20 Years in Prison for Sending Your Kids to the Wrong School? Inequality...

[Brewman_Jax]

20 Years in Prison for Sending Your Kids to the Wrong School? Inequality in School Systems Leads Parents to Big Risks

http://www.alternet.org/story/152737/20_...big_risks/

From the article:

Quote:Kindergartener A.J. Paches was kicked out of Brookside Elementary School earlier this year because his homeless mother used a friend's address to register him in the wealthy district of Norwalk, Connecticut. After expelling A.J., Norwalk authorities charged his mother with first-degree larceny for enrolling her son under a false address, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Sadly, A.J.'s story is not unique. He is one of several low-income students whose parents use the residence of a relative or friend to provide their children with educational opportunities that are severely lacking in poor districts. In the recession era of budget deficits and cuts to public education, wealthy school districts are cracking down hard on these families, going to extreme lengths to identify the kids and prosecute the parents.

...

One popular method is to offer bounties to tipsters who report students who turn out to be illegally enrolled. As of 2008, the Bayonne Board of Education in New Jersey offers a $100 bounty for tips about students suspected of lying about their residency. In the middle-class suburban enclave of Clifton, New Jersey, the bounty is set at $300 for informants who correctly report a boundary hopper. According to the New York Times, the district immediately follows up with a visit by an “attendance officer” to the suspected students home.
...

Perhaps more shocking than the invasive surveillance techniques schools are using to identify these students, are the punishments they dish out to parents.

...

As much as things change, they stay the same.

Equality for all didn't magically happen after the Civil Rights era. The side effects of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation continue in spite the passage of the Civil Rights laws. The penalties are excessively severe for "not staying in your place", felony-level charges and up to 20 years in one case. Only the most terrible of crimes have penalties that long. If the punishment is supposed to fit the crime, I don't see it here. According to the article interviews, the prosecutions and severe punishments are meant to make examples of the accused, so anyone else will think twice--and then think twice again.

Being poor, or being black and poor, is hard enough. It should NOT be a crime or path into the prison-industrial complex. Oppressed people do not like being oppressed, nor did they cause their own oppression.

The racial and economic segregation of education is not new. That glaring fact of economic inequality was the major argument Thurgood Marshall used in the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case. The fact that so little has changed is an indictment of our society; that some parents are willing to risk so much for change, and other parents are willing to fight so hard to stop change, shows that we have so very far to go.

[jaxx]

That is an irrational sentence. 20 years for school boundaries while child molesters get off with 3 years? The bounty thing......omg that is the bottom of the barrel. I hope the ACLU is on this.

[nofurylike]

sickening. outrageous.

" ... they stay the same."



thank you for posting that, Brewman_Jax.