Remembering Elementary School Shootings of the Past

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The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre Nov. 14 constitutes the second deadliest mass school shooting incident in American history, second only to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in which a single assailant murdered 32 individuals and injured 17 others. With an estimated 26 victims dead -- 20 of whom are children -- the recent massacre is far and away the deadliest shooting incident to ever occur in one of the nation’s elementary schools. Although mass shooting incidents in university and high school settings have occurred in the past, the Newtown, Conn. massacre serves as a rare instance of a perpetrator targeting elementary school students.

Exploring the Use of Pell Grants To Go From Prison to College

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NEWARK, N.J. – Recidivism could be cut and public dollars could be saved if lawmakers lifted a longstanding federal ban on Pell grants to prisoners. Those were some of the key arguments made at Rutgers University last week by a group of academics, criminal justice reformers and formerly incarcerated individuals in a fledgling program meant to serve as a bridge from a youth correctional facility to college. John J. Farmer, Jr., former New Jersey attorney general and now Dean and Professor of Law at the Rutgers School of Law, called the restoration of Pell grants for prisoners “one of the most important dialogues we can have in the context of law enforcement.”

“I think that education in our prisons is the key to preventing recidivism,” Farmer said. Farmer made his remarks Thursday at the Rutgers University Paul Robeson Campus Center during an event titled “Pell Grants and Prison Education: How Pell Grant Access in Prison Transforms Lives.”

Among those who spoke in support of lifting the ban on Pell grants to prisoners was Dallas Pell, daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, father of Pell grants. Pell, who is founder of an organization called Pell Grants for Public Safety, said providing education for individuals in prison is a “no-brainer” and “one of the most effective tools we have to make our community safe.”

Pell and various speakers noted how a plethora of studies have repeatedly found that higher education for prisoners significantly reduces their likelihood of returning to prison.

Healing Words: Creative Writing Programs as Therapy for Kids in Detention

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ANNISTON, Ala. — Mercy Pilkington’s classroom, at first glance, seems like any other in the nation’s public school system. Novels penned by John Steinbeck and Harper Lee are stacked over a U-shaped row of cubicles. The walls are lined with laminated posters; crayon-colored cutouts of chubby red robins and lime-green pigs are pasted on the room’s sole window. Pilkington, 39, has taught for 11 years.

New Report Examines High Cost of School Discipline in Budget-Stressed Texas Districts

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The Austin-based advocacy organization Texas Appleseed recently released a report examining the financial impact on several Texas school districts of using exclusionary discipline techniques, including expulsions, out-of-school suspensions and alternative education program referrals. The findings in “Breaking Rules, Breaking Budgets: Cost of Exclusionary Discipline in 11 Texas School Districts” stem from an evaluation of about 25 percent of the state’s 4 million public school students. According to researchers, the total “cost of discipline” for the 11 school districts studied resulted in a combined $140 million in expenditures from 2010 to 2011. The combined cost includes a number of factors, including the cost of operating alternative education campuses, security and monitoring expenses and overall lost state funding due to out-of-school suspensions. Researchers said that budgetary constrictions - including a recent $5.4 billion cut to the state’s public education budget - means Texas school districts will have to be more strategic in selecting effective, evidence-based programs to improve student outcomes.

Atlanta Forum Set on Alternatives to Alternative Schools

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A year-long research and reporting project on equity in education in Georgia schools will frame an upcoming public discussion for professionals and families in Atlanta. “Research has found children of color, poor children and children with learning disabilities tend to be disciplined more harshly in public schools,” said Chandra Thomas Whitfield, host of the forum. That’s one of her findings at the end of a year of her work as a Soros Justice Fellow. The panelists -- most of whom she has interviewed in her years of work as a journalist -- will discuss this harsher punishment of certain children, then what happens when students are put into so-called alternative schools. She defines those as schools where children have been put out of a traditional setting for a discipline or academic problem.

Pennsylvania Court Ruling Says Colleges Have Right to Incoming Students’ Juvenile Delinquency Records

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Last week, an attorney representing an incoming freshman with intentions of attending Temple University asked Pennsylvania’s Superior Court to reconsider the state’s “Juvenile Act,” following an appeals court ruling that allowed the university to be informed of his client’s previous delinquency history. In a 2-1 decision, judges upheld a previous Lehigh County juvenile court ruling which said that the state’s “Juvenile Act” could be extended to universities and colleges. Following the ruling, attorney Gavin Holihan filed a motion asking the court to reargue the case, this time in front of a larger panel of judges. Pennsylvania’s “Juvenile Act” requires schools to be notified if an enrolled student is found delinquent of a crime, with additional information required if the crime constitutes a felony. At 17, Holihan’s client had been found delinquent of disseminating child pornography on a file-sharing network.

Perps or Pupils? Safety Policy Creates Prisonlike New York City Schools

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This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity

When Minerva Dickson first saw her high school she thought it looked like a prison. After her first week she realized how right her initial impressions were. Every day when she arrived at the Thomas Jefferson Campus in Brownsville, Brooklyn, she waited in a line that snaked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She would shuffle up two steps passing beneath words from Abraham Lincoln inscribed on the neo-classical pediment: “Let Reverence for the Laws Become the Political Religion of the Nation.”

Next, she reached into her pocket for her identification card and slid it through a machine. When it recognized her, it blurted an approving beep and a green light would flash.

No Quick Fix for Disproportionate School Discipline of Black Students

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In the wake of a batch of federal data released earlier this year showing minority children are disproportionately disciplined in schools, experts and policy makers say the reasons are complicated and not so easy to explain. But one thing is clear, they say, changing that is going to require a major shift in school philosophy. African-American students make up 18 percent of the pupils in a major U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights survey covering the 2009-2010 school year. But they make up 35 percent of students suspended once, 46 percent of students suspended more than once, and 39 percent of students expelled. “There’s no proven conclusive definitive explanation,” said Michael Harris, a senior attorney for juvenile justice with the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, Ca.

Maryland’s High Court Turns Fate of State’s DREAM Act Over to Voters

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The highest court in the state of Maryland has cleared the way for voters this fall to determine the fate of a 2011 law allowing certain children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at Maryland universities. Maryland is among a dozen states to have passed such a law, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In a brief order  released Wednesday, the state Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld a ruling by a lower court judge that a voter referendum on the law be allowed to appear on the November ballot. The law remains suspended until the public votes on the measure. Lawyers for the immigrant rights organization CASA de Maryland had unsuccessfully tried to convince the state supreme court’s seven-judge panel that the law was an appropriations bill as it dealt with tuition rates.

L.A. School Police, District Agree to Rethink Court Citations of Students

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This story originally appeared on iWatchnews.org by the Center for Public Integrity. In the wake of critical news reports, Los Angeles school police and administrators have agreed to rethink enforcement tactics that have led to thousands of court citations yearly for young students in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods. The Center for Public Integrity and the Los Angeles-based Labor-Community Strategy Center each performed their own analysis recently of previously unreleased citation records obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department, the nation’s largest school police force. The Center found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, Los Angeles school police officers issued more than 33,500 tickets to students 18 and younger, with more than 40 percent handed out to kids 14 and 10 years old. That was an average of about 30 tickets a day.