Advancement Project Applauds Passage of Florida Zero Tolerance Bill
May 11, 2009
Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization that has been working in Florida for the last eight years to reform zero tolerance school discipline policies, applauds the Florida legislature for voting unanimously last Friday to change its overly punitive school discipline law. The new law makes a number of critical improvements to the current law, including:
- The new law discourages schools from arresting students for minor offenses such as classroom disruption and fighting.
- The law encourages schools to use alternatives to expulsion and referral to law enforcement such as restorative justice.
- The new law requires that schools take the particular circumstances of the student’s misconduct into account before issuing punishment.
- The law also responds to the harsh truth of racial disparities in discipline in Florida by stating that zero tolerance policies must apply equally to all races.
This law is the product of years of advocacy by Advancement Project and our partner, the Florida State Conference NAACP. Advancement Project began working in Florida in 2001 to address the “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” caused by harsh and unfair school discipline policies and practices in use throughout the state. Our work intensified in 2005 after St. Petersburg kindergarten student Ja'eisha Scott was pinned down, handcuffed, and arrested by police officers for throwing a temper tantrum at school. We partnered with the Florida NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to organize a series of public hearings throughout the state to discuss the school discipline crisis in Florida. With the information gathered from these hearings, the three organizations jointly published a report in April 2006 – Arresting Development: Addressing the School Discipline Crisis in Florida – that presented our findings and called for school discipline reform at the state and local levels.
Over the last three years, the Florida NAACP and Advancement Project have been meeting with the Superintendents and senior staff from school districts around the state to implement the recommendations from Arresting Development. Additionally, in February 2008, Advancement Project and the Florida NAACP met with Governor Charlie Crist and the heads of the Florida Department of Education and Department of Juvenile Justice to discuss school discipline reform at the state level. At that time, we recommended that the state zero tolerance law be overhauled. As a result of those meetings, the Department of Juvenile Justice sponsored a “Zero Tolerance Summit” in August 2008, during which a taskforce was formed to draft the bill that has now passed the legislature.
The Florida legislature is to be applauded for passing this important legislation, which is a necessary response to an ongoing and urgent problem. Last year, there were more than 21,000 students arrested in Florida’s K-12 public schools, and nearly 70% of them were for misdemeanor offenses. Black students, in particular, were affected, as they were two and a half times more likely to be arrested than White students. With this new law in place, Florida communities will now have a powerful new tool to ensure that their schoolchildren are not needlessly criminalized.
