Post by Okwes on Nov 29, 2005 12:51:44 GMT -5
Dakota Indians say kids trapped in `school-to-prison pipeline'
School district denies complaint it is racist in disciplining tribal children for misconduct
By Tracy Dell'Angela
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 29, 2005
WINNER, S.D. -- Casey Chasing Hawk once loved school so much that he would arrive at his bus stop 30 minutes early.
That all changed when Casey was pulled out of his 7th grade class by the Winner school superintendent, turned over to the police and thrown into jail for telling a teacher he was so angry at a classmate who beat him that he wanted to kill him. He spent 63 days in a juvenile detention facility 60 miles from home before the South Dakota Supreme Court determined that his misbehavior didn't even amount to disorderly conduct.
"They claimed he was a monster, so they had to make him look like a monster," said his father, Nelson Chasing Hawk. "They did all these evaluations on him, and they found out that his only problem was what they had done to him at that school."
What happened to Casey more than four years ago is still resonating today in this tiny town near a sprawling Lakota Sioux reservation. It has landed this rural district in southern South Dakota squarely in the middle of a wider debate over how schools discipline minority children.
Civil rights advocates want to make a national example of this 900-student district over the "school-to-prison pipeline"--the practice of arresting children and teens for routine school misconduct such as fighting and disobedience. It's an issue that has garnered the most attention in largely minority urban districts such as Chicago but is all but ignored in Indian country.
Winner district leaders argue that Indian children are treated fairly in the district's three schools and that it enforces its discipline code without bias.
Yet this isn't the first time Winner schools have faced federal scrutiny. The Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department ordered the Winner district in 2000 to eradicate racial harassment and to stop disciplining Native Americans more severely than their white peers, and after four years of scrutiny the case was closed in 2004.
But the district's own statistics from 2001 to 2004 demonstrate that Indian children continue to be punished at disproportionate rates and are leaving the district in droves.
In Winner Middle School, Indian children represent less than 20 percent of the pupil population but 100 percent of the pupils suspended for insubordination in the 2002-03 school year. Last year, Indian pupils made up 70 percent of all out-of-school suspensions and 79 percent of police referrals.
At the grade school, about 90 Indian children are enrolled in pre-kindergarten to 4th grade--almost one-third of the school's population of 293. But at Winner High School, only about 2 percent of the graduates are Indian in a typical year.
Where do they go? Some drop out. Others go to prison. Most flee to reservation schools that are so far away from their families that they must live in dormitories during the school week.
The Winner students who live in dorms 45 miles from home do so, they say, because they are convinced that Winner's schools are hostile places. Sometimes this belief is born of personal experience with a racist child or an insensitive teacher. More often, it's the perception gleaned from stories passed down from parents and cousins and siblings.
"They made my brother go to jail. They said he stabbed someone with a pencil," said 11-year-old Alysia Peneaux, who lives in the tribal dormitory and attends 6th grade in Mission, S.D. She misses her family during the week but she was afraid of trouble at Winner Middle. "I know they would be mean to me, so I didn't want to go to school there."
Glen Old Lodge, a high school junior, said he left in 8th grade because he was always blamed for disagreements he had with white classmates. "They almost sent me off too. It's mostly racism. You just get treated differently," he said.
The discipline and enrollment numbers--provided by the district under terms of the federal lawsuit--prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and Lakota Sioux tribal officials to file a complaint this year demanding that the case be reopened by the civil rights office.
Rural areas a special case
Bernardine Dohrn, a Northwestern University law professor and a national expert on the school-to-prison pipeline, said it's important to identify this issue in rural areas because help for these alienated students is hard to find.
"At least in Chicago, the school board can say everyone has access to an alternative school," Dohrn said. "Most of the time in rural districts, there is no alternative. When kids are pushed out . . . it's a desperate situation. And they don't have the access to lawyers and advocates who are going to fight on their behalf."
But New York City lawyers from the ACLU decided to advocate for a few dozen families in this town. The ACLU argued in its complaint that the school district was able to get the federal case closed in 2004 by presenting "a grossly distorted" picture of race relations in the district.
"It's shocking to see the statistics coming out of this district--they are off the chart in terms of egregiousness," said Catherine Kim, an ACLU lawyer handling the case. "But I also think Winner makes it clear that these issues are not confined to urban schools perceived to be dangerous. Winner is an ordinary American town . . . but in terms of race relations, Winner is very far behind a lot of other places."
Winner School District officials acknowledged that the region suffered from a history of discrimination, but argued in its response to the ACLU complaint that it now "takes pride in its efforts to stamp out discrimination through education [and] sound policy."
Supt. Mary Fisher, a former elementary principal who took over the district after the superintendent named in the Chasing Hawk case left the Winner district, said she's upset about the lies that have been spread about her schools. She said national advocates are making a major case out of isolated complaints from disgruntled families.
"We have great kids here, and very little trouble," Fisher said during a tour of the middle school this fall, when she boasted of school offerings that ranged from high-tech distance learning to a new golf team. "I'm a strong believer that you can always improve. But if you discipline kids you're going to have parents who are upset."
Noah Running Horse gave up thinking things would improve. He was suspended after defending himself from a fellow student who hit him with a tennis racket, he said. Another teen threatened to shoot him, and when his father complained to the principal, the threats were treated as "no big deal," Wayne Running Horse said. Noah dropped out of school and married the mother of his baby. Now 19, he is thinking about a job at the local McDonald's.
A review of disciplinary reports from 2002-2004 submitted as part of the 2000 civil rights case complaint revealed that an Indian boy in middle school was suspended for two days for walking through an alley rather than using a crosswalk; an Indian girl got the same punishment for chewing gum. An 8th grader drew a 90-day suspension for disrupting class and "insubordination"--an infraction that calls for a maximum punishment of four days suspension. Another 8th grader drew a four-day suspension for gang-related activity--drawing a medicine wheel and writing "Native Pride" on his notebook.
`Race card' too easy
The Winner district's lawyer challenged some of the conclusions presented in the ACLU complaint, particularly the assertion that school leaders ignore racial harassment of Native American students.
"It is easy to play the race card when children of different racial or ethnic backgrounds have problems with each other. But very often the truth is that such difficulties arise from . . . human nature, not from racial prejudices," wrote district lawyer Paul Jensen in his August 2005 response to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights.
He did not dispute statistics that show Indian kids get in trouble more often than their Caucasian peers--or that the number of Indian students who leave Winner schools is high.
School officials say they are not to blame for the misbehavior or the Indians' exodus.
"The lack of parental involvement and sponsorship of their kids' education, high rates of alcoholism and chemical abuse, and many other factors play a role in the unfortunate figures that are reported," Jensen wrote, adding that "teen pregnancies appear to be increasing in some of these cultural groups."
"The dropout rates of Native American students in this district are fairly consistent with other similarly situated school districts in South Dakota, perhaps nationwide," Jensen said.
Indeed, the outcome for Indian children nationwide is grim. About half of Indian children drop out in high school, according to two national studies.
Only 18 percent scored as "proficient" in reading tests on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared with about 40 percent of their white counterparts tested in 4th and 8th grades.
But the exodus of Indian students is not reflected in the district's graduation statistics because the Native American children who leave are not counted as dropouts unless they formally report themselves as such. And when they do leave for reservation schools, their educational prospects dim. In the Winner district, 59 percent of all Native American students meet state standards in reading. In the Todd County reservation schools, only 42 percent of middle and high school students pass reading tests.
The legal battle is playing out in a declining town where jobs are scarce, school funds are tight and allegiances run deep. The school lawyer also is the town's only prosecutor, and the closeness of Indian clans often forces younger children to suffer the legacy of their older cousins' and siblings' misbehavior.
Winner administrators say their "discipline matrix" is objectively applied, but educators know that discipline decisions involve a lot of discretion. It's the teacher who decides whether to ignore adolescent surliness and when to punish someone for insubordination. An administrator can decide which schoolyard fights merit a call to police for battery and which are best mediated in a back office.
Tribal lawyer's complaint
"If it's a white kid doing something wrong, it's a kid being a kid. If it's an Indian kid, it's a kid being a criminal," said Dana Hanna, a former New York City criminal defense lawyer who is the attorney general of the Rosebud reservation's Lakota Sioux tribe.
"They are educating Indian kids for the role they expect them to fulfill in society--that of criminal defendant," he added. "Schools are abdicating their job to police, prosecutors and judges. And they don't see it as a problem."
Casey Chasing Hawk learned that role during his two months in jail, his parents said. When he returned to Winner he lost all interest in schoolwork and shut down around his teachers. He dropped out of school, left home, started abusing alcohol and getting into trouble with the law. The 19-year-old's slide is devastating to his parents, who raised Casey in a traditional Lakota home and hoped he would be a leader in the tribal community.
"His spirit was broken," his mom said.
School district denies complaint it is racist in disciplining tribal children for misconduct
By Tracy Dell'Angela
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 29, 2005
WINNER, S.D. -- Casey Chasing Hawk once loved school so much that he would arrive at his bus stop 30 minutes early.
That all changed when Casey was pulled out of his 7th grade class by the Winner school superintendent, turned over to the police and thrown into jail for telling a teacher he was so angry at a classmate who beat him that he wanted to kill him. He spent 63 days in a juvenile detention facility 60 miles from home before the South Dakota Supreme Court determined that his misbehavior didn't even amount to disorderly conduct.
"They claimed he was a monster, so they had to make him look like a monster," said his father, Nelson Chasing Hawk. "They did all these evaluations on him, and they found out that his only problem was what they had done to him at that school."
What happened to Casey more than four years ago is still resonating today in this tiny town near a sprawling Lakota Sioux reservation. It has landed this rural district in southern South Dakota squarely in the middle of a wider debate over how schools discipline minority children.
Civil rights advocates want to make a national example of this 900-student district over the "school-to-prison pipeline"--the practice of arresting children and teens for routine school misconduct such as fighting and disobedience. It's an issue that has garnered the most attention in largely minority urban districts such as Chicago but is all but ignored in Indian country.
Winner district leaders argue that Indian children are treated fairly in the district's three schools and that it enforces its discipline code without bias.
Yet this isn't the first time Winner schools have faced federal scrutiny. The Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department ordered the Winner district in 2000 to eradicate racial harassment and to stop disciplining Native Americans more severely than their white peers, and after four years of scrutiny the case was closed in 2004.
But the district's own statistics from 2001 to 2004 demonstrate that Indian children continue to be punished at disproportionate rates and are leaving the district in droves.
In Winner Middle School, Indian children represent less than 20 percent of the pupil population but 100 percent of the pupils suspended for insubordination in the 2002-03 school year. Last year, Indian pupils made up 70 percent of all out-of-school suspensions and 79 percent of police referrals.
At the grade school, about 90 Indian children are enrolled in pre-kindergarten to 4th grade--almost one-third of the school's population of 293. But at Winner High School, only about 2 percent of the graduates are Indian in a typical year.
Where do they go? Some drop out. Others go to prison. Most flee to reservation schools that are so far away from their families that they must live in dormitories during the school week.
The Winner students who live in dorms 45 miles from home do so, they say, because they are convinced that Winner's schools are hostile places. Sometimes this belief is born of personal experience with a racist child or an insensitive teacher. More often, it's the perception gleaned from stories passed down from parents and cousins and siblings.
"They made my brother go to jail. They said he stabbed someone with a pencil," said 11-year-old Alysia Peneaux, who lives in the tribal dormitory and attends 6th grade in Mission, S.D. She misses her family during the week but she was afraid of trouble at Winner Middle. "I know they would be mean to me, so I didn't want to go to school there."
Glen Old Lodge, a high school junior, said he left in 8th grade because he was always blamed for disagreements he had with white classmates. "They almost sent me off too. It's mostly racism. You just get treated differently," he said.
The discipline and enrollment numbers--provided by the district under terms of the federal lawsuit--prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and Lakota Sioux tribal officials to file a complaint this year demanding that the case be reopened by the civil rights office.
Rural areas a special case
Bernardine Dohrn, a Northwestern University law professor and a national expert on the school-to-prison pipeline, said it's important to identify this issue in rural areas because help for these alienated students is hard to find.
"At least in Chicago, the school board can say everyone has access to an alternative school," Dohrn said. "Most of the time in rural districts, there is no alternative. When kids are pushed out . . . it's a desperate situation. And they don't have the access to lawyers and advocates who are going to fight on their behalf."
But New York City lawyers from the ACLU decided to advocate for a few dozen families in this town. The ACLU argued in its complaint that the school district was able to get the federal case closed in 2004 by presenting "a grossly distorted" picture of race relations in the district.
"It's shocking to see the statistics coming out of this district--they are off the chart in terms of egregiousness," said Catherine Kim, an ACLU lawyer handling the case. "But I also think Winner makes it clear that these issues are not confined to urban schools perceived to be dangerous. Winner is an ordinary American town . . . but in terms of race relations, Winner is very far behind a lot of other places."
Winner School District officials acknowledged that the region suffered from a history of discrimination, but argued in its response to the ACLU complaint that it now "takes pride in its efforts to stamp out discrimination through education [and] sound policy."
Supt. Mary Fisher, a former elementary principal who took over the district after the superintendent named in the Chasing Hawk case left the Winner district, said she's upset about the lies that have been spread about her schools. She said national advocates are making a major case out of isolated complaints from disgruntled families.
"We have great kids here, and very little trouble," Fisher said during a tour of the middle school this fall, when she boasted of school offerings that ranged from high-tech distance learning to a new golf team. "I'm a strong believer that you can always improve. But if you discipline kids you're going to have parents who are upset."
Noah Running Horse gave up thinking things would improve. He was suspended after defending himself from a fellow student who hit him with a tennis racket, he said. Another teen threatened to shoot him, and when his father complained to the principal, the threats were treated as "no big deal," Wayne Running Horse said. Noah dropped out of school and married the mother of his baby. Now 19, he is thinking about a job at the local McDonald's.
A review of disciplinary reports from 2002-2004 submitted as part of the 2000 civil rights case complaint revealed that an Indian boy in middle school was suspended for two days for walking through an alley rather than using a crosswalk; an Indian girl got the same punishment for chewing gum. An 8th grader drew a 90-day suspension for disrupting class and "insubordination"--an infraction that calls for a maximum punishment of four days suspension. Another 8th grader drew a four-day suspension for gang-related activity--drawing a medicine wheel and writing "Native Pride" on his notebook.
`Race card' too easy
The Winner district's lawyer challenged some of the conclusions presented in the ACLU complaint, particularly the assertion that school leaders ignore racial harassment of Native American students.
"It is easy to play the race card when children of different racial or ethnic backgrounds have problems with each other. But very often the truth is that such difficulties arise from . . . human nature, not from racial prejudices," wrote district lawyer Paul Jensen in his August 2005 response to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights.
He did not dispute statistics that show Indian kids get in trouble more often than their Caucasian peers--or that the number of Indian students who leave Winner schools is high.
School officials say they are not to blame for the misbehavior or the Indians' exodus.
"The lack of parental involvement and sponsorship of their kids' education, high rates of alcoholism and chemical abuse, and many other factors play a role in the unfortunate figures that are reported," Jensen wrote, adding that "teen pregnancies appear to be increasing in some of these cultural groups."
"The dropout rates of Native American students in this district are fairly consistent with other similarly situated school districts in South Dakota, perhaps nationwide," Jensen said.
Indeed, the outcome for Indian children nationwide is grim. About half of Indian children drop out in high school, according to two national studies.
Only 18 percent scored as "proficient" in reading tests on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared with about 40 percent of their white counterparts tested in 4th and 8th grades.
But the exodus of Indian students is not reflected in the district's graduation statistics because the Native American children who leave are not counted as dropouts unless they formally report themselves as such. And when they do leave for reservation schools, their educational prospects dim. In the Winner district, 59 percent of all Native American students meet state standards in reading. In the Todd County reservation schools, only 42 percent of middle and high school students pass reading tests.
The legal battle is playing out in a declining town where jobs are scarce, school funds are tight and allegiances run deep. The school lawyer also is the town's only prosecutor, and the closeness of Indian clans often forces younger children to suffer the legacy of their older cousins' and siblings' misbehavior.
Winner administrators say their "discipline matrix" is objectively applied, but educators know that discipline decisions involve a lot of discretion. It's the teacher who decides whether to ignore adolescent surliness and when to punish someone for insubordination. An administrator can decide which schoolyard fights merit a call to police for battery and which are best mediated in a back office.
Tribal lawyer's complaint
"If it's a white kid doing something wrong, it's a kid being a kid. If it's an Indian kid, it's a kid being a criminal," said Dana Hanna, a former New York City criminal defense lawyer who is the attorney general of the Rosebud reservation's Lakota Sioux tribe.
"They are educating Indian kids for the role they expect them to fulfill in society--that of criminal defendant," he added. "Schools are abdicating their job to police, prosecutors and judges. And they don't see it as a problem."
Casey Chasing Hawk learned that role during his two months in jail, his parents said. When he returned to Winner he lost all interest in schoolwork and shut down around his teachers. He dropped out of school, left home, started abusing alcohol and getting into trouble with the law. The 19-year-old's slide is devastating to his parents, who raised Casey in a traditional Lakota home and hoped he would be a leader in the tribal community.
"His spirit was broken," his mom said.