Abstract

Excerpted From: Bailey Ellicott, From Suspension to Mass Incarceration: Punishment of Students with Special Needs and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, 27 Richmond Public Interest Law Review 155 (May 17, 2024) (216 Footnotes) (Full Document)

On September 14, 1986, Ronald and Nancy Reagan addressed the nation from the West Hall of the White House. Speaking from their home into the homes of millions, the Reagans spread a message of moral outrage over the crack epidemic. “It's back-to-school time for America's children,” President Reagan began. He continued with a warning: “[D]rugs are menacing our society. They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They're killing our children.” From there, the Reagans appealed to Americans' moral righteousness, inviting citizens to join in their “national crusade” against drug use. President Reagan promised stronger law enforcement agencies, zero-tolerance policies, and stricter punishments for those caught with drugs. The War on Drugs Era shortly bled into school discipline after drug enforcement policies spread to schools in the 1980s. By the 1990s, Congress found that school systems should be on the frontlines of the crusade against drug use and crime. Under the guise of keeping schools safe, institutions implemented zero-tolerance policies to punish a wide range of behavior with mandatory suspensions and expulsions.

Mass incarceration born out of the zero-tolerance era drug policy has spread to school disciplinary policies, and these policies put disadvantaged students on the path towards prison. While intended to protect children, these policies have instead victimized children of color and children with disabilities, and upended educational careers. Though legislation like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) promise equal education for all, those protections are easily skirted, and increased police presence in schools only exacerbates this disparity. Today, approximately 60,000 minors are incarcerated in juvenile jails and prisons in the United States. Juvenile incarceration disrupts family connections, upends education, and often exposes developing brains to further trauma. Even worse, it is estimated that sixty-five to seventy percent of youth involved in the juvenile justice system have a disability. For many of these children, the manifestation of their disabilities led to their incarceration in the first place. For example, between twenty-five to forty percent of individuals currently in jail or prison are believed to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (“ADHD”), mostly undiagnosed or untreated.

The school-to-prison pipeline works just like massincarceration, especially for Black students struggling with a learning disability. National surveys of schoolsuspensions show that minority students and students with disabilities are more frequently pushed out through harsh disciplinary policies. During the 2017-2018 school year, twelve percent of Black students received out of schoolsuspensions, compared to the national average of five percent. Furthermore, almost ten percent of students with disabilities were suspended while four percent of students without disabilities were suspended. Black students with disabilities were the most frequently suspended: almost one in five Black students with disabilities were suspended during the 2017-2018 school year. When Black students are disciplined more harshly and students with disabilities are more likely to be reprimanded due to behavior resulting from their disability, these policies culminate in an assembly line of students being funneled out of schools through disciplinary policies instead of getting the heightened attention they need.

[. . .]

The promise of IDEA, to deliver equal educational access to students with disabilities, contradicts zero-tolerance policies born out of the War on Drugs Era. To this day, minority students, particularly Black students with disabilities, are disproportionally punished and pushed out of their classrooms. The experience of many students with ADHD shows that despite the name, IEPs are not always meeting the individualized needs of every student, and too often external considerations become a large factor in the determination of a student's educational trajectory.

Furthermore, over-policed school environments that resemble prisons are less safe and less effective in teaching students in need. Rather than being treated as students, children with disabilities are considered suspects by the law enforcement in their schools. Furthermore, a school environment that looks like a prison sends a message to students that incarceration is their expected outcome. Punishments like suspension and expulsion upend a student's education and start the path toward prison. Instead of punishing first, schools should focus on the positive intervention promised by IDEA and defer to the positive interventions of an IEP team to properly divert students with disabilities.

Bailey Ellicott is a third-year law student at the University of Richmond School of Law.