A disproportionate number of black students and those learning English placed in special education classrooms in a California school district were subjected to a “toxic” environment, denied services they needed, and received “grossly inferior educations,” according to a new lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California against Pittsburg Unified in the East Bay, alleges the systemic mistreatment of minorities placed in special education classes.
Pittsburg Unified is an 11,015-student district in Contra Costa County, where 95% of the students are nonwhite and 77% are low-income. A little more than 11% are enrolled in special education classes, which shakes out to roughly the same as the state average. However, students in Pittsburg Unified’s special education classes are alleged to be treated differently than their peers elsewhere in the state.
The students are almost twice as likely to be suspended and more than five times likely to be suspended for willful defiance. Black students were also subjected to “5150s,” or referrals with which students are taken to psychiatric wards due to purported mental health crises, at nearly three times their rate of enrollment in the district, the lawsuit alleges.
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“They attend schools that, in practice, are schools in name only, doubly toxic because their counterparts on the same campuses are receiving meaningful education as the Constitution and law mandates,” the lawsuit claims. “The message is clear: students with disabilities are not worthy of the same treatment; and, functionally speaking, they can do with less or even no education, consigned to a life without the skills that a public education provides and the respect they should command by virtue of their character. In failing to deliver legally mandated education, the statewide system of public education creates and perpetuates the ugliest societal stereotypes and biases. In other words, it is the educational system that works the most severe and consequential harm on these children’s lives.”
The suit also alleges that Pittsburg Unified perpetuated implicit biases and stereotypes that portray black children as “violent and aggressive, which leads to unjustified restraint and exclusion.”
One student walked out of her sixth-grade classroom in frustration because of her teacher’s alleged mistreatment toward her. In response, the school “5050’d” her. They called the police, strapped her to a gurney, and took her to a psychiatric hospital. But it got worse for the girl when she returned to school. She was eventually pushed out of the district altogether and was placed into an independent study program when she was 13 years old, isolating her from peers during a “crucial phase of her social-emotional development.”
In another incident, the district routinely disciplined a black student named B.T. for innocuous activities.
When he was in the sixth grade, he was given an office referral for mistakenly standing in the wrong line outside of a classroom.
“This office referral was placed in B.T.’s school record and later impacted his application to an academically rigorous high school program in the district,” the lawsuit claims.
In another incident, the district gave him an office referral for throwing a piece of paper in the trash can. When B.T. was in the eighth grade, he was disciplined for wearing a jacket with a picture of the Disney character Goofy, which his science teacher found “offensive.” He was also disciplined multiple times for wearing an orange jacket that school officials said was too close to the color red, which was prohibited under the dress code.
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“These experiences made B.T. feel less safe in school from arbitrary, hostile, and exclusionary treatment from the district, when instead, district staff should have been focused on teaching and supporting B.T. as a student,” the lawsuit claims.
District Superintendent Janet Schultze called the lawsuit “disappointing” and told Ed Source that much of the information was misleading and didn’t take into account the progress the district has made in closing achievement gaps among student groups and ensuring a high-quality education for all students.
“We will not let this lawsuit distract from the significant efforts of our district and staff to identify and address disparities,” she said. “As attorneys attend to this situation, I am confident that the facts will set straight the many misleading comments in the ACLU statement, and I am equally confident that the dedicated professionals in our district will not let this deter them from focusing on the needs of our students, who are every day at the heart of their work.”
