School District With Highest Student Arrest Rate in the Nation Agrees to Reform How It Disciplines Disabled Students

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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An Illinois school district that had the nation’s highest student arrest rate has agreed to change its disciplinary practices and provide help to those who missed class time while being punished.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Education will end a federal civil rights investigation into the Four Rivers Special Education District that was launched following a 2022 ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation that found the district turned to police with stunning frequency to discipline students with disabilities.

Under the deal, students who were referred to police or sent to a “crisis room” multiple times during the past three academic years could be eligible for services including tutoring, counseling or remedial education.

Four Rivers operates one public school: the Garrison School, in west-central Illinois, for students in an eight-county area of the state who have severe emotional and behavioral disabilities; some also have autism or ADHD.

In announcing the agreement on Thursday, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said it found that despite claiming to be a “supportive” school, Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something explicitly prohibited by federal law.

In the 2021-22 school year, investigators found that students were sent to police 96 times — more than the total number of students enrolled that year — for reasons including “noncompliance,” “disruption,” “inappropriate language” and violating a phone policy. Students also “spent extensive time out of the classroom” even when police weren’t involved; one student was sent to a “crisis room” 143 times in one school year and spent four hours and 20 minutes there one day.

Under the agreement, Garrison employees should no longer call police for behaviors that a specialized school like Garrison “should be fully equipped to manage,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said in a written statement.

By Dec. 20, the school must meet about students who were sent to police or to the school’s seclusion room during the past three school years to determine whether they should be given additional services for what they missed and the harm they suffered. Those services would have to be provided within six months of the meeting, according to the agreement.

Four Rivers Director Tracey Fair did not comment on the agreement or respond to questions from ProPublica about plans to help students going forward. She previously told the Tribune and ProPublica that administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior. Fair signed the civil-rights agreement on Tuesday.

The agreement also requires the district to develop new policies governing when to use its crisis rooms — described by the Education Department as two bare rooms with cinderblock walls and tile floors — and provide those to the agency within 30 days. Additionally, the district will need to keep detailed documentation every time students are sent to police and provide training to all staff, including on when the use of law enforcement or a crisis room could violate federal law.

The ProPublica-Tribune investigation found school administrators had called the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average, for years. When police were brought to the school, staff members then regularly pressed charges against the students — some as young as 9.

Officers typically handcuffed students and took them to the Jacksonville police station, where they were fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding cell. The local newspaper in Jacksonville then printed a brief description of the arrest in its police blotter.

(Jacksonville Journal-Courier)

During the 2017-18 school year, half of all Garrison students were arrested. No school district in the country that year had a higher student arrest rate, according to federal data.

Olga Pribyl, who oversees the special-education law division of Equip for Equality, called the agreement “a wake-up call” that the school should be focused on training staff to help students avoid crisis situations. The group is the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois.

“They should’ve been complying with the law, that’s the bottom line, and they weren’t,” she said. She said that, at a minimum, all students who were sent to police or put in the seclusion room should be offered counseling.

“There’s trauma involved whenever these types of restrictive practices are used on students and especially if they’re used frequently,” Pribyl said.

A mother named Lena, who pulled two of her children from Garrison, said she won’t seek help from the school even though her sons would be eligible under the new agreement. One of her sons was arrested at school.

“For people who are going to go there in the future or going there now, that’s great,” Lena said. (ProPublica and the Tribune are not including her last name to protect the privacy of her children.) “But for the kids whose lives have been altered completely, that doesn’t do any good.

“You are asking somebody to take their kid back to the place that harmed them.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen.