Commentary Open Forum: End school-to-prison pipeline -- Legislature, local schools taking steps toward that end

"In my “Closing the gap” commentary of a few months back, I highlighted the serious disparity in the discipline practices in the Winchester schools, as stated in 2015-2016 Virginia Department of Education data, which showed African-American and Hispanic students disproportionately disciplined throughout the WPS system, with suspension of African- American students exceeding 10 times that of whites in two Winchester schools and at least double that of whites in all others.

But, as noted at that time, this is far from any local aberration as attested to by a cited University of Pennsylvania study which listed Virginia as one of the 13 states that most disproportionally suspends African-American males and as the No. 1 state in the school-to-prison pipeline

My revisiting of this issue is prompted by the mounting recurrence of evidence of the de-emphasized and/or termination outright of traditional school-based disciplinary interventions, replaced by an extensive expansion of the use of police officers in schools under what became widely adopted zero-tolerance disciplinary approaches..."

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