Leaving Homeroom in Handcuffs: Why an Over-Reliance on Law Enforcement to Ensure School Safety Is Detrimental to Children

• Author: Jennie Rabinowitz
• Position: B.A., English, Wesleyan University, June 1999. J.D. Candidate, June 2006, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
• Pages: 153

Page 153

Introduction

In contemporary America, school administrators and public officials increasingly rely on law enforcement and the juvenile and criminal justice systems to ensure that public schools are safe. These policy makers have legitimate reasons to worry that students and teachers may become crime victims while on school grounds; during the 1999-2000 school year, 71% of public schools had at least one violent crime.¹ Yet crime in schools -and violent crime in particular- decreased significantly between 1992 and 2002, the most recent year for which statistics on school crime are available.²

Although extreme measures like the presence of armed police officers in schools may be necessary to ensure safety in some cases, policymakers who craft school safety strategies should keep in mind that arresting children for infractions committed at school can have negative repercussions on those children's futures.³ Furthermore, policies that rely heavily upon law enforcement are often expensive, and alternatives exist that will not only make children less violent and schools safer, but that will save taxpayers money.⁴Page 154

This article will begin in Section I by considering a school safety initiative in New York City, in which the city has flooded problem schools with police.⁵ This section will then offer a brief overview of the reliance of school administrators in other parts of the country on law enforcement and the courts to keep their schools safe.⁶ Section II will discuss some of the historical, legal, and social factors that have led school administrators to rely upon law enforcement and the courts to keep students in check.⁷ This background information provides insight into why school administrators are now more willing to place police officers and the courts in charge of student discipline, whereas previously teachers and parents bore that responsibility.

Section III will discuss some of the negative effects that contact with law enforcement and the courts can have on children. One such effect is that when students are arrested, they are labeled in negative ways by the police, school administrators, teachers, and often their fellow students.⁸ They may receive rehabilitative treatment, which could be helpful in setting them on a healthier track in life, or they may be incarcerated in a secure facility, an experience which may have negative effects on a child's development.⁹ A related possible negative effect is that reliance on law enforcement and the courts to maintain school safety may exacerbate the overrepresentation of minority youth in the criminal justice system. The percentage of minority youth who have contact with the criminal justice system is significantly greater than the percentage of minority youth in the total youth population of the United States.¹⁰ Police are most often stationed in inner city public schools that have large minority populations,¹¹ thus the negative effects discussed in this article are borne disproportionately by minorities.Page 155

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the placement of police primarily in schools with large minority populations leads to an unequal application of the law. My own experience bears out that hypothesis. I attended high school in a suburb of New York City with a primarily middle class, ethnically homogenous student body. Police and security guards were not regularly on campus. The summer after my first year of law school, I worked at a public defender office in New York City. One of the cases I followed concerned a high school senior who had been arrested by a police officer stationed at his school. A female acquaintance had accused the student of pulling her onto his lap and grabbing her breast during a basketball game in the school's gymnasium.¹² The student was charged with a sex crime which, were he convicted, would have required him to register as a sex offender. Sex offender status would have had profound effects on his life, including the loss of a scholarship he had secured from a university he planned to attend the following fall. While this young man had certainly made an error in judgment, was his crime so serious that it should impede his ability to receive a college education? A student who behaved similarly at my suburban high school would probably have received a stern talk from a school administrator. If his behavior had persisted, the school might have contacted his parents and required him to participate in counseling. I doubt that the police would have ever become involved.

Section IV will look at a failed federal attempt to make public schools safer. With the No Child Left Behind Act ("NCLBA"), Congress sought to pressure troubled schools to prioritize safety by empowering parents to transfer their children out of schools that are designated "persistently dangerous."¹³ Unfortunately, the NCLBA did not provide funding or any other means of helping persistently dangerous schools improve; in fact, persistently dangerous schools lose funding when a child transfers out under the Act.¹⁴ For that reason, states tend to craft definitions of "persistently dangerous," that will be met by few schools.¹⁵ Thus, the law has had a very limited effect.

In light of the negative ramifications of relying upon law enforcement and the courts to ensure that schools are safe, and of the failure of the NCLBA's "persistently dangerous" provision to succeed in makingPage 156 schools safer, Section V will examine alternative methods of achieving school safely. This section will first discuss alternative solutions that are being championed by the law enforcement community, which believes that early childhood education is essential in producing nonviolent adolescents.¹⁶ Second, Section V will explore alternatives that are promoted by educators, some of whom believe that school curricula should be used not just to teach traditional subjects like reading, arithmetic and geography, but also to provide students with coping mechanisms that will enable them to solve problems peacefully.¹⁷ Third, Section V will assess an approach that seeks to empower students to identify problems with their schools and to be involved in the process of crafting solutions.¹⁸ Fourth, this section will survey the way that school facilities can be built or renovated in a manner that promotes safety.¹⁹ Not every safety alternative is suitable to every school, but policy-makers, teachers, and school administrators should assess which of these alternatives seems most promising for achieving school safety given the location of their school and the size and composition of the student body.

The aim of this article is to get policy-makers to consider school safety in a broader light. The best way to make schools safe is to prevent children from embracing violence. The teaching of this lesson must begin early in life and continue throughout secondary education. Everything, from the way a building is designed to how basic subjects are taught, can be used to promote school safety in a manner that does not produce ancillary negative effects.

I Current Practices

A New York City's "Impact Schools"

On September 17, 2002, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Department of Education ("NYCDOE") Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced the new "SchoolSafe" initiative, in which the city's most dangerous schools would be flooded with police officers in an effort to curb crime on campuses.²⁰ The initiative was toPage 157 be implemented in the 10% of New York City schools with the highest criminal incident rates, which are referred to as "impact schools." The criminal incident rate at these impact schools was 150% greater than the average incident rate at New York City schools.²¹ Graduation rates at the initial group of impact schools was 30% below average, and the percentage of students at impact schools meeting minimum academic standards was 16% below average.²² The Impact School strategy was based on "Operation Impact," a New York City Police Department ("NYPD") initiative that achieved crime reduction by deploying large numbers of police officers to strategically targeted locations with high crime rates.²³

The SchoolSafe initiative was coupled with a "three strikes and you're out" policy under which students who received two suspensions in a 24 month period would be known as "Spotlight Students."²⁴ In a plan based on a NYPD initiative known as "Operation Spotlight," Spotlight Students who committed another serious infraction of the discipline code would be transferred to Second Opportunity Schools -special schools for students who had been suspended for a period of at least a year.²⁵ The new plan also included a "zero tolerance" policy, under which all students who possessed illegal weapons or who caused serious injury to someone at school were to be immediately and permanently removed from their schools; they too would be transferred to Second Opportunity Schools.²⁶ As Mayor Bloomberg explained:

Every student has the right to seek an education in an atmosphere free of fear or intimidation .... The plan we are announcing today will turn around the schools most plagued by disruptive students and criminal behavior. It will identify problem students and send the message that disorder will not be tolerated.²⁷Page 158

In January 2004, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein announced the first twelve impact schools.²⁸ Chancellor Klein...