In Texas …Thousands of High School Students get Arrested a year….

Is the problem the students?

Or the adults,  who have forgotten they WHERE teens once in their lives?

 

Over the past decade, school districts across Texas have sought to make classrooms safer by swelling the number of police officers on campuses and taking a tougher stance on misbehavior. But the crackdown has had an unexpected consequence: sweeping tens of thousands of elementary students and middle schoolers into the justice system.

Children ages 10 to 13 were referred for prosecution after incidents in schools more than 47,000 times since 2014, an analysis by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News found. About 4,800 students in that age group were referred during the 2024-25 academic year alone, the most recent school year for which data is available. That is a third more than the number a decade before.

Most of the students were accused of minor offenses, like making threats, using cannabis vapes or lashing out at classmates or teachers, the analysis found. Few caused serious physical harm….

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But William Shaw, a juvenile judge in San Antonio, said that many of the cases that came before him could have been handled by a school principal.

“Kids are sometimes not going to get along,” he said in an interview. “They may end up pushing each other, maybe even fighting. That can be considered adolescent behavior. It isn’t necessary to arrest.”

The Times and The Express-News reported this year that Texas’ multi-billion-dollar investment in school policing had transformed discipline, subjecting thousands of students to physical force, at times over seemingly minor misconduct. Some were tackled, blinded with pepper spray or shocked with Tasers.

For the new analysis, our journalists examined data collected by the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, identifying tens of thousands of instances since the 2014-15 academic year in which minors were referred into the justice system after an incident at school. Such referrals, as they are called, typically occur after an officer takes a child into custody. The youngest a child in Texas can be referred is 10; students 17 and older are considered adults….

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But even when children were released with just a warning, they were often taken from school in handcuffs, separated from their parents for hours and processed into the juvenile system — all of which, research shows, can hurt academic performance and is linked to future contact with law enforcement, feeding the so called school-to-prison pipeline….

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Donny Lee, the superintendent of the Wichita Falls school district in North Texas, said that before he was hired in 2022, school officers would “arrest kids first and ask questions later.”

“We were having charges put on our elementary kids,” he said.

He hired a new chief who agreed with him that arrests should be a last resort, and they replaced most of the officers. Mr. Lee also convened regular meetings to review law enforcement data.

Referrals dropped for students of all ages, data shows. For children 13 and under, the annual number was cut by more than half, to 44 from about 100.

Mr. Lee said that the district had achieved those results without being “soft” on discipline. Students who broke the rules were assigned in-school suspensions or community service and offered counseling.

“We’re not in the crime and punishment business,” he said. “We’re in the education business.”….

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