Problem Students in Pipeline to Prison

[Joanne98]

by Daniel G. Meyer
A 13-year-old girl was handcuffed and arrested at Brockton High School last June for wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt, which she was asked by school officials to remove, bore the image of her ex-boyfriend, 14-year-old Marvin Constant, who had recently been killed in a Boston area shooting. The girl refused to remove the memorial shirt and was arrested for “causing a disturbance.”

In Texas, 14-year-old high school freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her crime was pushing a hall monitor out of the way when she was stopped from entering a school building. The official charge was “assault on a public servant.”While extreme, these cases are not unusual. In Massachusetts and across the country, an increasing number of incidents that traditionally have been handled in schools by trips to the principal’s office are being dealt with by law enforcement officials and judges in the juvenile justice system. Countless school children, particularly children of color in poverty-stricken zip codes, are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile correctional facilities for minor misconduct.

A variety of overzealous disciplinary measures, including a mandatory “zero-tolerance” policy, are removing children as early as elementary school from mainstream educational environments and funneling them into a one-way pipeline to prison. This “school-to-prison pipeline” begins in the nation’s neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country’s expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/28/9244/

[bluestateguy]

1. I was suspended from school in 1991 for one day for throwing a piece of fruit

I had never before had any discipline problems, and never did again.

I didn't even throw the apple at anybody. The punishment seemed excessive.

I am currently planning on asking the current principal of my old high school for a pardon.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. The real meaning of No Child Left Behind, apparenlty..

[angstlessk]

3. prison the new and improved slave plantation,..

improved for the slave owner, not the slave, that is!

[MISSDem]

4. When prisons are "for profit", ie, under private management,

what do we all expect? They have no reason to try to keep folks out of prison and money reasons to get them into prison. It's a no brainer.

[flashl]

5. K&R .... Students point of view ...

The choice: Fund schools today, or prisons and welfare tomorrow

Gregory Jordan-Detamore and Khalif Dobsonare Philadelphia Student Union members

As Philadelphia public high school students, we experience firsthand the effects of inadequate school funding.

There is such a shortage of space that classes are held in the lunchroom and library.

From time to time, teachers cannot give students handouts because the photocopy machines don't work or there is a paper shortage.

The school has problems keeping new teachers. There are no sports facilities other than a gym and a roof, and science "labs" are merely tables with utility hookups.

Conditions are worse at other schools. At West Philadelphia High, classrooms are packed and taught by teachers who haven't been adequately prepared for such large classes.

Classes are not preparing students for higher education or the technical workplace.

Philadelphia Inquirer

[MISSDem]

6. more and more and more money is spent on the schools and

things there get worse and worse. What is the problem? The blame usually falls on the students, ie, they are a bunch of thugs, etc. who do not want to learn and so on. But I believe the funds are being misspent.

[flashl]

7. The growth is increases in administrative spending i.e. salaries. nt