A Florida school district has teamed up with local law enforcement and NAACP members to come up with a plan to curtail the number of students arrested for minor offenses.
Broward County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the United States, announced the agreement on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. District officials, police and the state attorney's office have settled on an arrangement that will scale back on what's being called the "school-to-prison pipeline," a set of zero-tolerance policies that funnels kids who misbehave in class into the legal system after they're suspended, arrested and charged with crimes. Under the new proposal, principals rather than school security will be tasked with administering punishment to students who disrupt classrooms.
In the South Florida district of Broward, America's seventh largest district, teachers, students and families saw the highest number of school-related arrests in the state during the 2011-2012 school year. Nearly 71 percent of the 1,062 arrests that year were misdemeanor offenses, AP reported.
But the larger issue of racially disproportionate numbers of arrest ultimately led school officials and law enforcement to strike up ideas for change. Minority students are arrested at overwhelmingly higher rates than their white peers. At times, some are severely punished for missteps which will typically grant white students a warning at most. More than 70 percent of the students who are arrested for school-related problems are black or Hispanic, the U.S. Department of Education reported.
Under the new policy, district officials and school resource officers will have a specific model to follow when a child steps out of line. If a student commits a non-violent misdemeanor such as trespassing, harassment, drinking alcohol on campus, holding drugs or paraphernalia, principals must try to avoid involving law enforcement. The new rules suggest a host of other options that stress rehabilitation rather than corporal punishment, including counseling programs.
After a student's first non-violent misdemeanor, he or she will not be arrested, but second, third and fourth offenses warrant the heightened means of intervention by the school. Following a fifth misdemeanor, law enforcement will then be called upon to step in.
The new rules were put into place at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie told AP. There has been a reported 41 percent decline in the number of arrests related to school misdemeanors this year, he said, adding that he first realized a change had to be made once he saw the raw data on the high rates of black male students doing badly in school. A closer look at the numbers revealed that the same group was also disproportionately being arrested and expelled.
"One other thing I heard quite a bit about was students being arrested for things that I would never have believed constituted an arrest," Runcie told AP. "For example, tardiness. Trespassing. Throwing spit balls. Things that you just, using a common sense approach, would say, we wouldn't want to do this to a child because once you get a record, it basically stays with you for your life."
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