Overcoming School-to-Prison Pipeline takes multifaceted effort
Representatives from the Hays County Juvenile Center and San Marcos CISD met last week for a panel discussion on overcoming the School-to-Prison Pipeline as part of the ongoing 2018 Summer Dialogues for Activism at the LBJ Museum of San Marcos.
On the panel were Crockett Elementary Response to Intervention Specialist and Texas State Teachers Association Region Director Susan Seaton, Hays County Juvenile Center Administrator Joel Ware Jr. and Texas State Philosophy Lecturer and Hays County Juvenile Center volunteer Gary Fields Jr. Moderating was SMCISD Board President Clementine Cantu.
“I come at this from an elementary school teacher perspective and there’s a lot of research out there about the School-to-Prison Pipeline and what that means is your child goes to school – and it starts as early as Pre-K, kindergarten and elementary school – and somehow they become unsuccessful,” Seaton said, “and this follows them into middle school into high school and beyond.
“This pipeline – for those of you who don’t know – it means they don’t finish school, they go to prison and there are many steps in between.”
One of those steps in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, according to Seaton, is suspension. Texas has taken some steps to stifle the use of suspension in schools as punishment. Last year the Texas Legislature passed a law that no longer allows suspensions of third graders or younger in the state. It does however allow some exceptions for violent behavior like bringing a weapon onto school property or dealing drugs or alcohol.
Prior to that law being passed, a report by the children’s advocacy group Texans Care for Children found that Texas schools issued more than 64,000 in-school suspensions to students in the second grade or younger during the 2015-16 school year, and a disproportionate number of those students were black, male, in foster care or in special education.
“We know that if they are suspended from school they are not learning and they are not on the same level as their peers, and that is the first strike in the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” Seaton said. “As a teacher, I do believe that there are times when suspension is necessary, but I think that is a last resort. I think that there needs to be a lot of things put into place before that.”
One of those other things that Seaton believes could be put into place is training for educators on how to deal with these students and situations without suspension.
“Kids have to be in a nurturing situation that tells them that they have a future, because there has to be somewhere where we break down the system, where we break down the cycle,” Seaton said. “Because the United States currently spends more money on prison incarceration than they do on education. That tells you that there is a huge problem.”
Rehabilitation and training
Ware talked about an experience that could have put him on the trajectory towards the School-to-Prison Pipeline when he was a young African-American kid in junior high. He remembers watching his mom get a phone knocked out of her hand and her head slammed against a windshield by a police officer. He tried to intervene and was thrown down, pepper sprayed and put into juvenile detention then juvenile probation.
“It’s ironic that that happened to me and I’ve gone on to do what I do now,” Ware said. “That could have sent me down the wrong path. I come from a great family, but a lot of my family is incarcerated – drug use, drug abuse and drug selling. Because of that though, I just try to do the best that I can, knowing that the color of my skin really is a factor in what I’m trying to do today.”
Ware said the Hays County Juvenile Center has taken steps with the intent of rehabilitating these young adults — things like de-escalation training for officers and only using restraint as a “last-ditch effort.”
“When a kid already has a problem with authority and then I put my hands on the kids – who’s winning in that situation? Nobody,” Ware said.
The Hays County Juvenile Center has also started a pilot program with Fields as a teacher working with the students in the program to not so much teach them what to think, but how to think.
“Our focus is on the ethical theories, trying to give the students tools they can use to make the best decision – especially when they are by themselves in ethical dilemmas or in a tough situation,” Fields said. “We talk about the importance of responsibility, being able to engage in conversations on individual identity and solidarity, looking at nature vs. nurture. We are really just trying to show them that they are not bad kids and they can be independent freethinkers.”
Looking at prevention
While many approaches to remediating the School-to-Prison Pipeline have been focused on the rehabilitation of students that have already fallen into its cycle, research has shown that prevention and early intervention are more effective, according to Seaton.
Typically, juvenile delinquency follows a trajectory similar to that of normal adolescent development. In other words, children tend to follow a path toward delinquent and criminal behavior rather than engaging randomly.
According to Seaton, the School-to-Prison Pipeline can usually be boiled down to several factors including low parent engagement, a lack of intervening school resources for students in ethical dilemmas and students’ social and economic backgrounds.
“We have a lot of parents that treat schools like daycares and that’s sad,” Seaton said. “When a teacher calls and can’t get a call back, when we have parent community days and the parents don’t show up. And usually this our neediest kids – it’s the ones with the most academic issues, behavioral issues – their parents don’t come. If education isn’t important to the parent, it’s never going to be important to the child. So that has to be the first priority, the parent has to be engaged,” Seaton said.
Seaton said these sorts of issues can arise in situations where the parents find themselves in economic or social binds and don’t want to reach out to the school or community for resources or help.
“A lot of times parents are very proud and they won’t tell us when they need help, but then their kid will be missing from school or they won’t come because they don’t have enough clothes or clean clothes, or they don’t have a ride,” Seaton said. “Having parent liaisons as a resource for the parents and knowing that it’s not a person that will come in and say ‘you’re a bad parent,’ but instead ‘How do we help you?’ is important.”
Parent engagement is only one level of intervention for the student, according to Seaton. School districts can create multiple levels of resources for students.
“The first thing that any school or any district can do is to focus the direction of their counseling programs,” Seaton said. “If you want to talk about change, that’s one of the things we need to change. Guidance counselors have to be able to actually guide the children. They can’t be constantly doing schedules — that’s an auxiliary job.”
Guidance counselors and school resource officers are often on outskirts of students’ and schools’ social spheres and students often don’t know that they can help with resources and personal situations.
“Children see them as police and that’s why we call them school resource officers and not police officers, because they are supposed to be used as a resource,” Seaton said. “I would love to see them introduced at the beginning of the year. Instead of standing in the background, they should be a part of the pep rallies and interacting with kids in the hall, but the kids do see them as police. They need to become part of the family of their campus, not just someone that the police department is employing to be there.”
Ware said because school resource officers are associated with the police, kids that are already struggling with authority not only won’t utilize them, but may actually avoid them.
“They need more guidance counselors in the school, but also counselors that look like me,” Ware said. “It’s hard for a someone that’s not a young Black male to tell one how to dress and talk about situations. There’s a lot things that if you are not the same color skin, it’s hard to engage with that individual and guide that individual in the right direction. That’s an issue we still deal with in the facility.”
Another aspect, according to Fields, is educators have to take into consideration the background of their students – their economic status, their race and their home lives.
“One of the things that educators have to understand is your students in their social context,” Fields said. “You have to take race and ethnicity into consideration. You have to take their situation into consideration, you have to to take into consideration the communities they live and some of the issues that they face.”
The last facet of the School-to- Prison Pipeline that the panelists discussed was the part that poverty plays in the system.
According to Cantu and Seaton, SMCISD’s district lines have been drawn to divide students out equitably – meaning some schools aren’t poverty pockets. But the poverty rate in San Marcos still stands at over double that of the state – 15.6 percent for the state of Texas and 35.8 percent for San Marcos.
“The lowest poverty rate we have right now is 68 percent at one of our elementaries and the highest we have is 78 percent at one of our elementaries,” Seaton said. “So between all the elementaries there’s only a 10 point difference in socio-economic situations.”
“I think the bigger conversation for San Marcos is not ‘How do we distribute kids into schools?’ but ‘Why do we still have this many neighborhoods in poverty?’.” Seaton said. “That’s the deeper conversation we should be having in San Marcos.”
