Salecia Johnson cannot sleep at night. According to her mother Constance Ruff, the six year-old wakes up repeatedly through the night screaming, "They're coming to get me!" Last week, the kindergartner was handcuffed and arrested by police at Creekside Elementary School in Milledgeville, Georgia, and taken to the police station for having a temper tantrum. She is traumatized.
This is not the first time a kindergartner has been arrested for a temper tantrum. In 2005 in Pinellas County, FL, another little African-American girl, J'aiesha Scott had a temper tantrum after a jelly bean counting game ended. She was taken to the principal's office where three police officers came in after the tantrum was over. They pulled her up out of her seat and forced her arms behind her, and they handcuffed the little girl. She was left in the back of a police cruiser for hours while she cried for her mommy. It has happened again. Another little African-American girl has been treated like a criminal. There are countless other children of color that suffer similar trauma at the hands of adults in schools.
Salecia, like J'aeisha, has had an early ride on what we call the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track. They like millions of other children in this country are victims of the school-to-prison pipeline - a system of zero tolerance policies in schools across the nation that takes an unyielding approach to student discipline and where children of color are punished more often and more severely for minor misbehavior than their white peers. It is a system where common sense becomes irrelevant as intolerance reigns and the consequences are high - academic failure, criminal charges, and damage to psyche. Children of color are most impacted. Data released by the Department of Education last month shows black children were suspended three and a half times more than whites in 2009-2010, and African- American and Latino children accounted for 70 percent of school-based arrests.
Zero tolerance discipline is used for minor actions most appropriately addressed by parents, teachers, and administrators. As schools become less tolerant, students are increasingly suspended for tardiness, talking out of turn in class, failing to wear uniforms, and engaging in schoolyard scuffles. Even worse, schools have upped the ante by turning these actions over to the police. Handcuffs now await many children for participating in such adolescent indiscretions as talking back to an adult, writing on the desk, and yes, even engaging in temper tantrums. A 14-year old Florida girl recently spent 21 days in jail for hitting another student with a pencil. In Denver, a 10th grade Latino student was taken down to the police station and booked for writing on the bathroom stall with a marker. A 2009 food fight in a Chicago lunchroom left 25 middle school kids with criminal charges.
Despite a sharp increase of police involvement in school matters, no evidence exists that it makes schools safer. In fact, an Advancement Project study of Philadelphia schools documents the dire consequences of increased police presence in our schools. These unforgiving zero tolerance policies take children off of a track to college or career and place them onto a path into the criminal justice system.
School staff, like those at Creekside Elementary, who overreact to childish behavior by treating it as criminal, rob children of a chance toward a successful future. There is a better way. Graduation rates in Baltimore reached record highs after doing away with zero tolerance policies. Out-of-school suspensions decreased 64 percent and youth crime has gone down. In Denver, parents and students successfully organized to get the school system to implement a common sense approach to discipline that led to a 68 percent reduction in police tickets, a 40 percent reduction in out-of-school suspensions, and higher attendance and graduation rates. These are just two of several school districts across the country that have adopted common sense discipline policies that minimize the role of police and give students, like Salecia, the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. These schools understand that we all lose when we don't nurture our children to their potential.
Handcuffing young children is never OK. Schools must use more appropriate ways to intervene when kids misbehave. Calling the police for a six year-old's temper tantrum is extreme. Police should be used as a last resort where a true threat to safety exists.
Originally suspended for the rest of the school year, the school relented and now says Salecia can return to school but at what cost? The experience of being handcuffed by police officers in her principal's office has left her scarred. Her mother is concerned about returning her child to a school that treats children the way Salecia was treated.
Join Salecia's parents and Advancement Project in calling for the actions of school officials and city police in this incident to be investigated and for them to be held accountable. We demand the school put an end to the zero tolerance discipline policies and that the police end their policy of handcuffing young children.
Schools in Milledgeville and across the country should put the best interests of its students first and immediately end their use of the zero tolerance approach to discipline. Salecia, and all children, deserve safe, high quality schools that care about them and give them the opportunity to succeed and dream.
Follow Judith Browne Dianis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@jbrownedianis
Parents - if you are going to make babies - then be their PARENT! Not their friend and not a prent when it is convenient for you. being a parent is a 24x7, 365 job. Now accept your responsibility as a parent, make yourself accountable and then maybe your child will have endless possibilities and not struggles because she can't contain her temper & actions. The Milledgevill Police dept followed protocol for the actions this child set forth. Perhaps it is not the child's fault after all .... and that of the parents. She is in kindergarten, so school has not been as much an influence in her life as her home has up to this point! Think about it!
How much more of this should the police and and the school have put up with before it was considered dangerous? Salecia's parents say she was traumatized by the event, but what about how all the other kids in the school must feel. I mean, would you want your kid sitting next to her the next time she gets (as her parents put it) "high strung"?
I felt really bad for "Tommy" because I knew he had been taken away from his biological mother who almost killed him during his infancy. This was not Tommy's fault, but the other children and the teachers had to be protected.
This is not a racial issue, but one that often involves violence against children in the home. Instead of blaming the school and the police, maybe we need to find a better way of handling the disturbed child. As a teacher and mother of many years, I can tell you that a small child CAN be violent and he CAN hurt himself or others.
Her mother's response to the press about the situation was this: "She has mood swings some days, which all of us had mood swings some days," Johnson's mother Constance Ruff told WMAZ. "I guess that was just one of her bad days."
Really? "All of us" HAVEN'T had "mood swings" like that. Since this is what the mother calls "just one of her bad days", then the parents are the ones who should be investigated to make sure that this child's emotional health is being attended to and her physical safety is not at risk.
The staff at Creekside Elementary didn't "overreact to childish behavior", as you claim. They were faced with a child who was putting herself, other children, and adults in danger. If they tried to restrain her, they could accidentally hurt her and risk being sued.
Here's what I'll ask: accountability for the parents and families of children who engage in criminal, dangerous, antisocial, or uncivil acts. Moreover, I'll ask for that equally from people of all ethnicities because it's part of being civilized human beings who live in communities. This isn't about race or ethnicity. This is about children who are feral, whose families dropped the proverbial ball and now wish to be free of responsibility.
The other 25 kids in that class (and in classrooms across the nation) have a right to be safe and productive; Salecia has no right to mistreat her peers, teacher, and surroundings.
Those parents certainly put the blame in those situations on the schools. I had trouble seeing it that way.
"Salecia Johnson, 6, was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing books and toys in an outburst Friday at Creekside Elementary School in Milledgeville, according to a police report.
Specifically, they say the child threw a small shelf which struck the principal on the leg, and also jumped on a paper shredder and tried to break a glass frame. So, the school called the police. When an officer tried to calm the child in the principal’s office, she allegedly resisted. The police report says she was then “restrained by placing her hands behind her back and handcuffed.”