Issues within the disability community are often connected to other forms of oppression, even though people tend to think of them as separate.
The school-to-prison pipeline affects both students with disabilities as well as students of color in many ways. For example, the National Council on Disability said in a 2015 report that even though black students accounted for less than a fifth of students with disabilities, they represented nearly half of all disabled students who were incarcerated.
The role police play in public schools is oppressive, even though many laud the relationship-building efforts that have taken place since police were placed in schools as school resource officers (SROs).
At best, SROs use relationship-building tactics to gain student trust in learning the social networks of the school, and at worst, retraumatize students who have had negative experiences with cops in their communities.
This is where we see the nexus of disability and race.
Started as a response to school shootings in the early 2000s, ‘zero-tolerance’ policies have criminalized routine behavior violations, escalated discipline procedures, and outsourced punishment to the criminal justice system. As a result, black students have been disproportionately targeted as ‘the problem’ in schools – and it can start as early as preschool.
According to the Seattle Times, black preschoolers are roughly 3.6 times more likely to be suspended out-of-school than their white peers, and as they grow up, about 5 times more likely than their white counterparts to be sent to a juvenile corrections facility, and disproportionately further sent to adult court. Segregation in housing and education over time has laid the groundwork for this reality, which rudely compliments the racial disparity in hiring teachers who understand the experience of students of color.
Both the disabled community as well as communities of color have historical reason to mistrust the medical system, but nothing exemplifies the intersection between disability and race in schools like the overdiagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder (ODD) in children of color. The DSM-5 categorizes ODD as a disruptive conduct disorder that features ‘irritable, defiant, or vindictive’ behaviors.
These behaviors could be perceived in many different ways, depending on the perspective of school personnel, or SROs, who also have the capacity to arrest students and are already viewing their role through the lens of preventing large-scale events such as school shootings.
So where do we go from here? In Maryland, the Kirwan Commission has lobbied the state government to increase education funding to include positions for school nurses, counselors, and the number of special education staff. Many advocates have stressed the need to remove traumatizing cops from schools, while other parents want them to remain, citing safety concerns.
Either way, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, we cannot allow virtual schooling to give school discipline a free pass into the physical homes of students. And the solution must include providing support for students with disabilities.