by Aziah Siid
The school-to-prison pipeline — the punishment of Black K-12 students, especially boys, who are funneled from school into the criminal justice system — is well known. But a new government analysis has found that the arrest rates of Black students more than doubled if their school had a police officer stationed on campus.
The General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, also found that for Black boys with disabilities, including students with special-education plans, the difference in arrest rates widened even further.
“GAO’s analysis of the Department of Education’s data collected from nearly every U.S. school district found that students’ race and ethnicity, gender, and disability status were all prominent with respect to rates of arrest and referrals to police, especially when the characteristics intersected,” according to the report.
Jackie Nowicki, director of GAO’s education team, said the report shines a light on a critical problem that schools have yet to fully address.
“It is really clear from our statistical modeling that race, and gender, and disability status all matter when it comes to things like arrests in schools–especially when students have more than one of those characteristics,” she said on “Watchdog Report,” the GAO’s podcast. “But they matter differently for different groups of kids.”
Titled “K-12 Education: Differences in Student Arrest Rates Widen When Race, Gender, and Disability Status Overlap,” the report found that arrest rates more than doubled in schools with police present compared to similar schools without police. The report also found that, of the 51% of schools with police present at least once a week, arrests were more common when the police were involved in student discipline.
Though procedures vary from one state to another, arrests typically are divided between paper arrests, in which the student receives a citation and is referred to police for investigation, and physical arrests, in which a police officer serving on campus handcuffs the student and takes them into custody.
Physical arrest results in a student transported to a nearby police station or juvenile detention facility. School police officers interviewed for the report in the Maryland, California, and Texas districts said physical arrest are a “last resort” in situations where the student is a danger to others.
Within every racial group, boys had higher rates of arrest than girls, according to the report. But Black students with disabilities — identified as having an Individualized Education Program learning plan — were arrested and referred to police at more than double the rate of those without disabilities. Students who fell into each category also experienced higher rates of referral or arrest.
Arrests are often the first step on the school-to-prison pipeline, Nowicki said.
“Although a small percentage of students are referred and arrested, these students may also face additional punitive consequences, such as suspension or expulsion from school, or be sent to the juvenile or adult justice system,” Nowicki said.
Why Are Police There in the First Place?
Police presence in K-12 schools date back to the 1950s, but officers became more present on campuses in the 1990s, following a spate of school shootings.
Advocates say police with badges, guns and arrest powers on campus can make students and teachers safer, help law enforcement build relationships with communities, and officers can develop a healthy rapport with students. But opponents say officers in the hallways can lead to the criminalization of Black and brown children, and makes it easier to bring the full force of the criminal justice system down on a child who may be simply misbehaving.
GAO Recommendations
Through the works of afterschool programs, grassroot initiatives, and other organizations, the will to keep students out of the prison pipeline is evident, especially as it pertains to preserving Black youth.
“In the Education investigation we just talked about Education found that Black students experienced physical harm and lost learning time,” Nowicki. “There was a Justice investigation that we cite in the report, which found that in another school district, they routinely relied on suspensions and referrals to law enforcement to respond to students who had disability-related behaviors.”
Two recommendations by the office are to collect arrest and referral data, by race, for students with disabilities who receive services under Section 504 and schools to clearly inform school districts about future changes to arrest and referral data in its civil rights data collection.