(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for Utah Insight is made possible by viewers like you, thank you.

- [Narrator] Tonight on Utah Insight, are disciplinary policies in schools, pushing students into the juvenile justice system?

- I was lucky enough to have youth services and programs come into our lives like big brothers, big sisters.

- [Narrator] What are the solutions, prevention?

- Don't be afraid to reach out to those programs because people do wanna help.

- [Narrator] Or early intervention, a look on how to keep kids out of trouble and in the classroom.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Utah Insights, I'm Raeann Christensen.

We wanna begin our show by acknowledging the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Texas.

At the time of this recording, we've learned at least 19 children and two teachers have lost their lives.

Our deepest thoughts are with the families of the victims and the entire community.

Tonight we'll be focusing on our plant topic about another problem in education, a discussion on pushing kids out of school and into the justice system.

Here's how the ACLU describes the problem.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services, instead they are isolated, punished and pushed out.

Now joining us in the studio tonight, we have Brett Peterson, the Director of Utah Division of Juvenile Justice Services, Erin Preston, Education Attorney at Utah Education Law and Martin Munoz, KIDS COUNT Data Analyst for Voices for Utah Children.

Thank you so much for being here tonight for this important discussion.

I wanna get your thoughts first on the ACLU statement.

Brett, do you think zero tolerance policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules?

- Yeah, I think that the approach we have to take when we're dealing with our youth, our young people, especially our adolescents, we have to recognize adolescent brain development.

We have to a recognize that youth don't respond the same way that adults do.

Especially when you layer in some of the complexities you described, disabilities and mental health.

We've got to stop looking for these punitive responses and start recognizing how do we serve a kid more holistically, right where they're at.

- Okay, and the ACLU students of color are especially vulnerable to push out trends and discipline actions are discriminatory.

Martin, how do you feel about that?

- Definitely, when we look at the numbers we see here, especially in our state, with our population, minority population are under a quarter percent of our student population, but then we're seeing higher of those numbers in our arrest and expulsions and suspensions.

It's something we just need to look at and find alternatives and disciplining a child with suspension and expulsion.

We need to find other alternatives and we need to work on policies that will work for, and as Brett said, and a holistic approach to healthy mental health and behavioral health.

- Along with students of color, this is a similar situation with disabled teens.

Erin, can you shed some light on why that might be?

- Yeah, I would say disabled students of all ages.

I have several clients who are elementary students as well, who have disabilities and often law enforcement or administration thinks in terms of one size fits all scenario.

And when students have very normal reactions for their disabilities, sometimes they're seen in a way that doesn't take into account those disabilities, say autism.

And those suddenly become criminal referrals and criminal charges against a student when they should be handled through education and accommodations.

- That has to be really scary for a child in elementary school to be dealing with something like that.

And this is something you deal with quite often.

- Increasingly often, unfortunately.

Resource officers, police officers are not necessarily trained on this is how a student with autism might react.

And of course, each student is different.

And so they will perceive different reactions, meaning different things because they don't have that training.

So needing to get the training, needing to work with educators is really critical because otherwise you've suddenly got a fourth or fifth grader who now has a criminal record and is perceiving that they are a criminal and it's only downhill from there.

- Okay, we also asked for feedback on this topic from our social media followers, we wanted to know how you would respond to the knowledge that some parents aren't aware school resource officers are actually law enforcement officers.

Jared Preece shared this, "Keep the police out of schools, "unless they're going to read your child a book.

"It distracts from the intended nature of a child "to be in a safe space for the directive of education."

Now, FOX 13 is reporting today that the Texas tragedy is renewing calls for mental health resources in Utah schools, rather than more security.

And the Utah PTA is saying that we need more nurses, more social workers, more school psychologists, but some people, Brett, might feel having law enforcement in a situation that's happened earlier this week.

We really need them to be there.

- Oh, well, I think the question of school safety is very legitimate and obviously weighing heavy on our hearts today, as we look at what happened in Texas.

I think the question has to be going back to what you said a little bit, Erin, whether or not an SRO is gonna be in a school, that's gonna be somewhat a local decision.

And if a community makes that decision, how do we help define the roles to help them see that look, they're not to be the school disciplinarian, if they're there, they're there for safety.

But then going to the training, a great thing that's been able to happen here in Utah because of juvenile reform, we have reinvestment dollars.

Some of those dollars we've specifically identified to provide training for SROs to help them be trained on how to respond to a young person with a disability, how to respond to a young person with significant histories of trauma, how to be aware of the racial and ethnic disparities in our system, so those are the things we need to do.

We need to, if we're gonna have law enforcement schools, which there's questions of why we need to, or why we should, it's a worthy debate, making sure we understand it's a defined role and making sure they have the right tools and the right training to be responsive in that environment.

- And Martin, having cops in schools could lead students to being criminalized for actions that some say should be handled within the school.

What do you think about that?

- Oh, excuse me, definitely.

I believe that currently, and this is this morning has started even prior to COVID, our children are suffering and are struggling mentally, behaviorally, and it's concerning because when you look at, from my position and I'm looking at the data and I look at how our schools are underserved by mental and professional behavioral specialists, and to have an individual because when a child acts out, they're acting out in pain, they're emotionally, physically in pain.

So having an officer there could be a trigger, it could be a situation that could escalate to even being a worse situation.

And an officer do not have that training to be able to deescalate a situation or communicate with a child who is going through a difficult situation.

We just need to be able to have policies that are going to take the initiative and put those dollars to work, to have school officials that can really be behavioral and mental health specialists.

- Erin, how do you feel about the situation with having an officer inside the schools with the situation that played out with Texas versus having the kids be scared that there's a police officer in their school?

- When I heard Texas just from a former education administrator, as well as near on 10 years as an education attorney, my perspective was, but how many shootings have been prevented by good counselors by good administrators, by good teachers who were catching kids early, understanding their situations, helping address things.

I hear about situations that could escalate all the time and I'm just saying we're alleviating or preventing so many issues with kids who are troubled and that's done by the counselors.

One of the things that I see in schools is, well, they say, to a hammer, everything's a nail.

When you are a police officer with the badge and the vest and a gun, you look like a hammer, whether you're going to act like one or not, but if you're trained to be a hammer, if you're trained to look for criminal conduct, that's what you see.

And sometimes you're used that way by administration and kids see the badge and they see fear, they don't necessarily see the person behind it.

I do wanna say there's some great resource officers who work really hard to engage with kids, but I think just the fact that there are police officers and known police officers in the school, puts a scary barrier up for so many very quickly.

- Brett, why do you think there's such a misunderstanding of the roles and responsibilities of SROs in our schools?

- Well, I think it's something that it's developed over time and it has come, and you look even at the juvenile justice system, for example, I mean, it kind of evolved out of say, a correctional environment.

And so all of these kind of interfaces are continuing to evolve.

And I think this conversation, it's really important.

I think we often want to put these things in an either/or, like it has to be this way, it has to be that way, I don't think they're that simple, I think it's more complex.

And I think that Utah's been engaged, policy makers in Utah have been engaged from 2017, 2018, each year saying, okay, SROs, we're acknowledging that our policy makers said there's a need, however, we need to have clarity on how that role interfaces with young people.

We need to have training.

And we still have so much work to do, we're making progress, but we still have work to do.

But it's a legitimate, important conversation, especially when you see these types of tragedies.

And I think like that to the either/or, the dialectic of this, of like it shouldn't be one or either security or mental health.

We need to think about how do we increase these mental health supports, if we're having officers, how do we increase that training to be specialized, to ensure that they can respond appropriately?

- I wanna take some time just to remind parents and teens and children that we do have the SafeUT App here in Utah, where kids can find counseling, parents can find counseling as well as find a place to report if they see anything that looks suspicious.

I wanna get to information from the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, this graph breaks down the ratios of teens in locked detention by race and ethnicity.

And keep in mind, these numbers are per 10,000 young people.

You can see the disparity between different racial groups here, with the spread being the most significant for Black teens.

They are 9.4 times more likely than white teens to be held at these facilities.

Martin, that is a stunning statistic there.

What do you think is happening?

- I'm really trying to figure that out.

You know that that's a big question and I wish I had an answer for it and I do not and it's something that I've been noticing it's concerning, it is, yes.

It definitely, especially when our student population, as I said before, minority population is small compared to our white student population and our Black and African American students are barely over 1% of the student population.

So there's some work there that we need to do and a lot of research and it's gonna probably take some policy makers to open up the coffers to do that type of research and study and find those answers and figure out why we're having such a large disparity there.

- Erin, do you find a lot of cases coming from these types of disparities with young people of color or disabled teens?

- Almost all my cases, yeah.

And one really mind shifting case for me had to do with a minority student who I represented initially taking on the case, thinking this must be a mistake.

How could this very small action have led to these criminal charges and this very extreme, long term suspension, possible expulsion.

And I dug into it and realized it really is that bad.

So my minority client and a couple of his friends were charged with criminal actions and the non-minorities that were involved in this altercation, which a police officer called a riot, were not charged even though their actions via what I watched on videotape were so much worse.

And it really does set up this thing where a minority family, that I was dealing with, who really had to shift their perception of this really is racism.

This really is us about us being different and looking different and him having a different name.

At the end of the day, there just wasn't another explanation for it.

And I think that goes to school culture.

And one thing I wanna highlight here is yes, resource officers report to a police department and educators of course, are bound by education laws.

Sometimes in the worst case scenario, I've seen them kind of back and forth between each other, hey, I can't handle this in an education capacity, but can you file criminal charges?

And the same information that's inaccurate will be disseminated, and suddenly I have a client with both criminal charges and suspension or expulsion issues, which is a double hit and results in much more long lasting consequences.

- Many parents who are desperate to keep their children out of the system, struggle to find the right resources for help.

Utah Insight's, Liz Adeola spoke to one local mother who was at her breaking point and then turned within to save her family.

- I never dreamt I'd go through what I went through.

I joke about it, but I always say I fell for the Mormon dream.

I got married young, I had my family and I thought I was set in stone.

- [Liz] But after Kate Anderson had her third child, that stone's foundation began to crack.

And she says her husband checked out.

- But I never thought I'd be raising my kids on my own with little education and no skills.

I was living in Section 8 housing and our house got broken into.

And I remember thinking, "I don't want my kids to think this is normal."

- [Liz] She worked multiple jobs while studying to become a nurse, but then another crushing blow struck her family.

- He suffered with bad depression.

Every single day I thought I was gonna find him dead.

- [Liz] Her oldest son was in trouble with the law.

- It was youth services that reached out and said, there's this alternative behavioral court he could go through and there's programs.

And they reached out to me and said, "What can we do to help?"

And that was the first time I've ever had somebody ask me, well, how can I help you?

- [Liz] From therapy to tutoring, mentoring, and more, Kate was introduced to an array of resources, funded by re-investments and shifts to support juvenile justice reform, resources she feels other parents who are struggling could use.

- It, takes a village to raise a kid, and us single moms are crying out like, "Yes, we would love it, help us out, grab a kid."

Teach him something or take some time with one of them because we don't have all that time.

- [Liz] She found ways to dedicate what little spare time she had to the program.

- I remember when I started an accelerated nursing program, they said the key to this is shutting off other things that aren't a priority.

I think I shut off my social media, I shut off a lot of free time and playing.

I knew for those period of time, I was gonna give it everything I had to change my situation.

So I can't tell you the times I've been in my car making phone calls, even Shauna and I talked and did interviews over the phone, or we talked and set goals over the phone.

- [Liz] Don't get Kate's youngest son started on Shauna.

- [Interviewer] 'Cause she like the family helper?

- She's kinda like Nanny McPhee, like how she comes in the house and helps you do the right thing.

- [Interviewer] So she teaches you a lot of lessons?

- Yeah, it was kinda like another parent in the house that we really never had.

- Shauna came into our life when I was gone majority of the day, and she came in and kind of just helped I think maybe give me a backbone or maybe give me some tips on, let's do this, let's set these schedules, let's set boundaries for your kids.

And it was just somebody else besides me being able to come into the home and say, this is a easier way to function, a smoother way to function that we can all get along and achieve goals better.

So that was a huge help for me and my family.

- I can see how mom can buy in and be like, "Okay, we need this," but how did you get your children to buy in and to take it seriously too?

- Oh, we didn't at first.

At first when we were doing the parenting and bettering our family, they would complain.

When they knew Shauna was coming over, they would be like, we're leaving, we're hiding, we're gonna do this.

And I was like, "Well, that's your choice, "but then this is what are your consequence is gonna be."

We just started doing it and becoming routine and just saying, this isn't gonna change.

We're making changes and we're changing the way we were running our home.

- [Liz] Eventually those changes began to seal the cracks that once threatened to destroy Kate's family, to destroy her children's future.

- I am so grateful for my experience of what I went through in my life, because I feel like the only person to fail is me.

And I learned that, that if I just believe in myself, that made a huge difference.

And I have my son, and I don't think that would've happened if we would've just thrown him through the court system.

- Brett, do you think it's as simple as teens and parents just needing a Nanny McPhee to come step in?

- I haven't put it in that context before, but sometimes, yeah, I do think it's meeting a kid and a family on their terms, where they're at, serving them in their home, schools, and communities, stop the systems that push them in, whether that's child welfare, juvenile justice, and often I've seen this.

Those are my staff, I see it firsthand.

And that's what it is, meeting them on their terms, come into their home, what do you need?

So I love that that young man shared it that way.

- Martin, how do you feel about prevention efforts?

Do you think that that's the solution for students?

- Yeah, especially if we could find the ability, to, as Brett said, bring it into the family and other possibilities within the school system, some other alternatives that we can utilize that will help as the mother said, avoid going into the system.

And that is so important that we go to the family and find out what they need, find out what they need and find out what's gonna work for them.

- Erin, what role do you think family members should play in a plan to help troubled kids?

And what about those families that have just a single mom or a single dad?

- I speak as a single mom.

My husband died three and a half years ago and our youngest was 13 at the time and everything I thought I knew through all my education experiences and raising the other kids suddenly went out the window and having a few key individuals at the school, realized what he was going through.

And despite trying to hide it and step in and say, hey, this is what we're seeing at school, I've never been more appreciative of that.

I think that I'm not an anomaly, my kids are not an anomaly.

So Martin referenced earlier that coming back from COVID, we have really a doubling in mental and behavioral health issues with kids.

We have kids who have been in a home settings and we don't know what those settings are like.

We have parents who had to work all the way through that, so kids have been left alone and they're behind.

We have to be able to meet the child with the environment that they're at and address that.

And that requires an increased focus on mental health, counseling and supports.

- Okay, go ahead.

- I just wanted to, it's such a key point.

A lot of these referrals, like this case, they do come from school counselors.

They come from, they're seeing the kid and so that's what this journey is about.

How do we reform, how do we shift where we're not spending money on the deepest ends of our systems, getting those resources upfront so that a school counselor has someone to refer to when they have these more complex challenges.

And so I love that you sharing your story, because I think it's such a critical piece in this conversation.

- Right, okay, I wanna get your final thoughts with this question in mind.

How do we keep kids in the classroom learning and not creating a pathway into the justice system?

We have about 30 seconds each.

So Brett, go ahead.

- First is gonna start with policy change.

So just hard lines saying, look, you're not gonna criminalize this type of behavior, then it's gonna take our shifts in practice, reinvesting, getting the dollars into the communities, into the schools.

- Okay, Erin.

- I think if a child, a student has somebody at the school who cares about them and something that they can feel like they're good at, that's positive and productive, that's their key to success.

And so, ensuring that our education system has that and that resource officers and the others are for worst case scenarios, they're not for day-to-day interaction, we shift the focus to a much more positive developmental route.

- Martin.

- I have to agree with both of them, I'm sorry.

But yeah, for me, the biggest thing I see is we need to increase and utilize the funding that we're saving to provide more mental and behavioral health.

That's what our kids need.

We just need to take care of our children.

Just as our legislators may say, we are investing in infrastructure for the future, this is our future.

This is the generation and it's our responsibility as adults to take care of them and make sure they have every opportunity to be the successful person they want to be and that is the most critical part.

- I like that, investing in our future, our future leaders.

We have more resources online for anyone who may need help or guidance on this topic, go to the Utah Insight page, pbsutah.org, there's a lot of resources along with this episode.

Next week on Utah Insight, Misinformation and Media Literacy.

Thanks to the growth of social media, news and information is easier to find than ever before but how do you know if the content you're consuming is correct?

We're gonna explore the tools needed to separate truth from fiction.

And we wanna hear from you, share your thoughts using the methods on your screen, social media, email, or call in.

Thank you so much for watching Utah Insight and we'll see you back here next week.

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