Numerous studies suggest that students who are suspended or expelled from school are more likely to end up in jail. It’s a phenomenon known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and it has lawmakers taking a closer look at school discipline in Vermont.
It didn’t take long for the cell phone footage from a South Carolina classroom to go viral. It depicts an African American girl sitting passively at her desk, then being slammed to ground by a police officer, apparently for refusing to hand over her cell phone.
Jay Diaz, a staff attorney at the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, played the short video on a large projection screen for the Legislature’s Joint Judicial Oversight Committee Thursday morning.
“I think a good question for us is can this happen here. What can we do to prevent this from happening here? Unfortunately what I can tell you is, this has happened here,” Diaz says.
Diaz told lawmakers that in his former job with Vermont Legal Aid, he represented two students – one 14, one 10 – who had suffered violent police treatment for minor classroom infractions. And while the examples are extreme, he says they’re symptomatic of disproportionate disciplinary measures sometimes imposed on Vermont students.
“Unfortunately, in Vermont schools, children who misbehave even in minor ways may not get that chance to learn from their mistakes – instead they’re kicked out of school for days, weeks and months.”
"Unfortunately, in Vermont schools, children who misbehave even in minor ways may not get that chance to learn from their mistakes." - Jay Diaz, Vermont ACLU staff attorney
Diaz says students of color, and students with disabilities, are suspended at significantly higher rates than their able-bodied, white peers. And he and others are calling for system-wide changes to school discipline policies and practices that may be setting kids up for failure.
Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe says she isn’t convinced that the act of suspension itself is leading to higher rates of incarceration among students hit with that sanction.
“The overwhelming majority of students who are suspended at one point in their lives do not end up in incarceration,” she says. “So it isn’t necessarily a causal relationship.”
But Holcombe says regardless of what’s behind the road to bad outcomes, the state needs to intervene in children’s lives before they engage in the kinds of behavior that lead to suspension. Holcombe says schools that have adopted what are known as “positive behavioral interventions and supports” have seen dramatic reductions in student suspensions and office referrals.
"They may be wonderful children who have never been taught how to behave in a social situation. We can punish them for not knowing, or we can actually try to positively teach them." - Rebecca Holcombe, secretary of education
“They may be wonderful children who have never been taught how to behave in a social situation,” Holcombe says. “We can punish them for not knowing, or we can actually try to positively teach them and support them and recognize them for exhibiting positive behaviors.”
Holcombe says her agency is working to expand the number of schools employing the practice. Diaz says improving teachers’ abilities to work with problem students is a good step. But he says kids aren’t always the main problem, and that school discipline policies also need to come under a microscope.
Bennington Sen. Dick Sears, chairman of the Justice Oversight Committee, says he doesn’t see a need for new laws at this point, but he says lawmakers will continue to monitor schools’ progress on the issue.
