Global Crisis

1. The other kids are standing up for their classmate, telling the bus driver he can't do it.
2. One child was holding the cell phone that caught this video and led to the arrest of the driver. Another child, at about 28 seconds, can be seen pulling out his phone to record the driver.
3. It's the "cult of compliance" embodied, yet again. The driver gives a command, the student disobeys, and the driver then uses that to justify (to himself and in the aftermath) his use of force. It's the same phenomenon as Spring Valley High and thousands of other incidents (use the tags to track them, though I'm still implementing tags consistently in the first 500 post on the blog). From the local news report:

Johnston police said the driver approached 15-year-old Christian, a student with special needs, after he failed to follow the bus driver’s instructions regarding a seat assignment.

Police said the student directed an inflammatory comment toward the bus driver who grabbed the student's coat, hit the boy in the face and pushed him to the floor.

Here's the video. Obvious warnings apply, though it's more disturbing than graphic.

Chart from http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/10/why-disabled-students-suffer-at-the-hands-of-classroom-cops/412723/ It shows 22.3% of all suspensions are black students. 18.1% are disabled.

Once we learned that school resource officer Ben Fields was known as "Officer Slam," I knew that if we dug into this officer's background, we'd find disabled victims of his bullying. That's just what happened. Here's a story that describes his violent encounter with an autistic student [my emphasis]:

Richland School District Two Superintendent Debbie Hamm admits that "clearly something did not go right," calling it the most upsetting incident she has seen in her 40 years with the district.
"We will be working with the Richland County Sheriff's Office to clarify our expectations about screening and training for school resource officers," said Hamm.
But one parent had a slightly different reaction.
"I saw his face and my first thought was 'Oh my god, that's the same guy,'" said Wendy Johnson, who says her autistic son was in a physical struggle with Fields when he was a freshman.
Photos she took of her son after the altercation reveal his shirt torn and marks on his arms and shoulder.

Then there's the question of trauma. There's a major class-action lawsuit in California arguing that victims of trauma should be covered under disability law. It has enormous implications for American education, because up to a quarter of all children, according to Susan Ko of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, will be victims of trauma. If trauma is so common and if should be treated as a disability (both givens that I believe to be true), it may indeed force us to stop treating disability as a deviation from the norm, as a case of "special" needs, but just as needs. We'll have to move to a system of universal design that requires all interactions with students take the possibility of disability into account.

In Kentucky, from the NYT:

The A.C.L.U. released what it called a “disturbing video” showing the boy, who it said weighs about 52 pounds, crying as the resource officer handcuffed his arms at the biceps behind his back. In the video, the officer tells the boy, “You don’t get to swing at me like that.”
The boy has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; the girl has the disorder and other “special needs,” according to the lawsuit. It says both children are protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and alleges that the school resource officer, who it says shackled the boy once and the girl twice in 2014, violated both the disabilities act and the children’s constitutional rights.

Mother Jones adds:

Two videos accompanying the lawsuit show a November 2014 incident in which Sumner tells an 8-year-old Latino student, identified as S.R. in the lawsuit, to "Sit down like I asked you to" while handcuffing him as the child cries and expresses that he's in pain. Earlier that year, Sumner allegedly detained L.G., a 9-year-old African American student, in the back of his cruiser, after she disrupted the classroom and was requested to be escorted to an in-school suspension room. The lawsuit also details two subsequent incidents in which Sumner handcuffed L.G., one of which resulted in L.G. going to a hospital for psychiatric assessment and treatment.

I wrote on the #cultofcompliance in our schools here, for Al Jazeera:

For those like Kayleb who live at the intersection of race and disability, these manifestations of what I call the cult of compliance can destroy lives. It threatens anyone who might fall outside the dominant norms. The cultural forces that punish diversity aren’t new. In the past, however, such perceived deviance might have met with bullying from peers or various forms of exclusion by teachers and other staffers. Today, jail beckons.

There are two major factors at work. First, the rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense, leading security expert Bruce Schneier to call them “zero-discretion” policies. Such policies have long been criticizedas being unfair to marginalized groups of all sorts. Second, SROs have increasingly been deployed on school grounds over the last few decades, a process that keeps intensifying after high-profile school shootings such as Columbine (1999) and Sandy Hook (2012). Meanwhile, SROs are experiencing mission creep. While de-escalation is usually the optimal response to challenging behavior situations, many teachers and administrators instead respond by calling in an SRO to apply restraints and arrest the student, thereby starting the process of criminalization. That’s how the school-to-prison pipeline begins.

There is a standard horrible argument out there that people with low IQ are protected from trauma because they don't understand what happened to them. It's used in sexual assault cases (read here if you must. It's upsetting) sometimes and must be confronted at every turn.

It's been on my mind as part of a broader phenomenon due to this case from Texas. A paraprofessional at a school was videoed (by a surveillance camera) shaking and otherwise abusing an 8-year-old boy with Down syndrome. I, too, have an 8 year old boy with Down syndrome, although it doesn't take such a proximate cause to be outraged.

The para has been fired. The DA has declined to charge the individual, though, because there's no evidence of pain. A petition has been started by the boy's mother, asking for the case to be taken to a Grand Jury. Here's a Facebook page from the local TV Station with links to the story. Here's a quote:

If it wasn't for a surveillance camera at Spring Branch ISD's Wilchester Elementary, Maggie and Raphael Suter believe they would likely never have learned their 8 year old special needs son was assaulted on February 11th by an educator responsible for his protection.
"When we saw the video and saw the para-professional grab him and start violently shaking him and choking him we were both crying, just devastated," said Maggie, a former public school educator.
"Who could ever do anything to an innocent child, let alone a child who can't speak or even tell us that something has occurred? I was heartbroken," said Raphael.
In addition to the choking, the Suters say they watched in agony as their son William was shoved violently to the ground by the same classroom aid.

So here's where we are.

1. The school waited 8 days to tell the police about the abuse. They are legally required to inform authorities within 48 hours.

2. They DA says that there's no evidence of physical or psychological harm, as the boy seems happy enough and didn't scream in pain while being shaken or thrown to the grown. So he won't charge the para.

I don't really know where we go from here, other than to share the petition and to talk about the fundamental problems with these kinds of protections and how they are executed for people with disabilities. If you can't say, "It hurts" or "I'm upset," then the law shrugs.

A few days ago over on my Facebook page I shared the story of the school district that took away a blind child's cane and replaced it with a "pool noodle." The cane technically belongs to the school district, and when the bus attendant reported that he was waving it in the air and potentially hitting someone with it, they confiscated it. Instead, they gave him a nerf pool noodle to replace it.