Administrators and school board members should move away from using punitive criminal measures to address minor disciplinary issues in local public schools.
This Saturday, a group of community organizations sponsored a forum, entitled “Punishment and Policing in Our Schools,” at the Carrboro Century Center.
The forum was held in response to concerns about the disparity in suspensions and discipline of minority students in comparison to their white counterparts.
This gets at the larger issue of using school resource officers and local law enforcement to deal with disciplinary issues within schools.
While some student actions surely merit referral to criminal courts, school administrators shouldn’t look to those courts to handle relatively minor disciplinary infractions.
By sending a young student to criminal or juvenile delinquency courts for something comparatively minor such as disrupting the peace, administrators are limiting their students’ future prospects and dangerously enlarging the school-to-prison pipeline.
Criminal records at a young age can make getting into college or getting a job a much more difficult process, to say nothing of fostering a distrust and contempt for the justice system.
The forum was a good first step in the direction of addressing the growing criminalization of student discipline, but this one community forum on its own is not enough.
School teachers and administrators should capitalize on the momentum from Saturday’s meeting to demonstrate a real commitment to engage students who are impacted by this issue.
