Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/protecting-black-children-applying-an-anti-racist-lens-to-positive-behavior-support/5026552/
*Supporting graphics can be found in the pdf version of this article.
At first, Kaia Rolle, 6, appeared not to understand what the police officers were doing.
“What are those for?” she said, eyeing the zip ties the officers had brought to the school office in Orlando, Florida.
“It is for you,” one officer responded. As he tied them on, she started to sob: “No, don’t put handcuffs on. Help me!”
The excerpt above comes from body camera footage reported in the New York Times (Zaveri, 2020) from the day Kaia Rolle was arrested for throwing a temper tantrum and kicking a teacher in school. The footage goes on to show Kaia begging for a second chance as the police take her away. Her grandmother reports that Kaia is still working through the trauma of that day (Ardrey, 2021).
The over-disciplining of Black children is not new. In 2005, researchers at the Yale Child Study Center (Gilliam, 2005) reported that preschoolers were being expelled at alarming rates (6.2 per 1,000 children compared to 2.1 in K-12 settings) and that children of color were twice as likely to be expelled as *White children. News outlets from California to New York ran with the story (Lewin, 2005; ...