With More Police Officers in Schools, Thousands of Texas Students Wind Up In Court Each Year
On Tuesday, Eric told you about a DISD sixth-grader who was arrested at his school, DISD's Learning Alternative Center for Empowering Youth, after attempting to steal $4 from a classmate. After his target felt the sixth-grader's hand in his pocket and pulled away, the frustrated would-be thief knocked him to the ground. The victim immediately tracked down two Dallas police officers working off-duty at the school and asked to press charges. The sixth-grader was arrested and taken to Dallas County's juvenile justice center, where he's being charged with robbery.
The incident started a furious debate in the comments section about police issuing criminal citations in schools. Over the past decade or so, this has become an increasingly common story in Texas schools, and, as The New York Times reports today, across the nation. Thousands of children each year face Class C misdemeanor charges for relatively minor disruptions, the paper writes, vaulting them into a legal process where they often face those charges without legal aid and with a chance of ending up with a lasting black mark on their records, as well as court fines and many hours of community service. (The ACLU has tracked a huge number of these cases nationwide, including the infamous example of Texas honor student Diane Tran, jailed for missing class. Tran was working two jobs to support herself and her siblings after her parents divorced and her mother left the state.)
And surprise surprise, these types of criminal charges appear to be most common in Texas: Students here are written more than 100,000 tickets each year.
That number comes from Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin-based legal advocacy center for juveniles. And Texas Appleseed has come to believe that the tickets are disproportionately issued in some districts to a certain kind of student: the non-white kind. In February, along with the Brazos County chapter of the NAACP, they filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. It alleges that black students in Bryan are ticketed at four times the rate of white ones, and tells one of their stories:
More at http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/04/with_more_police_officers_in_s.php .
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can become civil rights proponents when it is their child getting arrested for behavior learned at home from the parents.
I followed a case from my home town a few years ago and couldn't resist chuckling over a chick fight to woo the attention 
of a jock suitor.