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Persevere through our new school year journey.

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Retired - NYCDOE | DIIT Remote Learning Tech PD Calendar 

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Disabled Youth Are More at Risk of Being Incarcerated

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Disabled Youth Are More at Risk of Being Incarcerated

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The school-to-prison pipeline describes a national trend that stems from policies, laws, and practices in which children are funneled out of school and into the criminal justice system. A common thread linking the experiences of most children who end up in this pipeline is routinely ignored: disability. Criminalization of students with disabilities - writing them off as "bad kids" rather than creating support systems to meet their needs - begins as early as preschool. Students in special education classrooms are twice as likely as their peers to be suspended, which greatly increases their risk of incarceration.

Just as we cannot address the school-to-prison pipeline without considering racial discrimination, effective efforts to combat the criminalization of marginalized children must include a disability lens.

The school-to-prison pipeline for children with disabilities is a multi-layered problem. About 85% of incarcerated youth have a disability, but just 37% of them received special education services in school. At the same time, special education programs often function as a new form of school segregation that place disabled children on a track toward unequal outcomes, according to the National Council on Disability.

The situation is further complicated by disability's intersections with other identities, which make certain kids more vulnerable than others. Black children are more likely to go through school with untreated disabilities and to be diagnosed with behavioral disabilities that funnel them into what could be called a special-education-to-prison pipeline. Children in poverty are impacted harshly by having a disability, because it's more difficult for them to access resources outside of those offered by their public school. Native kids with disabilities are twice as likely as their white counterparts to receive out-of-school suspension, and three times as likely to be physically restrained in school.

A report released in August by the Ruderman Family Foundation shows that children with "non-apparent disabilities" - meaning those not immediately visible, such as learning disabilities, autism, Crohn's disease, or mental illness - are routinely criminalized rather than given the educational accommodations to which they are legally entitled. The report also found that non-apparent disabilities are overrepresented in children already at-risk, including Black, Latinx, and Native kids, those in the foster care system, and trauma survivors.

"In combination with zero tolerance policies at schools, these students are suspended at disproportionately high rates and ultimately criminalized," the report states. "The result of this systemic discrimination is that over half of our incarcerated population has a mental illness and another 19 to 31% have a non-apparent disability, like cognitive or learning disabilities."

Conscious and unconscious racial biases affect which students are considered learning disabled, a decision made by teachers - who, in the United States, are mostly white. Black students are more likely than any of their peers to receive special education services for "emotional disturbance."

The criminalization of children is expensive for taxpayers, too. It costs about $140,000 per year to incarcerate a child and just $10,000 to educate them. A fraction of the resources used to incarcerate young people could be put toward holistic solutions that give all children a chance to thrive - such as developing early warning screenings to identify and treat disabilities, increasing the number of school counselors, and implementing effective trainings to combat racial and disability bias among educators.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), along with the Americans with Disabilities Act, are supposed to guarantee that public schools meet the needs of students with disabilities, which can mean anything from extra time on a test to individual tutoring to mental health counseling. The IDEA also requires that children with disabilities are educated in the "least restrictive environment" possible - but the reality of modern classrooms does not reflect these policies. Under new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, protections granted by the IDEA are further out of reach, as she has stated the IDEA rights are "best left to states" rather than protected by the federal government, and that she may be "confused" as to what the IDEA actually is.

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Disabled Youth Are More at Risk of Being Incarcerated

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The school-to-prison pipeline describes a national trend that stems from policies, laws, and practices in which children are funneled out of school and into the criminal justice system. A common thread linking the experiences of most children who end up in this pipeline is routinely ignored: disability.

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Boost reading and writing confidence across all types of content and devices, in class, at work, and at home.

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multiple languages

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This resource provides a visual guide for individuals with autism about wearing a mask to avoid spreading germs. The resource includes why it’s important to wear a mask, as well as information about how to safely wear and remove masks. The resource is translated into Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabi…