How race skews school discipline in Texas.

[Are_grits_groceries]

Brandarion Thomas didn’t fit the stereotype of a sex offender. He was handsome, popular and 14 years old. But in June 2008, during summer school at Travis Junior High in Paris, a female classmate, also 14, accused him of grabbing her butt and crotch on four occasions in a classroom filled with other students.

Thomas, who is black, denies touching his classmate, who is also black. According to a statement she gave police, the girl—whose name is being withheld at her mother’s request—asked Thomas to stop. When he didn’t, she complained to school authorities.

Like many schools in the era of “zero tolerance” for discipline problems, Paris school officials turned to the justice system. Two campus police officers gathered witness statements, which generally supported the girl’s account, and referred the matter to the Lamar County district attorney.

Four-and-a-half months later, at the end of October, Thomas was arrested at his house by Paris police and charged with four felony counts of sexual indecency with a child. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew that I didn’t do it,” Thomas says. “But my mama was stressing so much, I just felt sorry for her.”

Dorothy Lawrence is no shrinking violet when it comes to disciplining her three kids. Thomas’ mother thought it appropriate when Brandarion, at 12, received a year of probation from the juvenile court and six weeks of alternative school for prank-calling 911 from the school bus. But she was horrified to learn that her son might face years in juvenile lockup and registration as a sex offender. “I didn’t know what they were going to do to him, him being so young,” she says. “I was just afraid, very afraid.”

Lawrence contacted Brenda Cherry, a civil rights activist in Paris. Cherry had brought attention to the case of Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old Paris girl who in 2006 was sentenced to up to seven years in the Texas Youth Commission for shoving a teacher’s aide. The judge in the case had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl convicted of arson to probation a few months earlier.

Cherry views the Cotton and Thomas prosecutions as extreme examples of a larger pattern of racial discrimination in Paris public schools. “The black kids are punished more often, more harshly. I think they go to extremes; they punish them for little things,” she says. “A lot of times, they see a black kid as more menacing.”

Though prosecutors offered a plea deal to Thomas—two years of probation in exchange for a guilty plea—Cherry helped convince Lawrence to take the matter to trial in front of the same judge who heard the Cotton case. “It’s ridiculous,” Cherry says. “He was 14. You’re going to ruin his life because you can’t make him plead guilty?”

In April 2009, on the morning of the trial, the defense attorney’s investigator again urged Lawrence to take the plea deal. “He told me, if I was you, I would tell him to go ahead and plead guilty,” says Lawrence. “I looked him in the eyes and said, I’m not going to do that. That’s when he told me if he loses, he’s facing two to 20 years.”

In February 1995, amid growing fear over juvenile crime and teen “superpredators,” newly inaugurated Gov. George W. Bush called on the Texas Legislature to crack down. “We must adopt one policy for those who terrorize teachers or disrupt classrooms—zero tolerance,” he said.

Bush called for a tougher, bigger juvenile justice system—more juvenile-detention beds, “tough love academies” staffed by retired Marine drill sergeants, and harsher sentencing for juvenile offenders. The Legislature drafted a list of serious offenses, such as bringing a weapon or drugs to school, that trigger mandatory referral to “alternative” programs.

There is much more :http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1103369271271&s=1285&e=001YB5fVN7Op0d6iAA3_wTkR_Fc2SlkoaCoDXIFetpDzqf0K7BAdIGJOyZ25URZYsOJAHk0atyqnYZctUs0yAQlKc0vwoFv7pZxPXtSOvpojyTTH2zle7vQ9buKEgQLWg0iT2wXxQRi22vhVMhju0A4aTw0T5_umBRNv0GvYWL4s18=

This is well worth reading, but watch your blood pressure. I don't even know where to begin.

[bluestateguy]

1. Only in very rare circumstances should the police become involved in school discipline matters

Otherwise, these things should be left to school authorities to handle, which should include the possibilities of suspension or expulsion, but not jail (not usually anyway).

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. Problem is that there is no due process and independent review in school discipline

and the level of capriciousness there is even higher.