By Sienna Wight and Olivia Tennison
The school-to-prison pipeline facilitates the incarceration of thousands of children each year. The majority of schools across the country neglect to offer students the support they need and instead opt to punish behavior they see unfit. However, in many cases “unfit behavior” stems from something stressful or traumatic occurring in the child’s home life.
An Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) is a traumatic event that occurs before a child turns 18. This can take many different forms such as verbal or physical abuse, neglect, mental illness, parental separation or poverty, as well as many others. Additionally, Black and brown children experience ACEs at a much higher rate than their white peers.
Due to the nature of traumatic events, they often severely impact children’s attention attitude, both of which often lead to punishment at school.
According to the Executive Director of the American School Counselor Association Amanda Fitzgerald, the earlier a child is introduced to counseling the more effective it is. Most attention and funding is given to counselors at a high school level, because of the career readiness aspect of their job. Yet if children don’t have access to a counselor until they are nearly adults, counseling is not as effective.
It is important that schools are implementing restorative rather than punitive practices. Restorative practices aim to support children and address the root of the problem, while punitive practices aim only to punish what they see as “bad behavior.” Punitive practices are practiced heavily in the form of suspension, expulsion or even something as small as time-out. Punitive practices enforce the idea that a child is not welcome in the classroom.
One of the best examples of restorative legislation is the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Act (ESSCA). This act would provide federal funding for each state to decrease their staffing ratios for school counselors, psychologists and social workers. According to Fitzgerald, this would aid in decreasing the ratio of counselors to students from 1:424 down to their goal of 1:250.
This act has yet to be passed, partially because of its recent introduction to the US House of Representatives and partially because it’s a stand alone act. Bills like this are extremely hard to pass if they are not a part of a larger education package.
The Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Act is the newest iteration of an old bill called No Child Left Behind. The bills have very similar goals, however ESSCA outlines specific funding formulas that the last bill lacked; with No Child Left Behind, each school district had to submit a request for funding, and with a relatively small budget of around 58 million for the entire country, many districts never saw any of the money.
Lack of budget is ultimately the reason for the discontinuation of No Child Left Behind, and it’s the downfall of many local restorative programs as well. Especially in more fiscally conservative areas, it’s very difficult to convince people of the importance of emotionally supporting at-risk youth, especially if they have a violent or criminal background.
While these bills are proposing restorative responses to the lack of emotional support that children are receiving, the government rarely allocates large budgets to such projects. As a result, even if the package gets approved and schools receive the funding to hire more counselors and social workers, the money runs out quickly. Schools and districts then have to scramble to maintain their budget to continue to staff professionals to support their students. In order for these solutions to truly make a difference in these children’s lives, and ultimately decrease the amount of children incarcerated, the budget needs to be sustainable for more than a couple of years.