Taylor Arnold, Claire Lawrence, and Patrick Richardson
Infographic created by Arnold, Lawrence and Richardson via Canva.
Children with disabilities are vulnerable targets in the school to prison pipeline as they are criminalized for behavioral issues when they do not have proper guidance, even with the potential to receive it.
“There is no doubting the reality of the school to prison pipeline,” social work professor Adam McCormick says. “Really any population that experiences racial adversity, and adversity in general. I think we developed these systems (juvenile justice, foster care, etc.) to respond in ways that are behaviorally based, which leads to having cops in schools, having zero tolerance, passing kids around from placement to placement.”
One of the policies currently in place surrounding this issue is the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), which deals with providing disabled students with special education services. This act has implemented the Individual Education Plan (IEP) for those using the services, which allows children to focus on setting social-emotional goals as well as academic goals.
“Children and youth need trained professionals that understand their complex needs and the psychological, social, and environmental factors that contribute to what is often perceived as misbehavior,” St. Edward’s University senior Social Work major Jessica Riley says. “Kids and teens need social workers, not cops, and they need support, not punishment.”
According to IDEA, there are five main characteristics of individuals with a behavioral disability, which include the inability to learn, the inability to build interpersonal relationships, general pervasive moods, and displays of inappropriate behavior or feelings in what would be considered “normal circumstances.”
“I’ve definitely seen people get trapped in the pipeline,” Riley said. “Most either lived in an unsafe environment, endured some form of childhood or early adolescent trauma, or had mental health challenges to overcome. I’ve seen kids as early as middle school charged with possession of substances and other things while at school and introduced to the juvenile court system. Later on, those same kids ended up in jail or even prison in or after high school.”
Some common behaviors that can lead to on-campus arrests show obvious signs of targeting children who may be considered “class clowns”. Behaviors like fake burping, fake fart spray, and throwing food have all been cited as things that would be considered assault and/or disruption.
“It breaks my heart because as a social work student I’ve come to understand how complicated ‘misbehavior’ actually is, and how important it is to have compassion for students with disabilities and other mental health challenges,” Riley says. “They are not criminals, and it upsets me to know that they are so often treated as such.”
There are ways the educational system can avoid this stereotype, most of which can be implemented in the classroom/school buildings. Alternative forms of discipline, like therapy and intervention, can be implemented in counseling services. The use of IEP’s may also display a potential change.
Assisting the IEP implementations, making on-campus officers and SRO’s a last resort rather than a first response could also keep behaviorally disabled children out of the pipeline.
“Instead of using on-campus officers to intervene when a child needs a behavioral intervention, it can be more beneficial to implement environmental interventions to eliminate the behavioral response altogether,” psychology graduate student Paige Knight says. “This can look like working with a child or a child’s caregivers to determine what triggers behavioral outbursts, and working to eliminate that trigger from the child’s environment.”
A downside to implementing changes might be the difficulties that come with proper training of current social workers and the administration of new ways to help children with behavioral disabilities. Changing strategies for dealing with children with behavioral disabilities would be difficult to implement on a nationwide basis as it would require extra training and funding that school districts may not be able to provide.
“Trauma-informed care can fundamentally shift the way we view behaviors,” Dr. McCormick says. “These behaviors are nothing more than a way to try and alleviate and deal with those overwhelming emotional experiences. The pipeline is just reinforced because these systems are not designed to acknowledge the trauma these communities and kids experience.”
When it comes to the younger crowd, children who struggle with behavioral disabilities, like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), have been arrested at school because their outbursts have led to tantrums that are labeled “assaults”. Through IDEA, these types of arrests can be avoided, for children will be given the guidance needed.
“A long-term change would mean turning these systems completely upside-down and rethink the way we fund and do schools [and] the way we address behaviors in schools,” Dr. McCormick says.
Overall, 30-50 percent of the demographic for the school-to-prison pipeline is made up of children with behavioral issues. 85 percent of students with both diagnosed and undiagnosed behavioral problems who are in juvenile detention centers are eligible for special education, yet only 37 percent receive it.
“This might be because nobody thinks or wants to ask the right questions,” Knight says. “They don’t want to ask these kids if they need special services. Honestly, I think perpetrators of this system want some of these kids to stay in the pipeline. The question that does get asked is ‘what are these kids doing wrong, why aren’t they doing enough to behave better’ rather than asking ourselves ‘why are we doing enough to help these kids who are obviously having trauma responses?’”
Attempting to make a change this large in the education system will provide a worthwhile challenge for policymakers and school administrations at all levels. Starting small, like slowly implementing more IEP’s on and off-campus for those who qualify, will open more possibilities for the future of special education and make sure those who are disabled behaviorally are getting the help they need and remaining out of the school to prison pipeline.
“This issue is intersectional, and as we think about the school-to-prison pipeline at large, we should be understanding it as a complexly oppressive system that works to disempower and criminalize youth based on many factors,” Riley says. “It’s not okay!! The state of the public education system in this country is disgusting, and we need to focus on supporting children, not criminalizing them.”