los Angeles County Probation Department officials, who say they’re trying to keep kids out of court and instead send as many as they can first to community-based counseling services.

But Criollo’s group has been pushing for explicit, written district policies designed to roll back ticketing even more and set strict limits on police involvement in disciplinary matters and minor offenses.

The group has long complained about “racial patterns” and unfair ticketing practices, and asserted that some police officers’ attitudes have spoiled students’ relations with law enforcement and teachers. The Labor-Community Strategy Center drew attention to and helped end early-morning sweeps that officers were doing around schools in low-income neighborhoods in recent years; officers would nab students, search them and issue tickets with hefty dollar fines to kids` who were even minutes late.

Criollo said the board’s new policy is a “strong mandate” for district officials to sit down and hammer out new police policies they promised they would do last year. “It’s the culmination of a lot of what community groups have been fighting for,” Criollo said of the policy.

The “bill of rights” adopted this week orders the district to “review and evaluate” all current school policies, practices and training “relating to the equitable treatment of students.”

It also orders the district to “review the data on the use of school-based citations and arrests and identify and remedy frequent use at individual school sites.”

L.A. Unified School Police Department Chief Steve Zipperman did not oppose the policy, and Garcia consulted with him when it was drafted. L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy publicly supported the new policy, and said it was aimed at stopping “early criminalization” of students for “frivolous” matters.

Report details lives ruined for children put on sex-offender registries

2013-05-01T08:27:29-04:00

Put on a sex registry for the offense of public nudity as a minor. Harassed by neighbors out of a home and banned from a homeless shelter because of an offense committed at age 15.

The New York-based research group Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report today on the life-shattering consequences of putting minors on sex registries for offenses — sometimes shockingly mild offenses — for the rest of their lives.

Filled with devastating stories of teens and young adults unable to put offenses behind them, the rights group's report is called “Raised on the Register: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.”

The report is the product of a 16-month investigation into 581 cases and interviews with 281 sex offenders — median age 15 — in 20 states. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, child sexuality experts and victims of “child on child” sexual assault were also interviewed. The investigation explores how a burgeoning national web of laws in various states requiring constant registration and public disclosure of offenders’ identities has affected the lives of young offenders long after time served or rehabilitation. Some on registries have killed themselves, even before reaching adulthood.

The report begins with Jacob C., who was 11 years old when convicted of one count of sexual misconduct in Michigan for touching, not penetrating, his sister’s genitals. He was not allowed to live in a home with other children, was eventually put into foster care and was placed on a sex registry that was made public when he turned 18. He struggled to graduate from high school, and was shunned because of his registration status. And when he enrolled in college, he said, campus police followed him everywhere. He dropped out.

Now 26, the report says, Jacob’s life continues to be defined and limited by a conviction at age 11.

Another case in the report: “In 2004, in Western Pennsylvania, a 15-year-old girl was charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography for having taken nude photos of herself and (posting) them on the internet. She was charged as an adult, and as of 2012 was facing registration for life.”

Sex offender laws, the report says, “that trigger registration requirements for children began proliferating in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They subject youth offenders to registration for crimes ranging from public nudity and touching another child’s genitalia over clothing to very serious violent crimes like rape.”

Registries can also include “people who have committed offenses like public urination, indecent exposure (such as streaking across a college campus), and other more relatively innocuous offenses.”

The Human Rights Watch report acknowledged that registration laws were designed to protect the public from offenders, and that they are based on assumptions that offenders are likely to violate again.

“But including youth sex offenders on registries assumes that they are highly likely to reoffend, which is not the case,” the report says. “Numerous studies estimate the recidivism rate among children who commit sexual offenses to between 4 and 10 percent, compared with a 13 percent rate for adult sex offenders and a national rate of 45 percent for all crimes.”

The report was prepared by Nicole Pittman, a national expert on the application of sex offender registration laws who was an attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She specialized in child sexual assault cases and registries, and has provided testimony to Congress and state legislatures on the subject.

The report calls current registry laws “an overbroad policy of questionable effectiveness” that leaves the public often unable to discern who on a registry is actually dangerous.

California lawmakers latest to consider limits for cops in schools

2013-04-30T09:46:59-04:00

As the national debate grows louder over deploying police in schools, the largest state in the union — California — is considering a bill that would require schools to set “clear guidelines” defining the role of school police and limit their involvement in disciplinary matters.

The Golden State joins Texas and Connecticut — home of the December Newtown school shootings — in considering legislation that would set limits on how schools involve police officers in discipline. Colorado adopted limits last year.

The proposals come amid burgeoning concern nationally over harsh school punishment policies, and police involvement in seemingly routine discipline. Police presence on campuses nationwide has grown steadily since two teens went on a killing spree at Columbine High School outside Denver in 1999. But a growing group of juvenile-justice researchers and judges argue that putting students into conflict with officers over minor infractions — and needlessly placing kids in the justice system — increases risks students will drop out and get into more serious trouble.

Since last December, lawmakers in various states and school administrators have rushed to fortify security in reaction to a young adult’s shooting rampage, which killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn. President Obama and California’s own senator, Democrat Barbara Boxer, have urged appropriating money to schools that want to increase security.

California State Assembly member Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat from Los Angeles, introduced the state school police bill, Assembly Bill 549, to “get out in front,” he said, of the drive to put more security personnel in schools. A first hearing on the bill is set for May 1 before the Assembly Education Committee.

California lawmakers are considering restricting other discipline practices critics say have become counterproductive, including suspensions that remove pupils from school for days at a time, often causing them to fall behind in classwork and leaving them unsupervised at home. The Assembly education panel recently approved a bill on April 17 that would restrict out-of-school student suspensions and expulsions for “willful defiance,” the basis of almost half of all suspensions in 2011-2012, new state data shows.

The Jones-Sawyer bill faces opposition from the Association of California School Administrators. Laura Preston, the group’s legislative advocate, told the Center that the proposal takes too much control away from local districts and schools because it limits what they can do with school safety dollars.

In an April 29 letter, the group argued that the bill’s requirements to put police guidelines in school safety plans added up to an imposition “without regard” for “the additional time needed to do this work.” Preston suggested “a conversation” about improving school police training could be an alternative to Jones-Sawyer’s bill.

Jones-Sawyer’s bill does have support from the California Federation of Teachers, the union representing many Los Angeles teachers. That support helps it over one major political hurdle. The California Teachers Association, an even larger union, has no position yet.

“This is not anti-police. I do believe there is a role for public safety on campuses,” Jones-Sawyer said of his bill. “But before we get the guns and guards out, let’s get some mental health [care] in there for students.”

“There should be guidelines for when you don’t need police involved in discipline,” he said.

Troubling history

Last year, the Center for Public Integrity documented the ticketing of about 10,000 mostly black and Latino students a year, including middle-school-age children, in lower-income neighborhoods in the Los Angeles Unified School District. L.A. Unified is the nation’s second biggest school district, and with more than 300 officers and additional security guards it has the country’s largest district-controlled school police agency. At one point, school police were issuing about 1,000 tickets, or court citations, a month in 2011.

New York City police in schools, by comparison, issued 1,666 tickets to students during the entire 2011-2012 school year, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is suing New York City police for alleged abusive treatment of students, which the department denies.

Arguing that citations had spiraled out of control, community activists and juvenile-court judges have in recent months pressured L.A. Unified and police to seek other ways of handling some seemingly minor allegations — allegations like vandalism or possession of a marker to commit vandalism, trespassing, marijuana and tobacco possession, daytime-curfew violations and many charges of disturbing the peace or public fighting.

Fresh data just obtained by the Center shows that L.A. Unified’s tickets have fallen sharply, driven mostly by a drop in daytime-curfew and tardiness violations. Between January and March, only about 60 students were ticketed for minor cases of tardiness, or skipping school. The truant or tardy students were referred directly to counseling under a new agreement.

For other alleged legal violations, L.A school police issued 316 tickets this past January; 454 in February and 282 in March.

In January of last year, by comparison, officers issued more than 650 tickets.

Despite the decline, the new data also shows that certain L.A. Unified middle schools in lower-income areas continue to remain hot spots for ticketing pupils who are almost all black or Latino. The most frequent allegation for younger students is disturbing the peace — a charge that often stems from student fights, shouting matches or allegations of threats to fight.

Out of 1,590 tickets issued from last November through March, half went to children 14 and younger.

In fact, if ages are considered separately, fewer 16 and 17-year-olds were cited than students who were either 13 or 14 or 15-years old. Black students represent 10 percent of the district’s enrollment, but were more than 37 percent of those ticketed for disturbing the peace. And 56 percent of black students cited for this infraction were between 11 and 14 years old. L.A. Unified officials did not respond to a request for comment on the Center’s new findings or Jones-Sawyer’s proposal. Last December, the district said it was continuing “to work with our internal and external stakeholders to identify and evaluate non-penal alternatives to various minor violations.”

Another way?

Jones-Sawyer, 56, attended L.A. Unified schools and remembers kids who scuffled being taken into the office of a vice principal, who put an arm around their shoulders and talked through problems. “We have to find out why kids are angry,” the assemblyman said. Reprimands were not in the form of police citations back then, he said.

He acknowledged educators’ complaints that California’s school counselor ranks have been decimated by budget cuts, leaving schools less able to deal with kids’ conflicts. Compared to a national average of 457 students for every counselor, California’s ratio of 814 students for every counselor in 2008-2009 was rock bottom among the states, according to data gathered by the American School Counselor Association.

Nonetheless, critics of involving officers in discipline matters say peer counseling, intermediate steps prior to police involvement and other cost-effective alternatives exist and are practiced in other states, and in schools in Oakland and San Francisco now as well.

Jones-Sawyer’s bill says schools “shall consider existing strategies and model approaches to minimize the involvement of law enforcement in pupil conduct and minor offenses that do not rise to the level of a serious and immediate threat to physical safety.”

In addition to requiring that schools’ mandatory safety plans define police roles, the bill would also require schools to “prioritize” federal and state public-safety funding on mental-health aid and other supportive behavioral-intervention programs — not just police. Schools would also have to publicly develop “memorandum of understanding” about officers’ duties.

“I think this bill is a huge shift in how we are talking about school safety,” said Zoe Rawson, a lawyer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, a community group listed as a non-legislative “sponsor” of Jones-Sawyer’s bill. The Strategy Center has represented students who received tickets and is negotiating with L.A. Unified and school police on standards that limit police involvement on district campuses.

The legislation gives “leverage” to local communities to set standards, Rawson said. “Right now, there is nothing required around police having frequent contact with young people.”

Any district in California with a school police force, or school resource officers, would be affected by Jones-Sawyer’s bill. Oakland’s district has its own school police, as does the Central Valley’s Kern Union High School District, which has more than two dozen high school campuses in Kern County.

After the Newtown massacre, the Obama Administration proposed allocating $150 million in federal funds for schools to hire police or counselors or install bullet-proof glass or other security technology. The recommendations are in the 2014 Obama budget proposal now winding its way through the budget process.

Boxer, a California Democrat, introduced a bill to bring back federal funding cut in recent years for school police and offer grants to needy schools from a pool of at least $40 million a year. The measure was folded into the gun bill that stalled in the Senate on April 17, but Boxer is expected to revive it.

Various states are also considering how to fund more school police through property taxes or by tapping other state coffers.

Urging caution

Los Angeles County Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Michael Nash is so concerned about the rush to put police in schools that he wrote — as president of a national judges’ group — to Vice President Biden, who was chairing a post-Newton gun-violence task force.

Penned by Nash as president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the January letter warns that “the influx of police in schools” in recent years is already “one of the main contributors” to minors sent unnecessarily into the criminal justice system.

Nash told the Center he supports Jones-Sawyer’s bill.

“I like this bill,” he said. “I have been asserting that, in considering school safety and enlisting personnel to maintain safety, we have to be clear in differentiating between security and discipline.”

Colorado — the state that was shaken by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre — enacted reforms last year that require police to “de-escalate” student fights and for schools to ease up on referrals of students to law enforcement due to “zero tolerance” policies. Denver public school discipline data shows a 71 percent increase in referrals of students to police between 2000 and 2004, with only 7 percent of referrals for serious offenses like carrying a weapon, according to analysis by the nonprofit Advancement Project.

Texas legislators are considering a bill that requires schools with police to adopt “graduated sanctions” and other means rather than having officers send children to court for disruption and disorderly conduct. The bill, which has bipartisan support, also requires school staff to submit sworn statements and prove steps were taken to counsel students before police referral to court. The state Senate has already approved the bill, which is now before its House of Representatives.

In Connecticut, where legislators are trying to balance new calls for security with concerns about over-policing, the legislature’s joint Committee of the Judiciary on April 19 voted overwhelmingly, 40-4, to approve a proposal requiring school boards to draft memorandum of understanding with police to limit their use in disciplinary responses. The proposal says agreements should spell out the need for “a graduated response model” to discipline problems. The bill is now before the state’s House of Representatives and, if approved, will go to the state Senate.

A Senate bill in Florida that would have required that schools refrain from referring students to law enforcement for “petty acts of misconduct” or misdemeanors — without written explanations — died when it failed to get out of legislative committees this spring.

Making changes

In March, the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights office reached a court-sanctioned agreement stemming from a federal investigation into alleged excessive involvement of police in discipline meted out in Meridian, Miss.

The agreement with the district of 6,100 students in Meridian essentially regulates school police on the district’s campuses. The district is required to train school police officers in “bias-free” policing and stop involving police in minor behavioral disputes in the majority-black district. Civil rights investigators said police in Meridian told them they were ferrying students to jail on allegations of defiance and disrespect at schools.

L.A. Unified, last summer, started referring most tickets not to court but directly to the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Because of a budget crisis, the county had to close its lower-level juvenile courts, where parents and students were usually summoned to answer to citations school police issued that carried hundreds of dollars in fines.

Judges and civil-rights advocates saw the closure as an opportunity to keep most students out of court, and instead first divert students, through probation officers, to community-based counseling or other family treatment.

Between November and March, the big three infractions students were cited for were allegations of possessing or using less than an ounce of marijuana — 514 tickets — and disturbing the peace, for which 496 students were cited. Tobacco or smoking “paraphernalia” was next with 252 tickets.

Rawson said it is a positive step that most ticketed students at L.A. Unified are no longer sent directly into court.

But as a lawyer who has represented students, she’s concerned that black and Latino students in lower-income neighborhood schools are “over-policed” compared to students in more affluent areas. L.A. Unified’s school police chief, Steven Zipperman, told the Center last year that officers are generally evenly distributed to schools — mostly high schools — but that schools of all grade levels can request that officers to dispatched to intervene in a problem.

Conflict with police officers, Rawson said, can leave students with a sense that their citation is a first step toward future clashes with law enforcement. The youngest student cited between March and December was a 9-year-old accused of vandalism.

New immigration bill provides ray of hope for separated families

2013-04-19T07:08:52-04:00

The new immigration proposal now before the Senate could help thousands of American citizens whose families have been shattered or forced into exile because of deportation and tough immigration penalties Congress adopted in 1996.

Grueling debate on the sweeping bipartisan proposal is ahead, with opponents, such as Numbers USA, an immigration restriction group, already mustering a campaign to denounce portions of the bill as “amnesty.” But Americans who have been forced to move out of the country to remain united with ousted spouses – or who face years of separation from spouses and sometimes children — say they are thrilled by language in the proposal that could provide them relief.

“We still have a long way to go, but this is one giant step forward for my family,” New Jersey native Margot Bruemmer, 40, told the Center for Public Integrity in a phone call from Veracruz, Mexico. She has lived there, in a remote area, since 2005, after she tried to legalize her husband and he was given a mandatory lifetime “bar” from living in the United States that can’t be appealed for 10 years.

The reason: He had crossed the border more than once unlawfully, which is not uncommon among undocumented workers. The couple has two small children.

Bruemmer belongs to American Families United, a network of Americans who have all been separated from spouses or moved abroad with them – or who fear that they’ll suffer the same fate if they dare to try to legalize spouses under the current immigration system.

As a recent Center for Public Integrity report revealed, thousands of American families have been separated – or face separation – because of these little-known mandatory immigration penalties. Bruemmer and others in American Families United recently traveled to Capitol Hill to plead with lawmakers to address their plight as part of immigration reform proposals.

Crafted by a bipartisan group of eight senators, the voluminous Senate bill calls for giving immigration judges and other officials more discretion to consider the pain and suffering that a loved one’s separation causes U.S. citizens and legal immigrants. The provisions, if eventually adopted, would allow citizens like Bruemmer and legal residents a much greater chance to bring back spouses who have been deported or forced into exile.

Others might feel more secure in coming forward, without fear, to legalize based on family ties.

Randall Emery, president of American Families United, said the legislation is unprecedented in its explicit recognition that judges can consider the plight of Americans and legal residents who suffer when a spouse or parent is forced out of the country.

The proposal says judges who review cases can decline to order an immigrant, with some criminal exceptions, to be “removed, deported or excluded” if it would be “against the public interest or would result in hardship to the alien’s United States citizen or permanent resident” spouse or children.

Although few Americans realize it, undocumented spouses, over the last decade, have been frequently assessed bars to living in the United States after they voluntarily came forward in attempts to legalize based on marriage. Right now, the idea that their children might suffer harm cannot be taken into consideration as a plea to halt their ouster.

Judges and consular officials who review applications have little to no discretion to disregard these penalties because Congress made them mandatory in 1996.

While some families can seek so-called hardship waivers to shorten a spouse’s mandatory exile, the waivers’ requirements are demanding. And anyone who has a deportation history or who even admits to crossing the border more than once is ineligible to apply for a waiver.

Douglas Stump, an Oklahoma lawyer and president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Center that fear of certain exile has blocked a significant number of the millions of illegal immigrants now in the United States from applying for legal status based on a close family tie.

Because her husband was barred, Bruemmer said, she made a tough decision to give up her career as a college professor and move with him.

She is now “desperate” to move back to the United States both for safety’s sake and for the sake of her children’s education. The family has faced kidnapping threats, she said, because of assumptions she must have lots of money because she’s American.

In reality, Bruemmer told the Center, the family is barely eking out a living. She was part of the American Families United group that recently visited congressional offices.

In Los Angeles, American Families United member Chris Xitco, said he was also optimistic after reading parts of the immigration proposal.

“It looks good,” Xitco said, his joy tempered by years of fighting to legalize his wife. “But now we have to get it through Congress.”

Xitco’s wife, Delia, lives with their two small children south of Tijuana, Mexico, where she moved after immigration officials told her they had no choice but to impose an exile of at least 10 years, until 2018, when she can once again apply for legal status. It did not matter that the couple had a baby.

Delia had crossed the border twice in the 1990s, and had been caught once.

A family in San Diego interviewed by the Center, headed by T.J. and Maythe Barbour of San Diego, is struggling with a 20-year bar that Maythe was given after a police officer stopped her for driving too slowly and turned her into immigration authorities.

T.J is an American citizen. A lawyer had advised the couple not to even attempt legalization for Maythe because she would surely have been barred due to a prior deportation. She was barred for 20 years because she was deported twice – the second time after she was turned over to immigration by the police officer.

She now lives in Tijuana and only sees her 10-year-old son when T.J. drives him over on weekends and one night a week. The boy has been deeply distressed by his mother’s deportation.

Emery applauded legislators for listening to the stories of members of American Families United.

“For the most part,” he said, “this is what we’ve been looking for: More discretion for judges to really look at the facts, and use more common sense to apply the law.”

New report highlights disproportionate school discipline for minorities

2013-04-29T15:10:43-04:00

Researchers analyzing a trove of national school discipline data have found that as black, disabled and English-as-a-second language students enter middle and high schools, their school suspension rates start soaring — a serious predicator for dropping out.

Even one or two out-of-school suspensions are now linked by multiple studies to a greater risk of a student dropping out, suffering “failure” and being incarcerated, researchers for the University of California at Los Angeles Civil Rights Project said Monday at a Capitol Hill briefing.

“Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that nationally, on average, 36 percent of black male students with disabilities enrolled in middle and high schools were suspended at least once in (the) 2009-2010 (academic year),” researchers wrote in their report, “Out of School & Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools.”

The study also found that across the nation, one in every four African-American students in secondary schools was suspended at least once in the 2009-2010 academic year. One in every five students with disabilities and one in every five English-language learners was also suspended, out of school, at least once. That’s compared to only one in 16 white students without disabilities receiving at least one suspension over the same time period.

For their report, researchers analyzed data on suspensions for the 2009-2010 school year gathered from schools for the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Database.

The report identifies 10 districts with the largest number of “hot spot” secondary schools with relatively large numbers of suspensions. A large number is defined as having 25 percent or more of all students in one or more of any subgroup, such as students of a certain ethnicity or students with disabilities, getting suspended in one year.

Chicago had the highest number — 82 — of high-suspending hot pot secondary schools in the nation. Among those students identified at particular risk: black males with disabilities in the Chicago Public Schools District, in Saint Paul (Minn.) Public Schools and in the Los Angeles Unified School District. (Los Angeles Unified struck an agreement in 2011 with the U.S. Department of Education to embrace other methods of discipline considered more successful than removal of students.)

“There is something absolutely wrong,” when students are removed at these levels, said Dan Losen, an author of the analysis and director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, an initiative of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.

High suspensions of disabled students are “just shocking when you think of the federal (disabled students) funds that have gone to support those schools, along with matching state funds,” said Diane Smith Howard, staff attorney for juvenile justice and education issues for National Disability Rights Network. She spoke on a conference call about the report’s findings.

Forty years ago, in 1972-73, according to the report, about 12 percent of black secondary students were suspended, out of school, at least once. Today that figure has reached 24 percent for all black students nationally.

Researchers also found that that the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District contained schools with similar student demographics that reported far lower rates of suspensions. That suggested, Losen said, that educational leaders at those individual campuses could provide help colleagues with “viable alternatives” to manage classrooms.

As the Center for Public Integrity has reported, the Los Angeles Unified School District also shows that students at some middle and high school campuses are also issued exceptionally high numbers of citations from school police for misbehavior, including fights and disruption by junior high students ticketed under the criminal label of “disturbing the peace.”

Losen said that high suspension rates are “an early warning system” at particular schools that should suggest school administrators need to make changes in how they manage behavior.

The suspensions data the report contains, Losen said, could be used to predict “drop-out factories” because middle schools with high suspension rates often are the source of students who go on to attend high schools with high suspension and drop-out rates.

“This is not a game of gotcha,” Losen said of the findings. He said parents, district leaders and administrators can use the Civil Rights Project’s studies and analyses to find schools within a district that might provide answers in terms of initiatives that help keep students engaged in school and improve behavior.

The report released Monday notes research indicating that being suspended even once in ninth grade is associated with a two-fold increase in the likelihood of dropping out. “The high number of students suspended, as presented in this report, should be of grave concern to all parents, educators, taxpayers and policymakers,” Losen and his colleagues wrote.

Researchers have posted data for 26,000 middle and high schools that can be searched online. The investigation was supported, in part, by Atlantic Philanthropies and the California Endowment. (The Center for Public Integrity receives funding for independent reporting from the California Endowment.)

At the Capitol briefing, Losen and others involved in research on suspension suggested that federal grants to schools could be made contingent upon efforts to reduce suspensions or employ them as a last resort. Losen said researchers are not suggesting that suspensions never be imposed.

Ivory Toldson, an associate professor of counseling psychology at Howard University, said Monday that school administrators sometimes engage in “bait and switch” when asked to respond to why they have high suspension rates. “They talk about the kid who stabbed a kid,” he said. But most suspensions, he said, are for unspecified low-level misbehavior that can be addressed in other ways.

Researchers also said that schools often feel the pressure to meet testing standards and might be tempted to remove lower-performing and troubled students.

Criminologists' critique questions NRA task force school safety strategy

2013-04-04T06:45:40-04:00

Just as a National Rifle Association task force unveiled its “National School Shield” report this week, a detailed critique from three criminologists termed the gun lobby’s push for enhanced school security “superficially simple.”

Two professors at Marshall University in West Virginia who are studying incarcerated school shooters and one professor at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military school, published their jointly written critique this month in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.

The criminologists began their review last December after the NRA announced its “National School Shield” project in response to a gunman’s massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in a Newtown, Conn. school. The NRA’s initial thrust was to urge schools to hire more police, but also persuade states to allow teachers or other willing staff or volunteers to carry arms. The NRA said it would provide training. In addition, the firearms association formed a task force to study schools’ vulnerabilities and make suggestions.

That task force unveiled a 225-page report at a press conference Tuesday with “best practices” recommendations, including advice on installing bullet-proof glass and surveillance equipment, redesigning doors and outdoor areas, seeking advice from consultants and putting an armed guard or armed employee in every school.

“Let me emphasize, this is not talking about (arming) all teachers,” said task force director Asa Hutchinson, a former congressman from Arkansas who also was an administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Teachers should teach. But if there is a personnel that has good experience and has an interest in it, and is willing to go through this training of, again, 40 to 60 hours that is totally comprehensive, then that is an appropriate resource that a school should be able to utilize."

The report offers a guide to school resource officers. It suggests schools use specific types of programs to identify and treat students who might be at risk of committing violence.

After looking over the report, the criminologists saw nothing that would change their conclusions about the NRA’s ideas, according to one of the authors, Angela Crews, professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. Crews’ co-authors are her husband Gordon Crews, also a professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Marshall University, and Catherine Burton, associate professor of Criminal Justice at The Citadel.

“To prevent school violence, society must first address troubled youth who have easy access to weapons,” the authors wrote, calling the NRA’s ideas “superficially simple” with risks of negative consequences.

The NRA, they also wrote, has presented itself as a “seemingly ready-made provider of all things necessary for the level of school security required for the safety of children.”

In their piece, the criminologists echo juvenile-court judges and others who are concerned that putting more police into schools – for the purpose of protecting students – could end up needlessly referring more students to the criminal-justice system for minor reasons.

The criminologists also warn that schools will take on substantial criminal and civil liability risks if they rush to hire security guards with insufficient vetting or allow staff to carry arms once they’ve had training certified by the NRA or another entity.

“The potential for that liability looms large for anyone who ‘certifies’ that another person knows how, and more importantly, when to fire a weapon,” the article says.

The NRA task force’s “model security plans,” the article also says, calls for costly security investments that would “potentially only serve to increase profits for those invested in security industries.”

Crews said she found it troubling that most of the 13 members of the “National School Shield Task Force” are affiliated with security advisory or design businesses that could stand to profit from schools seeking more security infrastructure.

“Comprising a task force primarily of representatives from two private consulting firms is highly suspect, especially when most, if not all of the members seem to be connected with government and/or private security endeavors,” Crews told the Center for Public Integrity.

“If we were forming such a task force, we would have consulted mainly experts in violent juvenile criminal behavior, experts in K-12 education, and experts in juvenile mental health. These people come mainly from military, governmental or private security backgrounds,” she said.

The NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

Hutchinson, at his press event, called the security professionals experts in their field who were best equipped to study schools’ vulnerabilities.

Two security advisory businesses, Command Consulting Group and Phoenix RBT Solutions, have been open about their executives’ participation in the NRA’s 13-member task force.

Neither firm responded to request for comment on the questions Crews raised about possible conflicts of interest. However, on the Command Consulting Group website, the businesses jointly announced their executives’ participation in the NRA’s task force and explained that they were already working with schools and school police with training and to improve security needs.

“Our team was proud to contribute in identifying current vulnerabilities and best practices for schools,” task force member Ralph Basham, former director of the U.S. Secret Service and a founder of Command Consulting Group, says on the website.

Anthony Lambraia, owner of Phoenix RBT Solutions and also a member of the task force, is quoted on the Command Consulting Group website as saying: “The time to effect change in school safety programs is long overdue. We’ve provided training programs guidelines and a best practices manual that offers actionable steps that can be taken to address school safety concerns.”

The NRA task force report suggests making school security funds available from the Department of Homeland Security; traditionally, most federal dollars for such programs have come through grant programs operated by the U.S. Justice and Education Departments.

“It is recommended that the Department of Homeland Security grants should be open for school security programs such as training, risk assessment and security response planning. This would not involve any additional federal funds, but would open up schools as a potential recipient of the Homeland Security grants,” the NRA task fund report says.

(In response to the Newtown killings, the Obama Administration is requesting $150 million for schools to hire more police or counselors or purchase other security needs. The money would be administrated mostly through the Education and Justice departments, with officials saying that it would be contingent upon schools agreeing to Justice Department-approved training of police on how to work in a school environment.)

Hutchinson, the task force director, said the group’s conclusions were “independent” of the NRA, which paid for the $1 million effort to scrutinize school safety at various locations. The task force dropped the NRA’s initial idea of persuading schools to recruit armed volunteers to protect schools that couldn’t afford guards.

But the task force report argues that having at least one armed guard or employee in every school could deter an attack or prevent mass killings.

The report released Tuesday contains “model legislation” legislators could draw from to change state laws so that school employees could carry licensed and concealed weapons at schools. A number of states, such as Mississippi, are already debating bills that were fashioned in consultation with NRA representatives.

Crews, who is conducting a national study of school shooters, told the Center that the research raises serious questions about staff members bringing weapons onto school grounds and carrying or storing them there.

“Ongoing research that we are conducting with incarcerated perpetrators of school violence also indicates that school shooters have easy access to weapons, often getting them — either as gifts or stealing them — from their parents, neighbors or friends who may have purchases them legally,” Crews said. “Putting more weapons in schools just makes more weapons available because inevitably, someone will forget to lock their drawer, misplace their key, or otherwise lose track of their firearm, making it easy for kids who want to have one to take it.”

Discriminatory discipline: Feds and Mississippi school district reach agreement on changes

Meridian,Mississippi,United States — 2013-03-22T15:58:22-04:00

A Mississippi school district under scrutiny for excessive punishment of black students has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to enact new disciplinary policies, train school police officers in “bias-free” policing and stop involving officers in minor campus behavioral disputes.

“We commend the Meridian Public School District for taking this huge stop toward ensuring that its schools are safe and welcoming to all students – and that education is a road to success instead of a pipeline to prison,” said Jocelyn Samuels, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Right Division.

At a Friday briefing with reporters, Samuels said the division hopes that school districts nationwide will look to the Meridian agreement as a model for addressing complaints of overly harsh and sometimes racially disproportionate discipline. As the Center for Public Integrity reported previously, Meridian, Miss., police told federal investigators that they were functioning as a “taxi service” to ferry students to jail for allegations of defiance and disrespect.

Separately, the civil rights division still is pursuing a lawsuit it filed last October against the city of Meridian, Lauderdale County and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services. The suit alleges that criminal-justice and law-enforcement officials were jailing students for days without probable cause hearings and without sufficient access to counsel to explain their rights.

Samuels said the division hopes that “by virtue of implementation of the consent decree,” Meridian’s school district will now stop sending so many students to jails and into the criminal-justice system.

“Some of the infractions we saw (in Meridian) were failure to tuck in one’s shirt,” Samuels said.

She and other division attorneys detailed what they found in an investigation that stemmed from parents’ complaints of disproportionate suspensions and arrests of Meridian’s black students. About 86 percent of the district’s 6,100 students are African-American.

Federal attorneys found that Meridian’s black students were five times more likely to be removed from school as punishment than white students referred to supervisors because of comparable disciplinary problems.

The new agreement, or consent decree, to make changes in Meridian’s disciplinary policies must now be ratified by a U.S. district court. The plan is to incorporate it into an existing federal school desegregation decree that goes back to the 1960s.

In a statement, the Meridian Public School District said its board of trustees unanimously approved entering into the consent decree with the Department of Justice and private plaintiffs.

“Discipline, in the past, has been more assertive and focused on consequences,” Meridian Public School District Superintendent Alvin Taylor said. “But now we will look into the cause of student behavior and put measures into place to help prevent those misbehaviors.”

The district this year began to employ a “positive behavioral intervention and support” model for dealing with student misbehavior. The idea is to reward good behavior, and to use counseling and other types of intervention to get to the root causes of students’ problems at school.

The consent agreement spells out, in detail, alternatives to be taken prior to resorting to suspensions of students and a system of appeals and meetings to ensure progress toward improving behavior. It also places specific limits on police intervention in Meridian’s schools.

The agreement says: “Incidents involving public order offenses committed by students, including disorderly conduct, disturbance/disruption of schools or public assembly, loitering, trespass, profanity, dress code violations, and fighting that does not involve physical injury or a weapon, shall be considered school discipline issues to be handled by school officials, rather than criminal law issues warranting MPD (Meridian Police Department) involvement, unless MPD involvement is necessary to protect the physical safety of students or school personnel, or public safety.”

Witnesses tell Congress that Americans, legal residents’ families suffer due to immigration laws

United States — 2013-03-14T17:50:24-04:00

American families that have been split up for 10 years or more — or forced into exile — by immigration laws took their fight to Capitol Hill Thursday. Representatives testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee that is a crucial forum for public debate over possible immigration reforms.

“It is often said that our immigration laws are broken, but not why. It’s simple: Our laws contradict our values,” Randall Emery, president of American Families United, told members of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, which is under the Judiciary Committee.

American Families United represents American citizens and U.S. legal permanent residents whose families have been separated for a decade or more by punitive immigration mandates.

As the Center for Public Integrity and KQED public radio reported recently, the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents are forced, under a 1996 law, to serve a 10-year exile or more outside the United States before they can finish their applications to become legal residents.

Some undocumented spouses can obtain waivers to cut short these so-called bars, but many thousands are not eligible. Thousands of people are too afraid to even try to sponsor their undocumented spouses out of fear of being separated or forced to move abroad to remain together.

The Center’s story recounts the hardship families with children are facing after applying to legalize undocumented spouses — only to have U.S. officials ultimately order those spouses to stay out of the United States for 10 years, 20 years, even for life.

“What does America gain if a husband and wife are separated, or the children are separated?” asked Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and member of the subcommittee. She said she strongly disagreed with the adoption of these bars in 1996 and warned that they would harm Americans.

American Families United is urging Congress to reform this system of inflexible punishment, arguing it serves no purpose because it does not deter illegal immigration and harms U.S. citizens.

On Feb. 27, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the Juciary Committee, suggested to reporters that he was open to discussions on changing these bars.

Thursday’s hearing — about divided nuclear families — also focused on the many years that U.S. permanent legal residents must wait before their spouses and children are also given visas to immigrate.

The minimum waiting time for a spouse of a legal immigrant to gain admission legally is currently more than two years. At one point, because of country quotas, the minimum wait time for a Mexican permanent resident’s spouse was eight years.

Emery told the subcommittee that American Families United is also urging Congress to shorten this waiting time for legal immigrants, whose families are strained by these waits.

Emery suggested it was a contradiction to force permanent legal immigrants’ spouses to wait so long to come to the United States while allowing certain temporary workers to bring spouses with them for the duration of their work visa.

“On the one hand, we welcome legal immigrants as permanent residents and urge them to become U.S. citizens, so that ‘they’ become ‘us,’ “ Emery said. “On the other hand, our laws block some of the most basic human values for both legal immigrants and U.S. citizens — marriage and family.”

Mental-health study of U.S. kids affected by surge in deportations

Mexico — 2013-03-14T12:02:45-04:00

An unprecedented surge in deportations in recent years has affected tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American children. The traumatic experience of losing a parent for an entire childhood — or being forced to move abroad to remain with that parent — is certain to have a profound impact on the mental health of these U.S. citizen children, according to researchers who have begun a study of this population.

This week, researchers based in Texas, California and Mexico released a joint announcement about a project they began last year to survey deportees’ American-citizen kids. Lead researcher Luis Zayas, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, said he wanted to draw attention to his team’s work now because Congress has begun serious negotiations on immigration reform proposals. Zayas hopes legislators take into account the welfare of children whose parents face deportation.

“It’s disturbing because these children are citizens,” Zayas said. “Our country is not accustomed to turning people into exiles.”

The University of California at Davis’ Center for Reducing Health Disparities is also collaborating on the project, along with Mexico’s National Institute of Psychiatry.

The study, expected to be done by next year, is funded with a $182,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers are interviewing a total of about 80 children in the Austin, Texas, and Sacramento, Calif., areas, as well as children who’ve moved to Mexico to be with parents.

The investigators are asking community groups to help them identify children to interview, and they are promising confidentiality to participants. Two researchers in Missouri and Southern Illinois are also conducting interviews. Most children will probably be between 10 and 15-years-old.

Clinical internal medicine expert Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, director of the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities, said: “We know that family separation can be catastrophic for children in critical stages of their development. Childhood adversity is one of the strongest indicators for early-onset mental health disorders, as well as for the premature manifestation of chronic health conditions.”

In Mexico, researchers will interview children born and raised in America, who have since been uprooted.

A deportation-related move to Mexico “tears away” children from “peers, schools and communities they know. And it is done under government coercion,” Zayas said. “In all of the cases I’ve studied and evaluated, families would have gone to small towns and hamlets [in Mexico] with minimal schooling and to impoverished conditions.”

Zayas said he hopes the evidence researchers produce will be “considered by those who make immigration laws and those who implement them.”

Some of the children affected by deportations have parents who are both undocumented. Others have so-called “mixed status” families, with one parent who is a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident and one parent who is undocumented.

The Center for Public Integrity and KQED public radio in California recently reported on the circumstances of U.S. citizens, many with children, who thought they could sponsor their undocumented spouses for legal status with relative ease.

They do have that right to sponsor a spouse. But when they begin the process, their foreign spouses are eventually told that Congress requires them to stay out of the United States for 10 years, or more, as a punishment before they can become legal residents.

This form of mandatory punishment has resulted in many children being separated from parents. Bethany Gonzalez’s two sons, for example, won’t be able to live with their father Jimi in the United States until 2018. By then the Iowa boys will be adults.

Other Americans have moved with their children abroad, and are raising them with spouses in precarious surroundings. Margot Bruemmer of New Jersey, a mother of two, recently visited Congress to urge legislators not to forget the plight of Americans who’ve been forced to leave the United States to keep families together. She told the Center that she has faced kidnapping and extortion threats in Veracruz, Mexico, where she moved so her family can stay together.

Statistics on how many children are affected by deportation or parents being barred from the United States are hard to come by. In 2012, Congress began receiving periodic reports from immigration officials on deportees who claim to have U.S.-born children.

In March of 2012, a Department of Homeland Security report to Congress estimated that during the six months between January and June of 2011, more than 46,400 people claiming to have U.S.-born children were deported from the United States or were otherwise “excluded,” perhaps after losing a legal proceeding to remain here.

Last year, an immigration official told the Center for Public Integrity that 74 percent of this group of deportees had criminal records, but that claim was not included in the report to Congress and no details were released separately.

Academic investigators who have examined deportation records say that deportees’ minor traffic violations and prior immigration violations have cast them into the category of criminal offenders. The Arizona Republic reported in 2011 that 60 percent of all deportees turned over to immigration authorities by local law enforcement agencies had no criminal records or only low-level offenses.

According to more recent records obtained by the Applied Research Center, which focuses on immigration policies, between July 2010 and September 2012, more than 105,500 people claiming to have U.S.-citizen children were deported. More than 99,200 other people claiming to be parents of U.S. citizens were also excluded, found inadmissible or volunteered to leave.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that in 2008, the number of children in “mixed status” families — with an undocumented parent — grew from 2.7 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008.

Controversy over cops in schools flares anew

2013-04-03T18:25:30-04:00

In post-Newtown America, those with power say they must act to prevent another massacre of innocents.

The Obama administration wants stiffer gun control, and $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 more on-campus police or counselors, or purchase security technology. State legislators are considering shifting millions of dollars around to help schools hire more police. Some locals aren’t waiting: The 5,500-resident town of Jordan, Minn., has moved its entire eight-officer police force into schools.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said after a young man shot his way into his former grammar school on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 first-graders and six educators.

With the new year, the NRA has been flexing its political muscle, lobbying states not just to hire more school police — under the group’s National School Shield project — but also to pass laws allowing teachers or other staff to bring licensed guns to school to defend their students and themselves.

Beyond the headlines, though, the push for more cops or other armed security personnel in schools is running headlong into another movement that’s been quietly growing in states as diverse as Mississippi, New York, Utah, Texas and California.

It’s a push to get police out of schools, or at least to end their involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.

Civil-rights groups and juvenile court judges — and even some officials within the Obama administration — argue that because the ranks of police began growing in schools in the late 1990s, the criminal justice system’s involvement in student discipline has gotten entirely out of hand in some communities. That has put students, especially ethnic minorities, on a path to failure, they say — the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

In Los Angeles, for example, scores of students, most Latino or black and many just 11 or 12 years old, have been ticketed by school officers for minor infractions often categorized as disturbing the peace. In Austin, Texas, a 12-year-old was forced to court for spraying on perfume in class. In DeSoto County, Miss. officers and a school district were sued after a bus surveillance video — seen in part by a reporter — revealed officers unjustifiably arresting black students, the suit alleged, and threatening others with a “a bullet between the eyes.”

Optimists — Education Secretary Arne Duncan among them — say cops in schools are not an either/or proposition: careful training, they say, will ensure that school police deployed in the wake of Newtown protect, rather than intimidate, students.

But many civil-rights advocates are worried. They say plenty of cities and states are only beginning to come to grips with allegations that schools, and school-based police, have unjustifiably sent students into the criminal-justice system.

A push for security

Police presence in schools has been growing for years. The number of full-time city police officers assigned to schools increased nearly 40 percent from 1997 to 2007, according to the U.S. Justice Department. One infamous incident fueling that rise was the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher by two students at Columbine High School in suburban Denver.

After Newtown, though, an intense new round of calls for more cops in schools has echoed through small towns and big cities nationwide.

The state legislative delegation of Broward County, Fla., for example, quickly approved a proposal in January — it must now be approved by state legislators — that could allow increases in property taxes in Broward to pay for more school police, at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group, told the Center for Public Integrity that in February it began tracking a flurry of school-security legislation in more than 20 states.

Since January, two school-security bills in Mississippi, publicly backed by NRA representatives, have been moving fast through the Statehouse.

One bill would set up a $7.5 million school-security fund to offer Mississippi schools $10,000 matching grants to hire police. The other bill, which Mississippi’s House of Representatives approved Feb. 13, would allow districts to designate teachers or other school staff to act as a secret defense force in the event of an attack. Volunteers would take their own licensed, concealed weapons to school. The House rejected a proposal to require psychological evaluations of those designated by districts.

Alabama legislators are considering creating a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school. Indiana lawmakers are weighing a proposal to set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools. States where legislators have introduced proposals to allow designated teachers or other school staff to be armed include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Texas and Utah already allow licensed gun owners to take weapons onto campuses under certain circumstances. Legislators in those states are discussing ideas for supporting school staff who want to have weapons at school for defense.

The NRA isn’t alone in trying to influence the debate. The Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, or NASRO, is pushing for more law enforcement in schools. NASRO opposes arming teachers.

Stung by criticism of resource officers, the nonprofit NASRO vigorously disputes the idea that a school-to-prison pipeline is pervasive. In To Protect and Educate, a report issued last October, NASRO said: “Attacks against the school resource officer are superficial and polemical.”

On a Facebook page, NASRO has posted multiple news reports about school resource officers foiling violent acts by students.

Kevin Quinn, NASRO president, said in an interview that NASRO regards cases of abuses by school police to be isolated. “The No. 1 way to combat that is training,” said Quinn, a school resource officer in the Phoenix area.

Quinn agreed with civil rights advocates that some school districts have become too reliant on police to enforce discipline. Over the last decade, more schools have adopted “zero tolerance” polices, not just for guns or other weapons or drugs, but for behavior that’s seen as disorderly or defiant.

“The problem,” Quinn said, “is the school at times says, ‘Oh, we’ve got a cop. Let him take care of things.’ ”

Out of hand?

Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske, of Clayton County, Ga., is not against police in schools, but firmly believes that a school-to-prison pipeline exists.

When Teske took the bench in 1999 in his Atlanta suburb, which is 66 percent black, one-third of the cases in his court were kids referred from schools. By 2004, he said, 92 percent of the 1,400 cases in his court came from schools, mostly for alleged disruption and disorderly conduct.

Lt. Francisco Romero, Clayton’s school resource officer at the time, told the Center for Public Integrity that he was disturbed to discover that one year he arrested more people — students — than any other officer in Clayton.

Fed up, Teske called together school and police leaders and hammered out a protocol requiring counseling and clear warnings before students were sent to court. Teske credits the protocol with improving relationships between students and police, and driving down juvenile felonies by 51 percent and increasing graduation rates by 24 percent.

“If police are placed on campus without written protocols defining their role, the results will be disastrous — just as removing existing police from campus can have unintended consequences,” Teske wrote in the publication Youth Today after the Newtown killings.

Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a national civil-rights group urging discipline reforms, said that after the 1999 Columbine shootings, police citations of students in the city of Denver skyrocketed. Student referrals to police increased by 71 percent between 2000 and 2004. Only 7 percent of referrals to law enforcement from Denver’s schools, whose students are mostly nonwhite, were for serious offenses such as carrying a weapon.

In February, Denver school and police officials signed an agreement that obliges school police to “de-escalate” conflicts, attend training sessions on child psychology and embrace “restorative justice,” which requires students to sit down and resolve problems outside the criminal court system.

Dianis, whose group collaborated on the Denver agreement, hopes Denver’s decision influences other jurisdictions as they weigh putting more police in schools.

In Los Angeles — home to the country’s largest school police force — school leaders, judges, police and civil-rights activists have been holding a series of meetings to work toward a protocol for student citations and arrests.

The Center for Public Integrity analyzed Los Angeles Unified School District Police records and found that from 2009 through 2011, officers issued about 10,000 tickets a year to students, mostly in low-income neighborhoods.

More than 40 percent of citations, the Center also found, went to students 14 or younger in schools that parents said were more heavily policed. Juvenile court judges complained about a parade of children in court for infractions better dealt with at school.

Reconciling such findings with current security concerns is difficult, concedes Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program. Parker said it sounds “callous” to protest placing more police in schools after Newtown, a town that immediately after the December massacre assigned officers to guard schools.

“It’s very likely that officers dealing with children in Newtown will deal with them differently than children in Harlem.”

But one of the ACLU’s high-profile lawsuits involving schools right now accuses New York City police — whose ranks have grown in schools by 73 percent since 1998 — of violating students’ rights by using excessive force, handcuffing and arrests in response to infractions such as drawing on a desk.

“It’s very likely that officers dealing with children in Newtown will deal with them differently than children in Harlem,” Parker said. “It is likely to be more of an ‘Officer Joe, your friend,’ who is there than someone who tells you to stand up against a wall and spread your legs.”

New York City police administrators insist that officers have lowered crime in schools and say that the ACLU “talks about arrests in schools but, conveniently, not crimes.”

On Dec. 13, the day before the Newtown killings, Parker’s Racial Justice Program filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of ethnic-minority students allegedly rounded up by police in December 2010 at West High School in Salt Lake City.

The ACLU suit says that plaintiff Kevin Winston’s son, Kaleb, was 14 when two plainclothes officers ushered the student, who is half-black, into a room and falsely accused him of gang membership and graffiti, or “tagging.”

An officer allegedly grabbed Kaleb’s arm, told him, “quit acting tough,” and searched his backpack. The suit says that officers forced Kaleb, who has no juvenile record, to pose for a photo — to put in a gang database — holding a sign with his name and the word “tagger” on it.

After he was released, the suit says, Kaleb was shaken, called his parents and asked to go home. The suit says that when Lisa Winston, his mother, protested what had happened officers told her the sweep was done because of “a problem with the Mexicans.”

On March 1, the Salt lake defendants filed a court document admitting that police had entered the school and questioned students. But in the documents, they deny that they "acted unconstitutionally" and deny that they referred to a problem with Mexicans.

In February, a similar suit filed by the ACLU of Southern California in 2011 was partially settled on behalf of 56 students at Hoover High School in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles.

The suit says that school administrators and Glendale police interrogated Latino and other minority students, and made them pose for mock mug shots.

Glendale police Sgt. Thomas Lorenz told the Associated Press that the actions were an attempt to educate students on the peril of gangs. He denied that officers’ methods amounted to racial profiling.

“I’ve never been in trouble, and it was confusing, terrifying and humiliating,” Ashley Flores, who was 16 when the incident happened.

The settlement requires Glendale police and school officials to notify parents if students are to be questioned on campus. To ensure that officers uphold students’ rights, they will be trained to avoid racial profiling.

Walking the line

Michael Nash, presiding juvenile court judge in Los Angeles County, said in an interview that it’s hard to argue against placing police in schools — if they stay out of discipline matters.

As president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Nash sent a strongly worded letter to the Obama administration on Jan. 15, responding to the administration’s call for ideas on school safety.

“Research shows that aggressive security measures produce alienation and mistrust among students, which, in turn, can disrupt the learning environment,” the letter said. “Such restrictive environments may actually lead to violence, thus jeopardizing, instead of promoting, school safety.”

A student’s odds of dropping out of high school quadruple with a first-time court appearance, Nash wrote. Last summer, the judges’ council began a national campaign “to support school engagement and reduce school expulsion.” Putting more armed personnel into schools, Nash said, could prove “counterproductive” to this effort.

On Jan. 16, the White House announced it would seek congressional authorization for a $385 million school violence prevention package for fiscal year 2014.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the president’s proposals would go to appropriate committees. A Washington Post poll in January suggested that the recommendation for hiring more school police would face little opposition. The poll found that 55 percent of the public would even support a law to put an armed guard in every school.

A centerpiece of the White House proposal is the request for $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 new police. But in nod to concerns like Nash’s, schools could also use grants to hire counselors and school psychologists.

The administration also proposes $50 million to help 8,000 schools create safer and more “nurturing” atmospheres at schools. Another $25 million would be used to help schools struggling with “pervasive violence,” and $30 million would be for one-time grants for states to help schools develop emergency plans.

A total of $130 million would be for helping schools adopt conflict-resolution programs and improving early detection of student mental health problems.

In a January media call, Education secretary Duncan was asked to respond to concerns that more police would lead to misguided crackdowns on students.

“There’s no reason why additional school resources have to drive up the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline,” Duncan said. “Execution is really important — taking time train people in a really thoughtful way.” The Department of Justice, he said, will be in on that training.

Duncan is no stranger to controversy over school discipline.

Between 2009 and 2012, the Department of Education launched more than 20 investigations into allegations in school districts that minority students were punished more harshly than white pupils for the same violations of school rules. Duncan’s department aims to amicably reach agreements with districts to change discipline practices. Last year, the department also released an unprecedented analysis of national school data showing that black students, 18 percent of the sample, represented 42 percent of students referred to law enforcement.

These issues have been aired in two Congressional hearings since December.

In a February appearance before the House Education and the Workforce Committee, NASRO’s executive director, Mo Canady said the role of school resource officers is as “a trusted adult that a student can come to for information, for guidance.” He also said officers should leave “formal discipline” to educators.

Searching for balance

In Texas, police involvement in routine school discipline is a hot topic.

On Feb. 20, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Youth Law Center filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The complaint is based on citation records showing that black students in the Bryan Independent School District, 100 miles north of Houston, are given municipal court summonses in numbers far greater than the proportion of school enrollment they represent.

Black students represent almost 22 percent of the 15,500-pupil Bryan district but were given more than half of all Class C misdemeanor tickets issued to students for “disruption of class” and “disorderly conduct,” according to the complaint. The complaint also says that staff of Texas Appleseed, a public-interest law group, observed Bryan students in court, including a 13-year-old whose teacher overheard him use profanity before class started and sent him to the principal, who, in turn, asked an officer to issue a ticket.

In a statement, the Bryan district said it would welcome “a dialogue” with federal education investigators. The citation numbers alleged in the complaint “were certainly no surprise to us, and we have been proactive in taking measures to address the issue,” the district said. “We hope the measures we are taking to support our minority students will result in a more positive outcome.”

Texas state Democratic Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, says it’s time to stop these tickets, which can cost families hundreds of dollars and end up creating a criminal record for the student.

He said legislators will have to search for a balance between security and smart use of school police. The Houston Democrat hopes to pass a bill this year to stop ticketing for basic misbehavior, and require alternatives for students before schools send them to court.

It used to be a “comforting” to see a police officer at school, Whitmire said. Then cash-strapped schools shed counselors, police stepped in as enforcers, and Texas courts, he said, began to expect revenue from student tickets.

“These police departments have grown and grown, and they have to justify their budgets,” Whitmire added. “They’ve even asked for legislation to be able to go [do enforcement] outside schools.”

But in response to Newtown, Whitmire is co-sponsoring another proposal with state Sen. Tommy Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands, to allow districts to try to raise taxes or other revenue to hire more school police or buy security technology.

He’d prefer adding police to arming teachers, Whitmire said, but he’ll “make damn sure,” he said, that more police doesn’t lead to more tickets.

Mississippi state Democratic Rep. John Hines Sr. is concerned about safety, too. But he’s also trying to get fellow legislators more interested in allegations of a school-to-prison pipeline in his state.

In January, Hines, who chairs the House Youth and Family Affairs Committee, held a state public hearing to discuss the “Handcuffs on Success” report issued that month by the Advancement Project, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and the Mississippi Coalition for the Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse.

“I want kids safe. I don’t want people coming off the street or an enraged child shooting people. But I don’t want lots of people all strapped up with guns at our schools either.”

The report notes that the Jackson Public Schools District was sued in 2011 in connection to allegations that its students were handcuffed to railings for dress-code violations or refusing to do their schoolwork. The district settled the suit last May with an agreement to stop handcuffing children younger than 13, and to only handcuff older students when they are accused of a crime. A review of Jackson police records shows, according to “Handcuffs on Success,” that 96 percent of student arrests at schools in 2010-11 were for misdemeanors, most for disorderly conduct. Only 4 percent were for suspected felonies.

Hines said he’s also troubled by a lawsuit the U.S. Department of Justice filed last October against Meridian, Miss, alleging that students there “are regularly and repeatedly handcuffed and arrested in school and incarcerated for days at a time without a probable cause hearing.”

“I want kids safe,” Hines said. “I don’t want people coming off the street or an enraged child shooting people. But I don’t want lots of people all strapped up with guns at our schools either.”

Republican Lester “Bubba” Carpenter, who also serves in Mississippi’s House, is sponsoring the proposal to allow districts to designate teachers or employees as a secret “marshals” with permission to bring their own licensed, concealed weapons to school.

Mississippi is a “pretty poor state,” Carpenter said, so the idea is cost-effective. He’s not worried that teachers will panic and shoot in haste.

“I think they’re smart enough individuals,” Carpenter said. “We trust them with our children every day.”

But Carpenter also supports the proposal to set aside $7.5 million so that schools can apply for $10,000 matching grants to hire police officers.

“I’ll vote for both of them,” Carpenter said of the proposals. “You can’t get enough security at schools.”

Carpenter said he wasn’t that familiar with the allegations of police excesses alleged in the ACLU and U.S Justice Department lawsuits, or the “Handcuffs on Success” report.

“You’re always going to have a bad apple,” he said.

Report reveals dramatic decline in youth incarceration

United States — 2013-02-27T13:24:30-05:00

The United States still leads the industrialized world in incarcerating young people, and ethnic-minority kids are still locked up more than whites.

But there is good news: Since 1995, the rate at which states confine young people has been steadily dropping for all ethnic groups, reaching the lowest rate in 35 years in 2010, according to a report released Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In 1975, the child welfare and research group found, the number of youth aged 20 or younger placed in lockup began climbing, reaching a peak in 1995 of 381 kids locked up for every 100,000 nationwide. That same year, though, the rate began declining, dropping by an impressive 41 percent between 1995 and 2010 to 225 per 100,000.

The report by the Baltimore-based foundation also notes that the reduction in incarceration rates has not been accompanied by any increases in crime. “On the contrary,” the report says, “crime has fallen sharply even as juvenile justice systems have locked up fewer delinquent youth.”

Laura Speer, associate director of policy reform and data at Casey, said in an interview that the report’s “main take away is that this is positive trend.”

However, Speer said, some states still show relatively higher propensities for locking up youths – South Dakota is one – and across the country, black youth are nearly five times more likely to be confined than whites. Latino and American Indian youth are between two and three times more likely than whites to be locked up.

“There is still a way to go, across the country, to get equities in the way kids are treated throughout the juvenile-justice system,” Speer said.

She cited several factors for contributing to the overall decline in youth incarceration.

One, she said, is the impact of lawsuits that have been filed in various states to expose allegations of abusive conditions inside state-run youth detention centers.

Another, Speer said, is a growing acceptance nationally of research showing that locking up most youth offenders only increases their chances of getting into more trouble later.

In addition, Speer said, even if they haven’t wanted to, state legislators have been pushed by state budget crises to deinstitutionalize youth who’ve been sentenced to do time inside costly prisons.

Instead, many wards have been shifted to cheaper county-based custody or community-based treatment. California and New York are among those states, as the Center for Public Integrity has reported. The Center receives funding from the Casey Foundation.

The figures cited in Casey’s new report are based on a survey of confined populations conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Speer pointed to another finding in the report that shatters assumptions held by many.

Most kids in lockup in 2010, the report says, were not there because they had committed violent offenses or robbery. Only one in four youths was confined for such serious reasons.

Instead, nearly 40 percent of detentions and commitments to juvenile lockup were for drug possession, technical probation violations and “status” offenses, infractions that only minors commit, such as truancy or underage purchase or possession of alcohol.

“The majority of these young people don’t pose a risk,” Speer said. Many experts are continuing to press states to stop locking up status offenders and other youth accused of relatively minor offenses.

Nonetheless, Speer said, the Casey Foundation is encouraged by changes it sees.

A vast majority of states — 44 out of 50 — experienced reductions in numbers of confined wards between 1997 and 2010. Several states, including Arizona and Georgia, cut their numbers by 50 percent or more.

On the global stage, Speer said, the United States has a lot of work still to do to drive down youth incarceration rates to those in comparable industrialized nations.

In 2010, she said, the rate at which American youth were locked up was 225 per 100,000. In 2008, in England, according to the latest data Speer had, the rate was about 47 per 100,000. In Australia, the rate of youth lockup in 2008 was about 30 per 100,000.

Rep. Gutierrez meets on Capitol Hill with families torn apart by 1996 immigration law

Mexico — 2013-02-15T08:33:32-05:00

Americans whose spouses have been exiled for years as a result of strict immigration penalties took their plight to Congress Thursday, begging legislators to help them as lawmakers discuss overhauling immigration laws.

Some of the affected families met with a key figure in the immigration fight, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who told them that he believes there is a new bipartisan spirit in Congress, and a readiness to eliminate at least some of the mandatory penalties Congress approved in 1996. Members who approved the punitive laws in 1996 said they wanted to try to deter illegal immigration by punishing offenders more harshly. The penalties have split up families for years at a time.

The punishments, mandatory terms of exile known as “bars,” must be imposed on an undocumented spouse when he or she tries to go through the process of becoming a legal resident. Americans have a right to sponsor foreign spouses for legal residency, but their citizenship does not trump the penalties Congress currently requires be handed down.

Thousands of Americans’ spouses — many of them parents of children who are U.S. citizens — have received these bars since they started kicking in, after delays, around 2002. A basic bar ousts spouses for 10 years. But some spouses have been barred for 20 years, even for life with no possibility of return.

On Thursday, affected Americans with small children told Gutierrez of relocating to Mexico to reunite with spouses. They complained of multiple hardships, including health problems and threats of kidnapping and extortion.

“What devastation,” Gutierrez said, calling the bars “cruel” and “fundamentally wrong” because they force a U.S. citizen to raise children alone, without a spouse, or face exile to keep a family together. Gutierrez sits on the House Judiciary Committee and its House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, key forums where negotiations over immigration proposals will likely occur.

Los Angeles resident Chris Xitco, whose story was featured in a recent Center for Public Integrity report on the bars, traveled to the Capitol to participate in the Thursday press event. It was organized by American Families United, a group urging Congress to make changes that would reunite families and put more flexibility into immigration penalties.

Xitco met with aides to his two senators, California Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as with an aide to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who could be critical to mustering GOP support for immigration reform.

Rubio’s press secretary did not respond to requests for comment.

“I don’t know how optimistic I can get,” said Xitco, 49, who fears for the safety of his wife Delia and their two small children, who live south of Tijuana, and whom he visits on weekends.

His wife, whom he married in Los Angeles in 2002, was barred at least until 2018, a punishment meted out because she had crossed the border a second time after getting caught once. She received a lifetime bar that can only be appealed after 10 years.

Margot Bruemmer, 40, of New Jersey, recounted moving to a rural area in Mexico’s Veracruz state after her husband was barred in 2005.

The couple has two children, ages two and four. Bruemmer said her lawyer failed to warn the couple that her husband would end up barred for at least 10 years when she tried to legalize him after marrying. Because he had crossed the border more than once, he too was given a lifetime bar that can only be appealed after a decade.

Bruemmer and her husband received news that he would be barred as others have — back in his home country, at a U.S. consulate, where undocumented immigrants are required to report for a legal-residency interview as a last step before getting green cards.

“I cried, and I begged,” Bruemmer said, remembering when the U.S. consular officer in Juarez, Mexico, gave the couple the shocking news that her husband was barred.

Bruemmer said her children have to sleep under a mosquito net and live with the threat of catching a fever. But she loves her husband and wants to keep the family together.

“I want my daughters to grow up the way I grew up,” Bruemmer said. She said her husband is eking out a living running a store. Because she is an American, she said, her family has become a target, and has been threatened with kidnapping and extortion.

“I am begging for our lawmakers, in this upcoming immigration reform debate, to not forget those of us already living outside the country, already barred,” Bruemmer said. “Please, do not forget us.”

In the 1996 legislation, Congress did include a system of hardship waivers that can shorten bars for some affected families. But that’s an option only if the undocumented spouse entered and resided illegally in the United States once, without multiple crossings.

In addition, up to now, spouses have only been able to apply for hardship waivers after they have been barred and are outside the United States. There are no guarantees that waivers, which are notoriously difficult to argue, will be approved. Thousands have been rejected, and many families have waited for months, or years, for word on applications.

Americans’ complaints about lengthy separations have resulted in some changes.

Starting in March, under order by President Obama, undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens will be allowed to apply for hardship waivers before going to their final residency interview back in their home countries. Rep. Lamar Smith, at the time the GOP chair of the House Judiciary Committee, denounced Obama’s change on the waiver procedure.

“Who is the president batting for — illegal immigrants or the American people?” Smith said in a statement. He was the author of the 1996 immigration reform.

But Obama’s waiver change won’t help Xitco, Bruemmer or Edgar Falcon, a citizen from El Paso, Texas, who also traveled to Capitol Hill this week.

Falcon’s wife, Maricruz, 24, has been barred for life, and now lives in Durango, Mexico. She arrived in the United States when she 16, brought in illegally by family members. Because her sister used a false ID to enter, a U.S. consular official decided Maricruz must have used one as well, Falcon said.

“I thought there was a waiver for teens,” Falcon said. After Maricruz was barred, Falcon contacted his congressional representatives, but received no reply. “They turned their back on me,” the 27-year-old said.

Gutierrez said he has been contacted by many Americans with barred spouses, and many others who are too afraid to try to legalize their spouses.

“The American public does not understand this situation,” Gutierrez said. But he sees potential allies for reform among some Republicans, he said, including Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the former vice presidential contender, and Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho. Gutierrez said he met with Rubio for an hour recently, and has also discussed the situation with Ryan.

Kathy McGroarty, 36, a resident of Chicago, read an emotional statement Thursday while at the Capitol, recounting how she and husband tried to live in Mexico after he was barred nearly a decade ago. They ended up returning to the United States — he illegally.

“For almost 10 years, my husband, Ines, and I have lived every day with the fear that our lives could be destroyed by a deportation order,” McGroarty said. “We have two boys, Estevan and Diego, who have no idea that their father’s immigration status could ultimately bring unbelievable heartache to our home. As far as they know, we are just another regular American family.”

Federal initiative to help schools recognize youth sex trafficking

2013-02-08T09:08:05-05:00

Children involved in commercial sex trafficking are often recruited first by classmates at school who are doing the bidding of pimps, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other officials warned Wednesday at an event at the U.S. Department of Education.

Officials also warned that educators could unwittingly leave students vulnerable to victimization if they suspend or expel troubled students from school — leaving them unsupervised — or place them in alternative school settings where they are also exposed to potential recruiters.

“In my school district we are looking at our disciplinary practices,” said Jenee Littrell, director of guidance and wellness at the Grossmont Union High School District in San Diego County. She was invited to the U.S. Department of Education describe her efforts to identify and help school-aged youth exploited by pimps. The Obama Administration is attempting to disseminate more information to schools on this problem.

Littrell talked about two girls who, unknown to school staff, had become involved in child prostitution. The girls’ behavior had become especially aggressive with staff, and one girl was suspended from school, Littrell said. She was discovered at a track, an hour later, Littrell said.

Littrell said that, in her experience, girls who are lured into prostitution have been poor and affluent and from all ethnic backgrounds. But recruiters, both boys and girls working for pimps, Littrell said, zero in on kids in foster care and students with troubled home lives or special-education needs.

Warnings signs teachers can look for: when kids buy lunch for other kids, or flash around money, or become fiercely protective of their cell phones because they contain information about pimps. One girl, Littrell said, ultimately disclosed to adults that she had been sent to work hundreds of miles away in another California city, where her prostitution at a truck stop brought in a thousand dollars a day.

Alice Hill, senior counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, said human trafficking, whether to serve the sex industry or the job market, has been designated a national-security threat. “We call it ‘hidden in plain sight,’ “ Hill said. Some of the trafficked are foreigners smuggled into the United States. They are often promised jobs in offices or industries and then forced into prostitution once they are here.

But other victims are Americans, some younger than teens.

Hill said between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are at risk of being trafficked for sex, according to University of Pennsylvania and U.S. Justice Department studies. Almost half of sex-trafficking activity involves minors. Gangs have become deeply involved in recruiting and controlling child prostitutes. One of the more notorious of these gangs, Hill said, is MS-13, the transnational crime group with networks in Central America and the United States.

Hill said gangs have started putting tattoos on girls whose prostitution they control. “It’s a form of showing ownership of the victim,” Hill said. Under federal law, no youth who is under 18 who is prostituting can be charged with sex-trafficking; he or she is considered a victim under the law. Underage recruiters, however, can be charged.

Class-action suit challenges Massachusetts foster care system

Massachusetts,United States — 2013-01-23T06:00:01-05:00

The state of Massachusetts is going to trial this week, fighting accusations that it is systematically failing to protect children in foster care from allegedly unfit foster homes, physical abuse, medical and educational neglect, questionable psychotropic drug doses and other harm.

Children’s Rights, a New York-based children’s national advocacy group, filed suit against Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and two health and human services officials in April 2010. The trial that opened in federal court in Boston Tuesday could last for weeks.

Massachusetts has a good reputation as a state concerned with child welfare, Children’s Rights’ executive director Marcia Robinson Lowry said. But after two years of research, her group was surprised to conclude that the state’s child-welfare system is “one of the most dangerous in the country on a number of significant measures.”

The Children’s Rights’ suit is a class-action lawsuit with six young plaintiffs whose alleged neglect is specifically described, along with findings based on data measuring various aspects of children’s care. Massachusetts tried, unsuccessfully to get a court to block Children’s Rights’ pursuit of a class-action lawsuit representing all the state’s foster children, who currently number about 7,500.

Massachusetts is the first state to decide to go to full trial – instead of settling— in response to a legal challenge by Children’s Rights alleging that foster children’s constitutional rights are being violated. Children’s Rights has sued 15 other states’ foster-care and welfare systems for alleged neglect of children.

“The accusation of deliberate indifference just does not fit,” said Angelo McLair, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, who is also named as a defendant in the suit. He told the Center for Public Integrity that the trial— expected to last weeks— is an opportunity for the state to air its side of the story, including a description of changes it has undertaken to improve the foster-care system.

Court documents show that McLair and the defendants, including Gov. Patrick, have argued that Children’s Rights can’t establish a link between the alleged harm done to the six individual plaintiffs and the need for “systemic” changes that the class-action lawsuit seeks —including federal court-ordered reforms and oversight. In a background document given to the Center, the state says, “We expect the full evidence at trial to show that the Department (of Children and Families) meets its obligations under the law to protect children from abuse and neglect.” The state has a more “comprehensive process of screening in cases for investigation” of alleged abuses than 44 other states, the document also says.

Unlike other states that the Children’s Right’s group has sued, Lowry said, Massachusetts “has expressed no interest in settling this case.”

She said that in Massachusetts, “there has been, from time to time, lip service to fix these problems.”

But while some changes have been instituted, Lowry said, “they have been improvements around the edges – with plans.” And some of the state’s own witnesses so far have said it’s too soon to tell if they’ll work, Lowry said.

“The state is actually misspending money,” Lowry said, because of allegedly poor practices that end up “compounding” children’s problems and costing taxpayers more as children languish in state care for years, requiring ever more specialized care, or cycle in and out of the system.

In its lawsuit, Children’s Rights describes harrowing allegations of suffering by the plaintiffs, including a boy named Connor B., who was removed from the care of his mother when he was six-years-old because of alleged neglect and endangerment in her home.

Connor was placed in a foster home with another older boy officials knew could pose a threat, the lawsuit says, but there were insufficient safety plans in place inside that home and the boy began to allegedly sexually abuse Connor in his room. Connor was moved at least five times during his first year in foster care, the suit says.

Because of abuses suffered following his abuse in foster care, according to the lawsuit, Connor was hospitalized for more than four months and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. A specialist made specific recommendations for where Connor should be placed. But child-welfare officials allegedly disregarded those recommendations and Connor, as a result, failed to get appropriate therapy and access to schooling as he was shuttled about from home to home, the suit says.

McLain said the state’s attorney didn’t want him to get into a discussion of legal stategy, but that once in court, the state will address allegations of neglect and the system’s transformation in recent years.

The lawsuit says Massachusetts moves children around among foster homes with “damaging frequency.” A federal audit ranked the state eighth worst among 51 jurisdictions, including states and the District of Columbia, reporting data on “placement stability.” This is a measuresment of how well a jurisidiction does at keeping children in stable foster homes rather than shuffling them around. The suit also notes that a federal audit ranked Massachusetts at 13^th worst among 47 jurisdictions reporting data related to “timeliness of adoptions” of children in foster care.

In a background document, the state’s Department of Children and Families says that its decision to contest the Children’s Rights’ lawsuit is “further evidence that we are confident in the work that we are doing on behalf of children in the Commonwealth.”

In the last four years, the document says, the state has increased “placement stability” of foster children from 73 to 79 percent, an improvement in the measurement of how well a jurisdiction is doing in avoiding transfers of children from home to home. Officials attribute to better rates of placement of children with relatives.

McLair, the commissioner of children and families, said that a review in 2009 led officials to acknowledge that they had to strive to improve the rate at which they were placing children with kin rather than non-relative foster parents. The rate of placement with kin increased from 72 percent in 2008 to 80 percent today, McLair said.

He also said that Massachusetts has improved its child-to-social worker caseload in recent years, from 18 to one to a current level of 16 to one. And, McLair added, the state recently boosted payments to foster parents, who were being underpaid.

The state doesn’t dispute examples of some problems that need to be addressed, McLair said. But he said officials disagree that the state needs federal court oversight to keep making improvements.

Juvenile court judges latest to express concern over armed security in schools

2013-04-29T22:31:32-04:00

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is voicing concern over the push to put armed police or guards into American schools following the Newtown school massacre of 20 first-graders and six staff last December.

On Tuesday, the Reno, Nev.-based group posted an excerpt of a letter sent to Vice President Biden, who has been leading a month-long effort to gather ideas for more effective gun restrictions and improved school safety. The White House is reportedly poised to reveal some recommendations Wednesday at a midday press conference.

In its letter to Biden, the NCJFCJ expressed strong misgivings about the prospect of communities putting armed guards in schools – which could become even more likely if federal dollars are offered to help schools make that choice.

Published reports indicated Biden’s task force was considering such a plan, which has also been pushed by Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat from California. In addition, the National Rifle Association has been vocal in its backing of armed security in the nation’s schools.

Echoing concerns by civil-rights and juvenile-justice advocates, the NCJFCJ warns in its letter than an expansive police presence in schools can lead to unintended and negative consequences. The judges’ group argues that the posting of police officers to ensure safety has in the past led to misguided crackdowns on kids.

The letter notes that many counties across the country saw an upsurge in arrests of minors for modest indiscretions after districts began deploying police on campuses during the 1990s. The increased police presence on campuses has not improved school safety, the judges’ organization argues, while asserting that graduation rates in some of these schools have fallen. Some students’ futures have been jeopardized, the judges say, by early introduction into the criminal-justice system.

“The influx of police in schools has been one of the main contributors to the growing number of children funneled into this pipeline,” the letter to Biden says. “Research shows that aggressive security measures produce alienation and mistrust among students which, in turn, can disrupt the learning environment. Such restrictive environments may actually lead to violence, thus jeopardizing, instead of promoting, school safety.”

The NCJFCJ’s letter was signed by its president, Judge Michael Nash, who is the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court’s presiding judge.

The letter refers to the 75-year-old NCJFCJ as one is a nation’s oldest and largest judicial membership organizations. Members study and recommend methods for improving juvenile-justice practices and advise more than 30,000 juvenile-justice professionals.

Nash, along with other juvenile court judges, has been an enthusiastic participant in a push to reform school-discipline practices in Los Angeles and elsewhere, in part by reducing the use of police officers at schools.

He was interviewed by the Center for Public Integrity for a recent series of stories about the deployment of school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the area’s largest. Officers in the California district, data analysis showed, were ticketing thousands of mostly low-income Latino and black students annually for alleged conduct ranging from tardiness to school-yard fights.

In March, the NCJFCJ took an official position that discipline practices had grown too harsh in a some regions across the country, resulting in too much police involvement and too many students sent to court for relatively minor misbehavior.

In July, the NCJFCJ began a national project to reduce school expulsions and promote new ways to keep students engaged in school.

“Any proposal to place more armed personnel in school,” the letter says, “would be counterproductive to the success of this project.”

In conclusion, Nash’s letter invites Biden to contact the group. The judges, the letter says, are “committed to remain involved in ongoing conversations to craft solutions to enhance student safety while promoting student school involvement and success.”

Last Friday, the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project and several other organizations involved in school-discipline reform released a report also expressing concerns about putting police in schools in response to the Newtown shootings. The Advancement Project has also begun a petition drive to oppose financing armed guards in schools.

After a number of its representatives met with aides to Biden and President Obama, the National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition also issued a series of recommendations for a “comprehensive” approach aimed at keeping children safe from gun violence.

“Across the country, people are searching for answers,” the Washington, D.C.-based coalition says in its recommendations. “The NJJDPC views this as a critical moment to invest more broadly in the true safety of proven strategies, not in the false sense of security of arming teachers or increasing police presence in every school. It is our view that true safety will not result from having more guns in schools or other places where youth congregate.”

The coalition includes the Campaign for Youth Justice, the National Juvenile Defender Center and the Center for Children’s Law and Policy.

The Newtown children and teachers and other staff were gunned down by a disturbed local man who shot his way into the school with semi-automatic weapons belonging to his mother.

The National Rifle Association, in response to the shooting, has offered to train staff at schools in communities that decide to arm teachers or other employees who are designated to protect students in the event of an attack.

In the meantime, some communities are already taking action unilaterally.

The small Montpelier school district in rural northeast Ohio, for example, has decided to pay for training four employees – who are not teachers -- who have agreed to carry their own guns inside the district’s one building. About 1,000 students are enrolled in kindergarten through high school. Legislators in various states, including South Carolina and Oklahoma, are considering legislation to allow teachers or other staff to have guns inside schools.

And in Arizona, the Associated Press reported, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio – who has been investigated for allegedly violating the civil rights of Hispanics – plans to post armed volunteers on the perimeters of schools.

School discipline reform groups question proposals for armed security

2013-04-29T22:31:32-04:00

As the White House considers proposals to allocate federal money for armed guards in schools, prominent school-discipline reform groups have issued a report denouncing the idea as a misguided reaction to the Newtown school shooting.

“Placing more police in schools has significant and harmful unintended consequences for young people that must be considered before agreeing to any proposal that would increase the presence of law enforcement in schools,”says an issue brief released Friday by the Advancement Project, Dignity in Schools and other organizations.

The Advancement Project, founded in 1999, has offices in Washington D.C. and California, and has worked with school districts and states to adopt alternatives to school suspensions and expulsions. Dignity in Schools is also devoted to working with school districts, advocating fewer school suspensions and less involvement of law enforcement in school discipline.

The groups called on the White House and Congress, before they act, to consider how the school-discipline climate changed after more police were introduced to schools in response to the Columbine school shootings nearly 15 years ago in Colorado.

“We have seen what happens when [schools] ramp up police presence and other security measures in response to a shooting or other violent act. In Colorado, it resulted in more students getting arrested for minor misbehaviors, more students being pushed out of school, and a declining sense of safety in schools,” the brief says.

“These unintended consequences,” the report continues, “are persistent and pervasive – despite efforts by parents, students, and the school district, the high arrest rates and racial disparities that resulted from increased police presence and zero tolerance policies still exist.”

Vice President Joe Biden, who is leading a new White House effort on gun control and school safety, is reportedly interested in the idea of allocating federal money to schools that wish to have armed guard protection, according to a recent report by the Washington Post.

The idea is being championed by one of Congress’ most ardent liberals, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who told the Post that Biden is “very, very interested” in a plan she presented to finance the deployment of police officers at schools.

“I don’t see why anyone should object to it, left or right,” Boxer told the Post. “It’s an area where I think I can find common ground with my colleagues on all sides.”

Biden has met with a number of different groups this week in his role as leader of the post-Newtown effort —among them the National Rifle Association.

The NRA, under scrutiny for its intense efforts to preserve gun-ownership liberties, has suggested that schools consider training and arming teachers or other appointed staff inside schools. The NRA has offered to pay for and provide training.

"If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy," NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said at a press conference explaining the group’s recommendations.

LaPierre also urged Congress to appropriate “whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school.”

But in its Friday brief, the Advancement Project, whose ideas have gained traction recently in Washington, reacted with dismay to both the NRA and Boxer’s recommendations.

Following the Newtown killings, Boxer also proposed placing National Guard in schools.

“We object to using the limited resources of the federal government to expand the presence of police in schools,” the Advancement Project brief says. “More specifically, we oppose the legislation offered late last Congress by Senator Barbara Boxer to facilitate the installation of National Guard troops in U.S. schools. We cannot support any such actions that have not been shown to make schools safer and instead can lead to terrifying, fatal mistakes.”

The Advancement Project report cites specific examples of students ticketed or arrested for minor infractions in various cities with a beefed-up school police presence, including Denver, Colo., New York City and Los Angeles, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity in a series of recent stories recently.

In Denver, where parent-led reforms are now aiming to reverse harsh discipline practices, schools saw a 71 percent jump in referrals of students to police or courts between 2000 and 2004. Most referrals, the brief notes, were for minor infractions such as using obscenities, disruptive appearance and destruction of non-school property.

“Serious conduct, like carrying a dangerous weapon to school, accounted for only 7% of the referrals,” the report says.

The Obama Administration has noticed these patterns, the report also says, and has taken action to encourage or require schools to adopt alternatives to suspensions and involvement of law enforcement in discipline matters.

On Dec. 12, Advancement Project co-director Judith Browne Dianis testified at the first congressional hearing on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. That’s a term coined by groups arguing that the involvement of police in what should be school disciplinary matters is putting some students, especially low-income minorities, on a path to more serious trouble.

Activists want guidelines for L.A. school police

Los Angeles,California,United States — 2013-01-08T15:06:10-05:00

A new report by KPCC Southern California Public Radio focuses on continuing debate in Los Angeles over when it’s appropriate for school police to get involved in ticketing or arresting students.

In collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, KPCC reported Monday that nearly half of all tickets issued in the mostly-minority Los Angeles Unified School District are still being given to students 14 or younger. The most common charge is disturbing the peace. That’s roughly the same proportion that previous Center and public radio reports found when analyzing older data. Administrators pledged reforms after those earlier stories.

As the KPCC and Center joint report says, the L.A. district is continuing to institute “positive behavior support” methods in every school as way to both limit student suspensions and moderate law-enforcement involvement in discipline matters. The district’s “strategic plan” for 2012-2015 declares a commitment to “a non-punitive enforcement model that supports strategic problem-solving models rather than citation and arrest-driven enforcement.”

However, not all schools have adopted the new models. And the district hasn’t sufficiently clarified standards for ticketing, a Los Angeles student-parent group, the Community Rights Campaign, said in a Jan. 2 letter it sent to Superintendent John Deasy.

The group noted that, according to recent data, school police in Los Angeles are still giving out more tickets than police in New York City’s district, which is larger.

Black students, who make up about 10 percent of the L.A. district’s students, comprised 20 percent of all students ticketed in recent months, the Community Rights Campaign said. And, as the Center pointed out, students as young as six and seven have been cited, the group said.

“We remain firm that the district needs to implement specific guidelines preventing the use of citations, arrests and other formal law enforcement interventions for school discipline,” the group’s letter says.

Los Angeles Unified has the nation’s largest school police force.

Juvenile court judges in Los Angeles, probation officers, school police and administrators are currently discussing how to set specific standards for police intervention in schools.

Over time, judges and civil rights attorneys in Los Angeles have become concerned that school-police tickets – more than 1,000 in September and October -- are disproportionately given out in low-income schools whose students are mostly Latino and black.

Middle schools with high citation rates feed into high schools with high dropout rates. Judges said that in recent years, they began to feel that too many students accused of schoolyard fights in middle school and other minor infractions were being inappropriately ticketed in certain schools.

The release of citations data over the last year has confirmed these concerns, judges say.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is monitoring Los Angeles Unified’s agreement with the department to change academic and discipline practices. Citations are among the trends the department said it would monitor.

In its Jan. 2 letter, the Community Rights Campaign also expressed concern about the district’s recent decision to initiate daily patrols by Los Angeles city police officers inside elementary schools. The decision to organize city police checks at schools followed the massacre of 20 school children by a man who shot his way into a school in Newtown, Conn., last month.

While the need “to act” is understandable, the group said, its members are concerned that there have not been public discussions about this decision, nor clear “parameters” set for the role of officers.

The Community Rights Campaign is part of the Labor-Community Strategy Center, which successfully organized students last year to stop early-morning police sweeps around Los Angeles’ inner-city schools, where students were being ticketed even if only minutes late. Some students were handcuffed and searched.

Feds announce new rules for legalizing undocumented spouses

United States — 2013-01-03T15:45:57-05:00

The Department of Homeland Security has announced new rules designed to make it easier for thousands of U.S. citizens to legalize undocumented spouses without risking years of separation first.

The rules—published in the Federal Register Thursday—spell out a policy first announced by President Obama a year ago, in January 2012; the policy is designed to help families avoid the hardship of long separation. However, representatives of those families say thousands of others won’t benefit, and will still face certain exile under a series of little-known but mandatory punishments Congress created in 1996.

Those penalties and their effects on families were the subject of a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity. Thousands of U.S. citizens, many with children, have attempted to legalize spouses only to see them ordered out of the United States for a decade or more, as mandated by a 1996 immigration law. As a result, countless couples have chosen not to come forward and attempt to legalize the foreign spouse.

Here is how the current system works, and how the new rule – which takes effect March 4— alters the green-card application process:

Under current law, U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents can sponsor spouses or certain other relatives for a green card, which is a legal permanent residency visa. People who entered the United States unlawfully cannot complete the process for obtaining a green card without returning to home countries first for screening at U.S. consulate. Once these people leave the United States, however, they trigger what are called mandatory “bars” to returning to the United States.

The bars – penalties Congress created — vary from three to 10 to 20 years, or even life, as the report by the Center and KQED public radio made clear.

People whose only infraction was to illegally enter the country once and stay for more than a year can later apply for hardship waivers—waivers commonly granted only for extraordinary hardship, beyond the pain of separation from a spouse. But they can only apply for waivers once they are barred, and living outside the United States.

Couples that have applied for waivers complain that months, even years, have gone by before they have been either granted or rejected, causing families severe financial drain and emotional hardship.

Thousands of couples have not been eligible for waivers at all. This group is large: it includes anyone who has been deported, or admits they crossed the border more than once, or anyone whom immigration officials suspect might have lied or used a fake document to gain entry.

The new Homeland Security rule won’t change any of these terms for eligibility or rejection.

However, the new procedure will allow U.S. citizens’ undocumented spouses – if their only offense is unlawful presence— to apply for hardship waivers before, not after, they leave the United States for their required green-card interview back in home countries.

Under the new rules, by the time they go to their final interview, these immigrants will know if they’ve been granted waivers. Separation of couples is likely to be cut to a matter of months, and families will have more information with which to make plans, U.S. officials say.

The new procedure “facilitates the legal immigration process and reduces the amount of time that U.S. citizens are separated from their immediate relatives who are in the process of obtaining an immigrant visa,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said Wednesday.

Randall Emery, president of American Families United, called the new procedure “a step in the right direction,” but said “we expect only 5 percent of our members to benefit.”

American Families United is a loose network of U.S. citizens who’ve been separated from foreign spouses, or forced to move abroad to remain with them. Members also include many citizens who are too afraid to try to legalize a spouse because they fear lengthy bars will be imposed.

Emery’s group has about 100 active members at the moment, he said, and 4,000 supporters through a Facebook connection. Many families are reluctant to join a support group, or go public at all about their predicament.

American Families United, Emery said, will beef up lobbying in an effort to influence immigration reform proposals and address the continuing problems of its members —problems that were detailed by the Center’s investigation.

Read the original story.

Los Angeles school police still ticketing thousands of young students

Los Angeles,California,United States — 2013-03-04T13:43:38-05:00

Even as Los Angeles authorities continue efforts to reform school-discipline standards, fresh data show that police from the city’s biggest school district are continuing to ticket thousands of young students, especially minorities, at disproportionate rates that critics charge are putting them on a track for dropping out.

Citation rates for this year are little changed from 2011 data. Disclosure of the 2011 data this past spring led to federal civil-rights scrutiny and promises that policies at the Los Angeles Unified School District would be reviewed, and likely changed.

In 2011, children 14 or younger in the school district, the area’s biggest, were issued 43 percent of the nearly 10,200 tickets school police handed out to students for fighting, daytime-curfew violations and other minor infractions — indiscretions that community groups and judges have maintained might better be handled by school officials or referred directly to community-based counseling.

But during the first six months of 2012, even as local juvenile judges’ skepticism about ticketing grew, the share of younger students issued citations increased — to about 48 percent of approximately 4,000 tickets issued, according to a review of the data by the Center for Public Integrity.

Critics concede there has been some progress. Data from September and October reveal district school police officers issued fewer daytime curfew tickets than a year before — the result of new rules adopted last February that stopped police “sweeps” ticketing kids as they arrived to school, even a few minutes late. But records also show that during these two months, school police still wrote up more than 1,000 citations to students mostly for other infractions, including disturbing-the-peace allegations and suspected marijuana smoking.

Since last school year, community and parent representatives have met occasionally with school police officials to discuss their concerns about police involvement in discipline matters. Some school administrators also say they’d like to see clarification as to when an incident merits police officers citing — or arresting — students. L.A. Unified’s school police force is the nation’s biggest such agency, with about 350 sworn officers and 125 school safety officers.

“I think you have to save [police action] for really egregious things, like assault,” said Jorge Cortez, the principal at Judith Baca Arts Academy, a Los Angeles Unified elementary school.

Cortez told the Center that a mom’s complaint last April led to school police issuing tickets to two African-American first-graders who had gotten into a pushing match at his school. The mother of one child called 911, Cortez said.

Sheriff’s deputies declined to get involved, Cortez said. School police officers responded and issued “disturbing the peace” tickets for “mutual fighting” to the six- and seven-year-old boys. The citations were referred to the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

Knowledge of right and wrong?

L.A. Unified School Police Chief Steven Zipperman called citations of children as young as six and seven “an anomaly.”

“When we take a look at citing any student or arresting anybody for a crime,” the chief said, “it is all going to be based on whether they have the knowledge of whether what they were doing is right or wrong.”

Records show that in September and October, tickets were issued to children as young as 10 years old. They also show that that 13-year-olds were cited more often than 14-year-olds, or 17-year-olds. Zipperman explained that kids in the middle-school age group are “probably one of our largest populations [involved] in a fighting-type activity.”

The chief said he and district officials are continuing to discuss standards for when officers should refer cases back to administrators, rather than issuing tickets —especially for incidents like fighting. Zipperman said he still believes, however, that school police officers need to have the discretion to make decisions on a “case-by-case basis.”

Additional findings from September-October school-police data show:

A 10-year-old African-American child was ticketed in September for trespassing at the Menlo Avenue Elementary School.
At the Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School, seven African-American students between 11 and 13 were given disturbing-the-peace citations by police for fighting, also in September.
Black students were ticketed at twice the rate of their percentage of school population.

District officials did not respond to inquiries about these and other specific incidents, but issued a statement that the school police force “has not, and will not, engage in any form of biased or discriminatory enforcement activities.”

The statement says the district “will continue to work with our internal and external stakeholders to identify and evaluate non-penal alternatives to various minor violations.”

But concerns remain. Los Angeles Delinquency Court Judge Donna Quigley Groman, in an interview, noted that “if the approach was the same now when we went to school, a lot of us wouldn’t be where we are now.”

Groman credits Zipperman with a positive response to concerns about the role of school police, who are obviously critical to student and staff safety. Both the judge and the chief have joined a reform “partnership” that first met in September in the wake of protests over police intervention in discipline matters and Center and Southern California Public Radio stories analyzing previously undisclosed police citation records.

The School-based Arrest Reform Partnership is attempting to negotiate a protocol for when it’s appropriate for police to arrest students in situations that don’t necessarily require it. The talks include representatives of L.A. Unified and its school police force; the city of Los Angeles’ police department; and the L.A. County’s sheriff’s department, probation department, district attorney’s office, public defender’s office and parents and civil rights groups.

Three meetings have taken place and another is planned for January. The first goal is to reach consensus on which offenses might be candidates for an alternative series of responses before resorting to arrest. Such steps could include written warnings and referrals to counseling, said Ruth Cusick, an attorney with Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm in Los Angeles.

Cusick said the partnership would also like to bring in a representative of United Teachers of Los Angeles, a union representing district teachers. A union representative said the group hasn’t heard from Public Counsel yet.

The meetings come on the heels of other changes that occurred last year, when the L.A. unified district struck an agreement with the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education to reduce suspensions of black students, especially.

The district is pressing all its schools to start practicing “positive behavioral” support methods that emphasize frequent praise to help engage students in school. Some schools have started peer “courts” in school to sort out disputes, as well as referrals to community-based counseling.

“Citations, we need them in there, but we also need to educate our kids as well,” said Earl Perkins, L.A. Unified’s assistant superintendent of school operations.

Positive change, but complaints remain

The efforts to set new standards for police action are a function of both a desire for clarity and new fiscal realities.

This summer, budget cuts led to the closure of low-level juvenile courts in Los Angeles County, which had adjudicated cases involving ticketed students. Children were obliged, ironically, to miss school to go to court with parents so they could answer to truancy or other offenses that carried fines. If they hid a ticket from parents and skipped going to court — as many did — the result was a misdemeanor record.

With those courts now closed, all initial citations for daytime curfew violations are now referred back to schools, or to one of a new series of L.A. community centers with after-school counseling options.

All other types of tickets are going to probation officials, who decide on a course of action. Hopefully, probation officials say, most of the kids currently referred to them will resolve their problems by successfully completing mandated counseling services, sometimes with their families.

Children who are arrested or whose offenses are judged more serious still face higher-level delinquency court.

Groman said she’s been troubled to see kids as young as 11 referred to her court when they’re charged with criminal offenses at school.

Recalling her own youth, Groman related a story of scaring a teacher by running around a classroom with a scissors. “I didn’t know how to express myself any better,” said Groman. “But would I be where I am today if the school had expelled me for being in possession of a weapon? I highly doubt it.”

Similar concerns were aired nationally Dec. 12 at the first congressional hearing on the “school to prison pipeline,” and the impact of zero-tolerance discipline policies. It was held before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.

Schools have increasingly become “a gateway” to the criminal-justice system, said Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who presided over the hearing.

Federal justice and education officials testified that research clearly shows that placing students in the criminal-justice system for relatively minor offenses only increases their risk of dropping out and going on to more trouble.

Within the Los Angeles district, some schools are struggling with dropout rates higher than 50 percent.

Age limit needed, some argue

Some community activists would like to see an age limit on kids who could be issued police citations, or a civilian review board to monitor school police.

Hostile contact with school police can have a very profound impact on kids, said Manuel Criollo, an organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, which led the charge to rein in daytime-curfew sweeps around inner-city Los Angeles schools.

Many students are struggling in school or at home, Criollo said. Even those who are doing well, he said, get discouraged if police treat them as potential troublemakers.

The Strategy Center helped file complaints with Zipperman on behalf of two boys who were stopped by officers near their school, minutes late, and were searched, handcuffed and allegedly intimidated inside a squad car before officers took them into school and wrote them curfew tickets. The complaints, reported by the Center earlier this year, are still under review, Strategy Center lawyer Zoe Rawson and police said.

The national picture

U.S. schools have only recently been required to disclose ticket and arrest numbers to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is trying to measure the extent of student referrals to police and courts.

L.A. Unified, along with other districts, failed to submit its data last year. District officials explained that calculating referrals is daunting because multiple police agencies operate in the L.A. district.

But records reviewed by the Center suggest that L.A. Unified’s school force, which by far has the most contact with students, tickets them at higher rates than police assigned to New York City’s schools. With about 1 million students, New York’s system is the only U.S. school district bigger than L.A. Unified, which has fewer than 700,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union — which is suing New York police for alleged excessive force in schools — regularly obtains and reviews quarterly figures for that district’s school-based citations and arrests.

During the 2011-2012 academic year, the ACLU recently said, New York police issued 1,666 citations to students. By comparison, L.A. Unified school police issued more than 1,000 tickets in September and October of this year alone.

New York police made 882 arrests in schools during the 2011-2012 academic year. L.A. school police made 4,333 arrests over the course of three calendar years, from 2009 through 2011, according to data that the Center for Public Integrity reviewed.

More than 1,960, or 45 percent, of the Los Angeles arrests were of students 14 or younger.

The single biggest type of offense for which L.A. students were arrested was battery, including battery on school staff and police officers, said Cusick of Public Counsel. She said it is not uncommon for students to become emotional and struggle if they are grabbed during an encounter with police. First-time battery incidents, with no serious injury involved, Cusick said, are among the offenses that authorities could consider putting on a list for referral to prompt professional counseling rather than to court.

For Groman, the case of an 11-year-old accused of battery on a teacher sums up flaws in the current court-referral system.

“I don’t condone any kind of physical violence against a teacher,” she said. “However, to send an 11-year-old boy to juvenile court, where he’s sitting in the waiting room with many more sophisticated youth, gang-related youth, it’s just not the place for an 11-year-old.”

Like many kids, Groman added, the 11-year-old’s day in court did not take place until 60 days after the incident — too late for a child to effectively make a connection to what he or she did two months ago.

“This young boy needed some therapy,” Groman said. “The family needed some counseling. Yet none of that was done because the case, instead of being handled at the school level, was referred to the juvenile-justice system, which does not move very fast at all.”

Alternative ideas

In September, a team of justice authorities from Clayton County, Ga., traveled to Los Angeles to talk to Groman and others about a protocol they follow for referring students to court. Clayton County has emerged as a model for reformers.

Until firm standards were set, Clayton County Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske said, more than 90 percent of referrals to his court came from schools.

Lt. Francisco Romero, former Clayton County school resource officer, accompanied Teske to L.A. Romero told the Center that he supported instituting a protocol after realizing that he had arrested more students than any other officer in his county during one period of time.

“I never had any positive engagement with the kids. All they saw me as was an arresting machine,” Romero said. Some school staff resisted a formal protocol at first. But ultimately, Romero said, schools accepted it and Romero found he could focus on serious crimes. Kids grew to trust him. Teske testified at the recent congressional hearing that the protocol helped drive up graduation rates and reduce felonies.

Zipperman said that in Los Angeles, the citations his officers write don’t always lead to “punitive” action against a student. For many, he said, it’s a path to getting the counseling they need.

Hellen Carter, juvenile field services chief of the Los Angeles County Probation Department, praised Zipperman as a “tremendous problem solver.” But she said it still takes weeks to get kids processed and into counseling, which isn’t ideal. Schools could accomplish a lot more, she said, with more “teen courts” and mediation on campus. And school staff could benefit, she said, from training to distinguish between what is truly a serious incident and what is not.

“We know that kids are going to do some dumb things,” Carter said. “And we want to give them the opportunity to make amends for what they’ve done, learn from what they’ve done, but also not put them in a position where it can literally destroy their future.”

Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.

Tennessee county to overhaul juvenile system

2012-12-18T13:44:23-05:00

After a three-year investigation, authorities in Shelby County, Tenn. signed an agreement Monday with the U.S. Department of Justice to revamp a juvenile-justice system federal officials said was unduly harsh to black youth, including those accused of minor infractions.

The agreement will require Shelby, which includes the city of Memphis, to initiate sweeping staff training and changes to improve minors’ defense options, alter court proceedings to guarantee the rights of accused offenders and eliminate detention practices federal officials found dangerous.

In April, federal investigators published a litany of accusations about the Shelby County juvenile-justice system. Investigators alleged that local officials were routinely violating the constitutional rights of youths put into court proceedings and detention. Among the accusations: “cursory” decisions to transfer youths to adult court, inadequate counsel and an adult-court transfer rate for black wards twice that of white wards.

Detention officials also violated their own policies by strapping wards down in restraint chairs for lengthy periods of time and for inappropriate reasons, investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division alleged. In addition, they said custodians failed to protect wards from “self-injury” and used “dangerous and unconventional pressure point tactics” to subdue youth.

Juvenile-justice advocates consider the Shelby agreement an important step forward in a burgeoning national movement to reform suspect juvenile-court proceedings and detention policies. New York and other states are already scaling back large detention facilities and placing low-level offenders in community-based rehabilitation programs, which is Shelby’s plan now, as the New York Times reported.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that some local elected officials were unhappy with the process leading up the agreement, even though some had also previously complained of suspect treatment of youth. Another local elected official reportedly said he thought allegations of disproportionate unfair treatment of black youth were blown “out of proportion.”

One member of the county’s elected Board of Commissioners said members might not vote to authorize spending $4.5 to $6.5 million in reforms they didn’t help plan, the newspaper said. If the conditions of agreement are not fulfilled, however, federal officials could sue Shelby.

The report that federal investigators released in April contains allegations of stark racial disparities that were uncovered, they said, by studying records and transcripts of juvenile proceedings in Shelby County.

Investigators found “a disparity in the initial detention of black children as compared to white children,” according to the report. “The case data showed that a black child was more than twice as likely to be detained as a white child. This number remained unchanged after accounting for other legal and social factors.”

Investigators also found that black children were one third less likely to receive a warning from local juvenile authorities than white children, “even after accounting for other factors such as prior contacts with the court, the severity of the charges, gender, and education.”

As the Center for Public Integrity reported in September, civil rights investigators with the U.S. Department of Justice have also scrutinized the juvenile court of the community of Meridian, Miss.

Federal officials sent a warning letter to Meridian after an investigation found that youths were being sent into detention unjustly in a “school to prison pipeline.” In October, federal officials filed suit against authorities in Meridian, alleging violations of constitutional rights of minors sent to detention because of violations of school discipline rules.