When Heather Martin was a senior in high school, she survived the Columbine High School shooting that killed 12 students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado. Even as she tried to move on with her life, she carried the trauma of that day inside her — often in ways that surprised her.
The following year, during a community college class, she burst into tears during a routine fire drill, confused and embarrassed by her emotional reaction.
“I hadn’t remembered, until that very moment, that the fire alarm had been going off while I was barricaded for three hours before the SWAT team came,” she said.
She also struggled with panic attacks, an eating disorder, and insensitive comments from instructors. Eventually, Martin dropped out of college.
Today, Martin is a high school English teacher who prioritizes making her students feel safe and giving them the tools to understand and cope with trauma. She’s also the executive director of The Rebels Project, a nonprofit that supports survivors of mass tragedy.
The Los Angeles school district’s decade-old ban on suspensions for ‘willful defiance’ has benefited students — but also required a major investment in less punitive discipline methods.
In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.
A Hechinger Report investigation reveals the national picture on suspension that is quite different.. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.
As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
In separate trials earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley became the first parents in U.S. history to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for a mass shooting committed by their child.
On Tuesday, they were each sentenced to 10–15 years in prison, the maximum penalty for the crime. Prosecutors argued the Crumbleys ignored urgent warning signs that their son Ethan was having violent thoughts, and that the parents provided access to the gun he used to kill four classmates and injure seven other people at his school in November 2021.
When Yusef Qualls-El was 17, a judge sentenced him to life behind bars. It was the mid-1990s, an era when the U.S. prison population exploded.
Thousands of minors like Qualls-El received sentences of life without parole and entered prison at an age when their peers were going to college or starting their careers. But inside, education is often reserved for those who will soon return to society. As a result, those who were seen as the least likely to get out had the fewest opportunities.
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Just three days before her 15-year-old son carried out a mass shooting at his Michigan high school in 2021, Jennifer Crumbley was captured on security camera leaving a shooting range with the handgun in tow. She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”
Recently, at one of the writing workshops that I teach at three juvenile lockups in and around my hometown of St. Louis, one of my students posed a provocative question: “Why should I write about changing the world when the world doesn’t care about me?”
The roundtable discussion focused on the importance and effectiveness of mentoring and encouraged participation in mentorship opportunities for Florida’s youth.
In 2019 on Halloween, my wife and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys. The police lined them against a wall, cuffed them and took them away.
When you say the names of the Chicago communities where I grew up, they may evoke negative images. Both are neighborhoods with some of the city’s highest rates of gun violence. I grew up in North Lawndale and have lost friends and family on its streets. In the spring of ninth grade, one of these murders changed my life.
The judge responsible for the administration of a troubled juvenile detention center in rural southern Illinois abruptly moved to close it as of Dec. 31, citing staffing shortages that made it difficult to meet new state standards governing the treatment of youth in custody.
A 65% reduction in youth incarceration between 2005 and 2021 and the closing of two youth prisons during that time are among the great strides of Redeploy Illinois, an innovative Cook County program allowing communities to tailor state-funded juvenile treatment services to meet their particular characteristics and needs.
Rather than just build more jails, Louisiana juvenile justice system administrators urge officials to take a closer look at policies to address youth criminal trends, in addition to curbing persistent violence and escapes at state correctional centers.