Feds asked to investigate arrest of student for throwing Skittles
1st June 2015 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
In Jefferson Parish Public Schools, far more students are arrested at school or referred to law enforcement than any other school district in the state. And they are hugely disproportionately African American.
One student was arrested for throwing Skittles at another student while on a school bus. The day after the incident, the 15-year-old was forcefully handcuffed in front of his classmates in the middle of taking a Social Studies test. The officer then said things to the student like “I’ve got you now,” and that if the officer was the student’s age, he would “beat the f**k out of you,” according to a civil rights complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in May. The complaint describes the principal witnessing these remarks, and staying silent.
The boy then spent approximately six days in juvenile detention. Appearing before a juvenile court judge prior to his release, the judge asked, “Am I to get this right—are we really here about Skittles?” During his incarceration, the school gave the student several unexcused absences.
However three years have passed since the SPLC filed the original complaint with the Office of Civil Rights regional office in Dallas – and things are only getting worse.
Now the SPLC is looking for federal investigation and intervention.
The Jefferson Parish numbers are alarming by any standards: Despite making up just 41.5 percent of the public school student population in Jefferson Parish, African-American students accounted for 80 percent of the school-based arrests or referrals to law enforcement during the 2013-2014 school year.
During the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years, African-American students made up 46 percent of the student population and approximately 76 percent of all “school based arrests and seizures,” according to the SPLC.
During the 2011-2012 school year, there were 706 students arrested at school, and 923 students referred to law enforcement. The total number of students was 45,914.
In East Baton Rouge, the second largest school district in the state (with 42,985 students), for the same year there were zero students arrested at school, and 170 students referred to law enforcement.
In St. Tammany (37,281 students) in 2011-2012, there were zero school-based arrests, and six students referred to law enforcement.
While the SPLC hoped to see action and improvement after filing the original complaint, they describe the opposite.
First filed in January 2012, the SPLC issued an addendum in May 2015 to the initial complaint, stating that: “The intent of this Supplement is to demonstrate that far from being resolved, the problem of discriminatory arrest and law enforcement referral policies persists and has actually worsened in Jefferson Parish, in violation of both Title VI and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
In addition to the high numbers and the racial disparity, the SPLC found that the majority of the arrests and referrals are for “minor student misconduct that should be handled in the schools.”
The SPLC report describes the context: The Jefferson Parish school district has a one-year $600,000 Cooperative Endeavor Agreement with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office that places 10 full time police officers in nine schools.
The agreement states that “The POC [Police Officer on Campus] will assist in enforcing school rules, including monitoring student movement in the halls, checking passes and parking permits, etc.”
But the SPLC points to a troubling conflict: On one hand the “JPPSS has essentially delegated to these police officers the authority and responsibility for enforcing school rules.” But the agreement also states, “POC shall not act as a school disciplinarian” and that “[d]isciplining students is a school responsibility.”
The SPLC argues that there are insufficient guidelines for what kind of behavior constitutes an arrest or referral: “Illustrating the lack of guidelines and limitations, the original Complainants were arrested for such minor offenses as having a cell phone on school premises, walking in the hallway without a pass, engaging in play fighting and horseplay, and using profanity against school officials.”
In addition to the Skittles incident, the SPLC report describes a 14-year-old girl arrested for yelling and cursing in the school parking lot. Another complaint tells the story of a 10-year-old autistic girl being handcuffed faced down in the dirt after throwing a tantrum and attempting to escape into tree. The officer was “kneeling on top of her, pinning her down with a knee squarely in the small girl’s back,” according to the SPCL report.
The failure to have clear and consistent policies in place for violations that do not involve weapons, drugs, or serious injury, “has caused confusion and an overreliance on police officers and the court system as a method of disciplining students for misbehavior,” according to the SPLC. “Clearly, JPPSS has endorsed a district-wide policy of relying on police officers on campus to enforce routine matters of school discipline through the juvenile justice system.”
The JPPSS declined a request for an interview, but issued the following statement: “We are aware of and are very concerned by these allegations. We pledge to work closely with those agencies involved to quickly resolve any issues that we identify. We are committed to ensuring that our students have a safe, healthy environment and are treated equably at all schools.”
Research shows that the presence of police officers on a school campus “significantly increases the likelihood that school officials will refer students to law enforcement for low-level offenses that are more appropriately handled by school staff,” according to the SPLC.
Studies also show long-term damaging affects on children, including the creation of “an adversarial environment that pushes students, particularly at-risk students, out of school rather than engaging them in a positive educational environment.”
Research shows that students kicked out of school – for any amount of time, are more likely to dropout, less likely to succeed academically, and more likely to become incarcerated. The SPLC report details the devastating consequence each incident had on the specific students who made the complaints, including dropping out of school activities and becoming disengaged and distrustful of school authorities and law enforcement.
“The Jefferson Parish Public School System is needlessly derailing young lives with these arrests,” said Sara Godchaux, an SPLC staff attorney. “Far too many school children have been pushed out of class and into the justice system.”
In the state that leads the country that leads the world in locking up its own citizens, more and more people are questioning whether the culture of mass-incarceration (particularly for nonviolent offenses) benefits society as a whole or benefits the lucrative for-profit prison industrial complex.
Louisiana spends about three times more money to incarcerate a person as it does to educate a person.
“The Jefferson Parish Public School System has continued its destructive practice of arresting and jailing children for minor, and often trivial, violations of school rules and decorum,” said Eden Heilman, managing attorney for the SPLC’s Louisiana office. “It’s nothing less than a racially biased system of criminalizing African-American children. It must stop now.”
This article originally published in the June 1, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
