Greetings,

April has been a very busy month for the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC)! We held our first DSC Days at the Capitol for 2011. On April 10-13 over 50 DSC members and supporters traveled to Washington, DC to meet with their legislators, share their stories, and make their voices heard on Capitol Hill.

This e-mail features an update from the Community Rights Campaign on their recent victory for Los Angeles high school students, new resources from the NAACP and the new and revised DSC Fact Sheets on School Pushout. It also includes two new blog posts on the correlation between the quality of educational opportunities and potential future incarceration for our nation's Black and Latino youth, and an inside look into the abusive practices at a residential treatment center and day school for adults and children with disabilities.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you'd like to get involved by writing to [email protected].

Best wishes,

Dignity in Schools Campaign

Working Group Update

Member Group Spotlight

The

From the DSC Blog

Educate, Don't Incarcerate
by Mariame Kaba, Project NIA
We know that the very best way to prevent future incarceration is to invest on the front end in providing excellent educational opportunities for children. A 2007 study estimated that the U.S. could save $209,000 in prison and other costs for every potential dropout who could be supported to complete high school. However, for years now, the U.S. has neglected its educational system and instead pursued a racist tough-on-crime policy that has resulted in locking up millions of black and brown people.
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More Than Just a Loss of Dignity
by Matthew Engel, Disability La Center
All students have the right to be treated with dignity and to not be abused, punished in an arbitrary manner or pushed out of school. There is one school, however, which brings the treatment of its students to a whole new level ... a very low level. The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) is a residential treatment center and day school located in Canton, Massachusetts which serves children and adults with a variety of disabilities. The majority of the residents are funded by school districts or state agencies serving adults in New York and Massachusetts, although a number of other states also provide funding. The cost per year is mind-boggling, more than $200,000.
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In The News

Putting School Suspensions on the Agenda
by Rebecca Vevea (Chicago News Cooperative, April 26, 2011)
"A coalition of community organizations pushing for Chicago Public Schools to reduce suspension and expulsion rates could find an ally in incoming schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard, who dramatically cut suspensions during his time in Rochester, N.Y., though some criticized Brizard’s methods for doing so.

By switching all short-term suspensions from out-of-school punishments to in-school punishments, Brizard lowered the district’s suspension rate from 15 percent to 2 percent in his first full year running the Rochester school system. But because in-school suspensions are not counted in the suspension rate, critics of Brizard in Rochester say the numbers changed, but the policy did not fully address behavioral problems."
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Special-ed Student Joseph Anderson, 7, Handcuffed by Cops at Queens School After Easter Egg Tantrum
by Meredith Kolodner (New York Daily News, April 21, 2011)
"Cops handcuffed a 7-year-old at a Queens school after he became upset while decorating an Easter egg, his mom said. Special-education student Joseph Anderson, a first-grader at Public School 153 in Maspeth, was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center in metal cuffs, even though his mother told school officials she was on her way to pick him up, mom Jessica Anderson said."
Read more.

Stop Dumping Our Most Vulnerable Students
by John Thompson (Huffington Post, April 21, 2011)
"The proliferation of choice has allowed charters and other selective schools to "cream" the easiest to educate students, leaving even greater concentrations of generational poverty in neighborhood schools. The results of this increased segregation might not have been so tragic had we also invested in alternative services for the children who have endured suffering so terrible that they are emotionally incapable of functioning in the chaos of neighborhood secondary schools. Instead, we have dumped our most vulnerable children on our most vulnerable schools, turning them into way stations for those kids until they land on the streets."
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LAPD Won't Ticket Tardy Students on Their Way to School Anymore
by Julianne Hing (Colorlines, April 18, 2011)
"The revised policy is the product of an agreement from the LAUSD, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office and his non-profit Partnership for Los Angeles schools and the Labor Community Strategy Center, Public Counsel, as well as the ACLU of Southern California. The community and advocacy groups argued that far from encouraging kids to get to school on time or at all, truancy tickets actually do the exact opposite by forcing students to miss class in order to resolve them. The Strategy Center, which has been organizing to fight the punitive truancy tickets for several years, argued that aggressive truancy ticket policies actually fast-tracked kids into a school-to-prison pipeline. The more interaction kids have with the police, they said, the more likely kids are to drop out eventually."
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The Time Is Right to End 'Zero Tolerance' in Schools
by Gara LaMarche (Commentary - Education Week, April 6, 2011)
"It is too early to know whether the current wave of school reforms will lead to lasting improvements in student achievement. But it is not too early to note that many of these reforms have a troubling consequence: a doubling-down on harsh, ineffective zero-tolerance discipline policies. All too often, the debate about school reform has wrongly emphasized pushing troubled children out of school, rather than making systemic improvements so that all students have the support they need to learn."
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