Missouri to start charging students who fight in school with felony

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Missouri is taking an unprecedented step. The state will soon start charging students who get into fights with felonies.

The move, advocates argue, will effectively doom countless children to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The state statute will go into effect Jan. 1, 2017. Where fights were seen as a minor offense, regardless of age, they will now be charged with assault in the third degree, which is a Class E felony. Assaults of this type could see the child facing four years in prison, fines or probation.

Threats of bodily harm will be treated as a Class A misdemeanor, which can carry with it a year of prison time. If the assault victim is considered a “special victim,” the aggressor could be charged with a Class D felony that carries with it a maximum prison sentence of seven years.

Criminal justice advocates say these enhanced charges could destroy the lives of these children by chaining them to a record before they are old enough to understand what it really means to have a record. Even more, the concern is that students of color will be even more vulnerable to these new laws.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the phenomenon of when children are criminalized for their actions in school and are exposed to law enforcement at a young age, making them more likely to interact with the system again as they age. The pipeline is made worse by SROs stationed on school grounds and teachers who have relied heavily on the police to intervene in student affairs.

Regardless of where a student lives, one single arrest doubles the likelihood that the student will drop out of school. If they had to make a court appearance, they are four times more likely to drop out, studies show.

Students who get pulled out of school fall behind on their studies and also miss the valuable social interactions that help them grow and mature into healthy individuals. This makes them more likely to engage in criminal behavior, subsequently locking them into the criminal justice system, which in turn reduces their access to education and jobs down the road.

All across the country, students of color are disproportionately funneled through the pipeline, and this begins as early as preschool. Data shows that black students are often punished more harshly because they are seen as more dangerous by their teachers.

UCLA’s Civil Rights Project says that Missouri schools have some of the highest racial discrepancies in the nation now, so one can only imagine how bad things could get under these new laws.