DOJ Says Kansas School District Routinely Engaged In Biased Enforcement Of Student Policies

Students have rights. That’s something educators and (especially) administrators seem to forget.

Schools also aren’t immune from the same issues that negatively affect the outside world. Adding cops to the school discipline mix definitely hasn’t helped anything. Biased policing is an everyday occurrence pretty much everywhere in the county. Just because the officer patrols halls rather than streets doesn’t mean they’ve left their preconceptions at the door.

Proactive efforts have been made to undo some of this damage to ensure minority students receive the same chance at an education as their whiter peers. A civil rights complaint was recently filed in Illinois, targeting one of the state’s largest school districts. According to the allegations, the Rockford Public School district is violating the Civil Rights Act on a regular basis.

This isn’t an anomaly, as a recent investigation of Kansas’s largest public school district has shown. The US Department of Justice has taken the results of its investigation and converted into a settlement agreement with the Wichita Public School district that will — at least theoretically — limit the amount of biased discipline minority students are subjected to.

Here’s what the DOJ discovered when taking a look at WPS:

The department’s investigation revealed, among other things, that the district’s Black students were disciplined more frequently and more severely than white students who engaged in similar conduct and had similar backgrounds and disciplinary histories. This pattern was most evident when it came to subjective offenses such as insubordination, and was especially stark when it came to discipline of Black girls, whose behavior was repeatedly characterized using stereotypical terms like “attitude” or “drama.” In addition, the investigation concluded that the district inappropriately and repeatedly secluded and restrained students with disabilities and relegated those with the greatest behavioral needs to inferior facilities with inadequate services and support.

Biased enforcement is still very much a thing 60 years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. The settlement agreement [PDF] mandates several changes in the school system, and gives the DOJ the right to veto policy changes made by the school if it doesn’t appear those will comply with the DOJ’s demands.

Unsurprisingly, the DOJ also discovered the district was allowing in-school cops (or “school resource officers,” as they preferred to be called) to handle lots of low-level discipline. Obviously, this is a bad thing. Routine discipline shouldn’t be handled by people with badges and guns who have been trained to treat pretty much everyone they interact with as a potential threat to their own safety.

Consequently, the district has agreed to stop doing this very dangerous thing.

The District will not use Safety Services Officers to respond to conduct that meets the definition of a Level 1 offense. This includes incidents involving a Dress Code violation, the failure to have or display school identification, disrespect, insubordination, disruptive behavior, and skipping class or school (although Safety Services Officers can respond to an incident in which a student leaving school grounds poses a safety risk because of proximity to traffic).

Added to this part of this list is another mandate: any cop who makes “physical contact” with a student will have to report that incident to the school district.

Realizing school cops are only part of the problem, the mandates also prevent administrators from abdicating their own disciplinary responsibilities.

Unless required by law, District staff will not request the involvement of an SRO in an incident of student misbehavior unless it presents a significant safety risk, poses a threat of substantial physical harm, or is the kind of criminal offense that would cause the District to call law enforcement if no SRO were on campus.

Unless required by law, District staff will not report to the SRO a resolved incident of student misbehavior unless the incident resulted in a significant injury or is the kind of criminal offense that would cause the District to call law enforcement if no SRO were on campus.

That should help prevent a lot of minors from being placed in handcuffs for violating school policies. That being said, there’s a nod to the die-hard federalists in both paragraphs: “unless required by law.” That means if the state government is intent on treating students as criminals and treating minority students as even worse than criminals, it can pass laws that allow SROs to cuff any student for nearly any reason. The caveat, of course, is that they can’t violate the Civil Rights Act by doing so. So, if the state wants school cops to go HAM on minors, it will need to take steps to ensure its white students are cuffed/roughed up just as often as students of color.

It’s a step in the right direction, though. But it’s not all that encouraging. The district should have recognized its bias problem long before the DOJ got involved. And local officials overseeing the school district should have taken steps to correct these issues on their own, rather than being forced into a consent decree with the feds. But they didn’t. So, this is what we get. Let’s just hope it actually works.