The Price Kids Pay: Schools and Police Punish Students With Costly Tickets for Minor Misbehavior – By Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards (Chicago Tribune) / April 28, 2022
Illinois law bans schools from fining students. So local police are doing it for them, issuing thousands of tickets a year for truancy, vaping, fights and other misconduct. Children are then thrown into a legal system designed for adults.
Update, April 29, 2022: Hours after the publication of this investigation on April 28, Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Carmen Ayala urged school administrators across the state to stop working with police to ticket students, saying fines associated with the tickets hurt families and there’s no evidence they change students’ behavior. Read more here.
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This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.
The courthouse lobby echoed like a crowded school cafeteria. Teenagers in sweatshirts and sneakers gossiped and scrolled on their phones as they clutched the yellow tickets that police had issued them at school.
Abigail, a 16-year-old facing a $200 penalty for truancy, missed school again while she waited hours for a prosecutor to call her name. Sophia, a 14-year-old looking at $175 in fines and fees after school security caught her with a vape pen, sat on her mother’s lap.
A boy named Kameron, who had shoved his friend over a Lipton peach iced tea in the school cafeteria, had been cited for violating East Peoria’s municipal code forbidding “assault, battery, and affray.” He didn’t know what that phrase meant; he was 12 years old.
“He was wrong for what he did, but this is a bit extreme for the first time being in trouble. He isn’t even a teenager yet,” Shannon Poole said as her son signed a plea agreement that came with $250 in fines and fees. They spent three hours at the courthouse as Kameron missed math, social studies and science.
CONTINUE > https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-school-police-tickets-fines
