Trauma informed journalism is key to exposing, explaining and moving communities toward understanding and ultimately critical policy reforms so everyone is able to fully be who they are. Subjects - people - who have lived experiences show us what happens when systems fail them - and society fails them. Over the last 8 months I have been researching how people with disabilities worldwide are policy afterthoughts, stigmatized by their own community and in crisis zones often left to die.
Here is a preview of one US based research project I have been working on. Access to education is critical to the health and wellbeing of children, teens and communities. Mental health and physical health. Not enough is being done to address the ongoing discrimination and othering of dis-abled students.
The Push Out: Mental and physical health consequences resulting from targeted expulsion of disabled kids from America’s public schools
According to an ACLU study from 2011 kids with disabilities were four times more likely to be suspended from school than their peers without a disability and that doesn’t capture a system of so-called informal removals of disabled kids from America’s public schools.
While news reporting has extensively – and rightfully – focused on the alarming health and educational disparities facing kids of color and the gender divide too little has been reported about kids with and what is driving expulsion numbers up?
In February I joined a Southern Poverty Law Center webinar about Cobb County, Georgia schools and targeted expulsion of kids with disabilities. One mother shared her son’s story
Aaron was expelled from his high school in Cobb County, Georgia last fall his mother Karen tells us; I can hear her frustration and anger as it transforms into sadness as she explains. Or tries to because she still doesn’t completely understand the school’s decision: how did we get here?
Aaron was diagnosed when he was 4 years old. Perhaps ironically it was through the school Karen was able to get a referral for assessment and finally an official diagnosis. Karen said Aaron’s autism isn’t a life sentence instead it is finding a new routine to living. The school helped make sure her son’s needs were met through an individualized education plan (IEP) as mandated through the US Department of Education to provide equal access to education for kids with disabilities.
There were problems off and on during Aaron’s schooling but they were in keeping with a child of his age and with his diagnosis. And then as he was entering high school the pandemic hit. Schools went virtual and just like that Aaron’s routine – and Karen’s – were turned on its head. Karen can adjust but for autistic people like Aaron a reliable routine is necessary to simply live. After two years of off and on virtual or hybrid learning Cobb County headed back to the classroom. Another change in Aaron’s routine. This time he got into a verbal altercation with another student who was sitting in his seat (especially assigned as part of his needs assessment on the IEP). And that was it. Aaron was out.
The subjects of a forthcoming article are the ultimate experts on their lives and only through them will we see how the pushout has impacted the health of the student but that of the family and community as a whole. And that connection to the reader is critical for society to create solutions.
Although legally required to continue academic instruction the school building itself can be a lifeline – in 2016 over 30 million children qualified for low or no cost school lunches. Parents working full time – sometimes multiple jobs – rely on schools and after school programs to be de facto childcare providers.
The push out starts young. Some studies have found kindergarten aged children are expelled or more often the case sent to a third-party learning center. There is no one law determining how a center is chosen or if it meets standards of care and education. It is part of an ongoing privatization of schools held afloat by taxpayer funded educational dollars. Kids like Aaron – teenagers – are funneled to what Georgia calls an ombudsman school, in California and Iowa they are alternative schools or learning academies.
I spoke with Des Moines Public Schools administrators over the last six months about their position as an actively anti-racist school district (this is the subject of an upcoming article for In These Times Magazine). Expulsions and student arrests reflect racial disparity and expulsions reflect an even larger disparity among disabled students.
“So, if our general disability percentage is 12 percent in district those kids are disproportionately represented in expulsions and disciplinary process,” Jake Troja, Director of Climate and Culture at Des Moines Public schools told me during an initial interview about this issue.
“And also, you know what happens when kids are expelled from school, they don't graduate,” he said. The district is working on reducing its expulsion rate among disabled students.
What can the federal government do to mitigate this crisis? What can people in districts do to advocate for change? And in the interim how are communities meeting the physical and mental health needs of these kids and their families?
With the influx of of COVID relief funding though the CAREs act and the American Rescue Plan Act - why are so many schools still failing students with IEPs (individualized education plans). ARPA came in two distinct tranches and provided $122 billion to schools for COVID recovery. Augmenting school mental health services was singled out in the DOE announcement as critical.
Where is that money? How is it being used? And why is Aaron and too many others across the US being pushed out when resources should be available?
This is just the beginning of a multi-part project to be reported during the upcoming school year.