Criminal charges against autistic students

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I was disturbed to read this PRI piece about schools in the US referring disproportionate numbers of disabled students to the juvenile justice system for criminal prosecution.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-10/h ... 6th-grader

That such systems should show the typical patterns of institutional racism endemic to the United States is depressing but not surprising. What did surprise me is the harsh treatment of developmentally delayed and learning disabled students including autistic students, as in the featured story of the criminal prosecution of 11 year old Kayleb Moon-Robinson.

There is a very good, very disheartening data set from the Center for Public Integrity.

Some key data:

This is outrageous. Sending kids into the criminal justice system for school infractions doesn't help anyone.

I have written elsewhere on Wrong Planet that this policy is evidence of the penalizing of public education. Our nation's schools have become miniature prisons armed with "resource" law-enforcement officers who are too stupid to be a security guard while taking out their anger and sense of superiority on humans half their size or less. How manly!

I believe that the educational system sees little about this that is criminal because they are generally just as complicit with their almost universal support of Applied Behavioral Analysis treatments which use "aversive therapy."

In other words, this is nothing but thuggish gangs ganging up with other thuggish gangs to gang up together against children with disabilities. And, nobody in the "system" sees anything wrong with this. Meanwhile, think of the kind of human it takes to do this to kids.

It's too bad that the zero violent policy is causing all this. This doesn't protect students with sensory issues who may react to touch and all he did was kick over a trash can, it's not like he threw things at anyone or tossed any furniture or attack anyone. He didn't break anything either and no one was hurt. Also the fact that kids with behavior disorders and behavior issues are getting arrested but my husband thinks that is the only way they will get help including autistic kids who are aggressive. Also what about bully victims who get into fights too? They're not protected either.

While I do think these kids should get help and treatment, I don't think arresting them is going to make them stop and I don't think they should have a criminal record from their childhood.

it also sounds like it's not only special needs students getting arrested, it's normal kids too also getting arrested. I am so glad my son's school didn't decide to call the police and have my son arrested for pushing other kids or biting one of them. Instead he got sent home after the bite incident. I think that was a severe enough punishment for him to not do that again because he loves going to school. Also they moved him to a smaller class so he was less overwhelmed because he was having to many behavior problems.

Why assume the system is racist? Is it not possible in your world view for a specific culture to produce a general oppositional-defiant attitude that engenders and encourages clashes with authority and actually assigns "street cred" to individuals for having served prison time? Don't be brainwashed by cherry-picked statistics and emotionally charged rhetoric. Often people are the source of their own problems.

"Special Needs" youth, by definition are at out of place a system designed to create and maintain order, and without adequate parenting are likely to be discipline problems. I do think that system needs to be prepared to recognize and support those needs, but standards of civilized behavior, for good or ill, must begin at home. If a special needs student enters the system unprepared to manage his or her own frustrations, engage in the learning process and treat others with respect, then creating specialized programs and tools to help them is a moot point - they're a lost cause before they even begin. You can't save everyone and it is not society's responsibility to do so.

1. If school employees don't know how to handle a child, juvie is a convenient way to get rid of them. Terrible. I've known 'uncontrollable' kids who needed only a little bit of attention and structure, and suddenly they were outperforming the rest of the class.

2. Teachers do not care about teaching or about the kids. They care about getting to the end of the day, the end of the school year, and retirement. They want only a paycheck and summers off and a nice, big retirement package (which they get because they are not part of Social Security); it's a big draw to lazy people. To teachers, kids are cattle.

3. The American school system (grades K-12) is the highest-funded school system in the world; we should be creating students that have the best education in the world. Yet we ranked #18 in the world for education in 2013, with ONLY A 99% LITERACY RATE AT GRADUATION! That means that 1 in every 100 students GRADUATES HIGH SCHOOL without being able to read! That's a terrible, awful track record. The entire system should be deconstructed, defunded, and rebuilt from scratch. Everyone employed by a school system ought to be fired, and all school boards should be disbanded. Yet all I hear about the American school system is how 'drastically underfunded' it is because no one wants to be the guy who proposes taking money away from schoolchildren. Problem is, the benefit of all that money isn't going to the kids. If it were, we'd be #1, in the ranking our money paid for.

I think because of faulty logic in the U.S. that says everyone is equal and is, or should be, the same. Equal doesn't mean the same though.

And when kids aren't the same or learn differently there's so much pressure they should try harder, parents should try harder, everyone needs to fit in and be the same. We put money into it rather than understanding. And we define kids as "failing" because they don't fit in, or don't learn like others.

It takes a lot of willpower for a kid to be ok with different when very few around them are.