Article orignially printed in the June 2019 issue of Success published by the Ohio School Boards Association
A lack of school-based special education services and a tendency for some districts to refer behavioral problems to law enforcement mean that many children with special needs end up in prison.
An American Bar Association study, Task Force on Reversing the School to Prison Pipeline, reports that 65% of juvenile inmates nationwide have some form of disability, and the rate is higher in communities with widespread trauma and poverty.
A shy teenager with light brown hair and big green eyes, Sebastian Montano was well known to staff and students at Alamogordo High. He had a long and messy school history, including 16 documented run-ins with school police officers — all in relation to behaviors associated with his disabilities: autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, PTSD, epilepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
But he also was a boy who showed great promise. He tested in the superior range in math and was considered something of a genius when it came to electronics. He understood the internal circuitry of complex gadgets with casual ease; his classmates often would hand him their broken smartphones to fix. When he was in seventh grade, he disassembled his mother’s laptop and melded it with an Xbox gaming console, creating his own portable gaming system.
With the right support, he might have been on his way to a career as an electrician or even an engineer. Instead, he was now another special needs student swept up in the school-to-prison pipeline. There are countless Sebastians across the U.S. — students with disability-related behavior problems who do not receive adequate special education services in school, and instead are repeatedly referred to law enforcement and end up in prison.
Cases like these aren’t supposed to happen. At the state and federal levels, laws and procedures are in place to identify kids like Sebastian, provide them with specialized learning programs and set them on a path to success.Those procedures, however, are frequently flouted. School personnel instead referred Sebastian to law enforcement time and again — even summoning the police when his behavior clearly called for intervention from a mental health professional. When he threatened to kill himself, the middle school counselor called police. When he cut himself intentionally, the assistant principal called police.
“We see this kind of thing all the time — a lot of kids who need behavioral intervention plans (BIP) don’t have one,” said Jason Gordon, a litigation manager with Disability Rights New Mexico. “If there was a BIP like there should have been, we wouldn’t be talking about criminal behavior.”