OPINION: Let’s never see another first-grader in handcuffs
It is far past time to end the school-to-prison pipeline that starts in early childhood
The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.
Two first-graders in Florida are not the same children today as they were last month. Consider the distress, fear and confusion that being forcibly taken, handcuffed and driven away from your school by a police officer would cause in any 6-year-old you know. Imagine it’s your child, your grandchild.
We both worked in the Obama administration, one of us as a senior policy advisor for early childhood development, and the other as a deputy assistant to the president and policy lead on criminal justice reform. Though we shared an office suite at the White House, our work worlds rarely collided. The main exception? School discipline, an issue that brings together two topics that should be separate: early childhood and criminal justice.
Last month, our worlds collided again. Two 6-year-old black children were arrested for incidents in their first-grade classroom in Florida. The officer involved in the incident was fired. But that doesn’t erase the trauma that those children faced and will continue to face. It doesn’t fix the system that enabled the officer’s behavior.
Related: TEACHER VOICE: Breaking the school-to-prison pipeline with ‘windows and mirrors’ for black boys
After months of operating in our own “lanes,” we got in touch with each other and shared our reactions to the story.
Criminalizing the developmentally appropriate behavior of black children is something that’s been happening for generations. In past years, there have been other well-publicized cases of school-resource officers handcuffing children whose hands are too small for CONTINUE READING: We must end the school to prison pipeline that starts in early childhood
