Anne Marhsall on Race & Discipline in JCPS: State of the News

Social justice groups call it the school-to-prison pipeline. It's a system by which children—disproportionately poor kids, black kids, victims of abuse or neglect, or those living with learning disabilities—are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Once a student has been labeled by teachers as a discipline problem, that label can follow the child through adolescence (maybe becoming a self fulfilling prophecy) and into an adulthood marked by repeated interactions with the criminal justice system.To shed some light on the beginning of this process, LEO Weekly's Anne Marshall did an in-depth story on discipline within Jefferson County Public Schools—and how the harshest punishments tend to be disproportionately meted out to African-American students.