From the St. Petersburg Times,  Tampa Tribune:

Three civil rights groups have filed a class action complaint with the Florida Department of Education alleging that students with disabilities in the Hillsborough schools were neglected and disciplined instead of being given counseling and support services required by federal law.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Advocacy Center for Persons with Disabilities and the NAACP joined forces to file the complaint over the Hillsborough school district’s treatment of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

The complaint asks the state to force Hillsborough to transform a “culture of neglect and overly harsh discipline” that puts students with disabilities on a path to jail and prison.

… Punishing students with disabilities instead of providing them with services that promote positive behavior “appears to occur more frequently with students of color,” according to the complaint.

Similar complaints have been filed against Palm Beach County, as well as in Louisiana and Mississippi.

“This problem is not limited to Palm Beach and Hillsborough,” said Brandi Davis, a lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “This is a state and national problem.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under behavior, criminal justice, education, emotional disabilities, mental health, race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.