Members of the Bay Area Activist Coalition, a group that fights for fair treatment of African Americans and other minority groups, had a message for members of the Hillsborough County School Board and its interim superintendent, Jeffery Eakins, Tuesday afternoon.
Cases like that of Brittany Overstreet, they said, will not stand.
Overstreet, an African American student at Chamberlain High School in Tampa, was brutally beaten by a school resource officer, while she was handcuffed. She was accused of bringing mace onto the campus, which hasn't been proven. She got upset when a school official ripped her bag out of her hands, and the situation deteriorated from there.
If she had been white, things might have gone down differently, activists say.
"I believe her case is a direct example of how black and brown children are being funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline,” said the coalition's Char Singleton.
Trey Gonzales read aloud a passage from the district's guidelines pertaining to discipline, namely, that "the best discipline is self-imposed," which they said didn't seem to apply in Overstreet's case.
“What was that student supposed to learn, after being slammed repeatedly, having their jaw broken in two places, receiving lacerations to their face, and being knocked unconscious, all over a false allegation?” he said.
Singleton said when it comes to the makeup of students on the receiving end of disciplinary actions, the numbers suggest racial bias at the school; that while just around a quarter of the student body is black, nearly all of the kids who get expelled are African American, as are about half of those who have received suspensions.
“I'm sure that you can all agree that this disparity is based on race,” Singleton told the board.
Such a disparity on the part of schools as well as law enforcement is landing a disproportionate number of young African Americans and Latinos in jail, setting them up for what the activists call the schools-to-prisons pipeline.
“We're failing too many of our students," said activist Ashley Green. "Point blank, we have too many students who are leaving high schools with criminal records and not diplomas. Brittany's story typifies many of our current policies and approaches to students, treating them, as I said before, as criminals and not children.”
Board members and the interim superintendent said they're already on it, and plan to meet on Friday as part of an ongoing effort to figure out how to address the issue.
"We do have a task force that has been convened about a year and it's about bringing members of the community, those members of the task force, will be meeting this Friday," Eakins said. "Friday is kind of a culminating day because they're going to be developing recommendations on the very issue you brought up this evening: how can we better address issues with interventions rather than the arrests, how to bring down in-school suspensions, looking at all students, but specifically African American and Hispanic males."
Members of the board invited Singleton and the other activists to attend. After the discussion, Green said she thinks the task force should have included minority students from the outset.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.