BLACK GIRLS PUT SCHOOLS ON NOTICE
Disparities in discipline, justice lead to programs to narrow gap
“It is so belittling and targeting. It makes you feel like something is wrong with you and the way you dress.” sophomore at Texas Southern University
Itivere Enaohwo is a college sophomore, majoring in criminal justice at Texas Southern University, with designs on law school. Her middle and high school days are long in the rear-view window.
But she still remembers the humiliation of being singled out – time after time – for dress code violations at a suburban Houston high school.
For wearing an oversized T-shirt and leggings in middle school. For wearing a dress a high school administrator deemed too short – even though Enaohwo had measured it carefully at home, making sure the hemline met the rule of not being more than 3 inches above the knee.
Enaohwo says white classmates seemed to get away with similar outfits. She wondered if the discipline had more to do with her race – she is black – and her curvy frame than with actual infractions.
Her concern was not unfounded. Black girls don’t misbehave more than white girls, yet they are more likely to be disciplined in school and often receive harsher penalties for the same infractions, experts and researchers say. They are “dress coded” more frequently than white peers and viewed as hypersexualized and “adultified.”
Nationally, they are nearly six times more likely to get out-of-school suspension than white counterparts and more likely to be suspended multiple times than any other gender or race of student, according to research by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. That disproportionality contributes to a cycle documented by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in which black girls are three times more likely to be referred to juvenile court than white girls and 20% more likely to be detained.
In Texas’ Fort Bend Independent School District, which Enaohwo attended, a six-year investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights found that black students were six times more likely to receive out-ofschool suspensions than white students and four times as likely to be placed on in-school suspensions.
Advocates and researchers say there are ways to close that gap – and to make sure black girls are not pushed out of school and into confinement.
Those remedies include launching restorative justice practices, creating diversion courts and – as the Office of Civil Rights recommended in closing its Fort Bend investigation last summer – revising the disciplinary codes to define infractions and procedures more clearly and developing a training program for staffers who enforce discipline.
A study set for release this week by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, which asked black girls and women to share their experiences with adultification and the long-term effect on their lives, calls for additional training for educators.
In Fort Bend, the federal investigation highlighted a problem in many school discipline policies: Too often, they are written in a vague language that leaves penalties up to the discretion of a teacher or administrator. As a result, black girls are often punished for infractions while their white peers get by with a warning.
At Elkins High School, where Enaohwo graduated, black students were nearly two times more likely to get inschool suspension for dress code violations than white students. According to the Office of Civil Rights investigation, of the six in-school suspensions meted out by one administrator, all went to black students.
At one Fort Bend middle school, a black student received one day of inschool suspension and one day of outof-school suspension for making a derogatory comment, but a white student received a parent conference and a notation to “think before he speaks” for the same infraction. At another middle school in the district, only one of 14 white students referred for first-offense tardiness was given detention, compared with six of the 17 black students.
“There are biases that people hold against black girls, and there are policies in place that allow them to act out those biases and enable them,” says Nia Evans, manager of campaign and digital strategies for the National Women’s Law Center. “But this is not an unsolvable problem.”
‘Restorative justice’
Inside Crispus Attucks Middle School, a predominantly black school in Houston, girls gather in circles once a week. They talk about anger and frustration, share stories from home and from the classroom. They work out conflicts and work through mistrust.
Everyone understands that what is said in the circle stays in the circle. It is all part of the Law Enforcement-Assisted Diversion program, or LEAD, a restorative justice initiative, which began in Seattle to serve adults. The Attucks initiative, the first school-based LEAD program, has served about 55 students in its pilot year.
Under the LEAD program, a joint initiative by the city of Houston and Harris County, campus police and administrators are encouraged to refer students for support services instead of arresting them for nonviolent offenses or enforcing punitive discipline. The idea, says program director Tisha Wilson, is to keep kids from getting tangled in a cycle of punitive discipline or being funneled into juvenile detention.
In the restorative justice approach, which the Fort Bend school district adopted in 26 schools, educators and social workers focus on prevention rather than punishment by addressing underlying trauma and emotional and social issues.
The use of restorative practices and training for administrators and teachers on how to enforce discipline fairly have helped bring down the number of classroom removals, including for black students, says Fort Bend district spokeswoman Amanda Bubela.
“We also recognize that we continue to have disproportionate removals of certain groups such as African Americans, Hispanics and students with disabilities,” she said in a written response to questions from USA TODAY. “We understand that this is a nation-wide concern, but still believe that the interventions, plans and resources that we have in place are effective and will continue to improve schools for our students.”
A study by Rights 4 Girls in 2015 found that 31% of girls involved in the juvenile justice system had been sexually abused and 45% had suffered five or more adverse childhood experiences, such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect and other traumas.
A study in 2016 by WestEd Justice & Prevention Research Center that surveyed practitioners from 18 states found that half said the restorative justice approach was used in more than one school, and half said it was used in all schools.
A study by the Rand Corp. found that the practice helps reduce suspensions, especially among black students, and a WestEd study says a well-implemented program can result in a “decrease in exclusionary discipline and harmful behavior.”
In the Oakland Unified School District in California, the use of restorative justice helped reduce suspensions from 34% to 14% over two years.
In an effective restorative justice practice, the school setting is basically reimagined and geared toward helping build “emotional literacy skills” such as conflict resolution, resilience and relationship building, says Thalia Gonzalez, senior scholar with Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality.
At Attucks Middle School, where 40 students were arrested last year (the highest number at any Houston school district campus), the LEAD program’s first year has had its share of obstacles.
There have been early – albeit small – successes: less fighting among the girls in the program, more attempts at conflict resolution and a decrease in disciplinary referrals.
Nearly every day, Wilson says, a student will knock on the door to the LEAD classroom and ask to join the program.
Diversion court
The girls who come through Magistrate Judge Mary Grace Rook’s courtroom in Washington have already been swept into the criminal system.
Though they may face delinquency charges, they are also victims – suspected or confirmed survivors of sex trafficking. In Rook’s H.O.P.E court, which launched in January 2018, that is how they are treated.
It is one of many diversion courts specifically for sex trafficking victims, including STAR Court in Los Angeles and ESTEEM Court in Dallas, which are designed to offer treatment and holistic services to juveniles instead of placing them in detention.
As of 2016, 28 states passed “safe harbor” laws that prevent minors from being charged with prostitution and give them access to specialized services.
Instead of being jailed, the girls in H.O.P.E Court are connected to counseling and mentorship that get to the factors that made them vulnerable to sex trafficking, such as homelessness, domestic violence or sexual abuse.
“We are decriminalizing the children. I think that is a significant part of the answer,” Rook says. “The way we’ve set up our court, the way it looks, all of those are statements we’re making about the fact that these are not criminals. These are children.”
This story was published with the support of a fellowship from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.