The Illinois legislative session wrapped up late last month without tackling the pervasive issue of school ticketing, a practice where schools refer students to police to be disciplined for school misbehavior.

As a civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, I’ve traveled around the state to witness the impact of these tickets. One of the first ticketing hearings I saw was in Joliet, purportedly for “disorderly conduct”: A girl with stomach problems disobeyed a teacher’s instructions to leave the bathroom, resulting in a referral to the police, an obligation to attend a hearing on a school day and a $150 fine.

Her experience is not unique. Across Illinois, tickets of up to hundreds of dollars are issued for things like littering, swearing or hallway scuffles — behaviors that schools should address internally with evidence-based solutions like restorative practices.

The ticketing practice is a debilitating symptom of a larger problem: the transformation of our classrooms into carceral spaces. Over the past decades, schools and prisons have become more alike in law, policy, and staffing. Courts have granted prisons tremendous control over prisoners purportedly in the name of rehabilitation and safety — and they’ve extended that same power to schools.

As incarcerated people lost the right to write each other love letters, students lost the right to discuss teen pregnancy in their news publications. As incarcerated people lost the right to be free of strip searches, students lost the right to demand probable cause before administrators dug through their purses. Supposedly, this is to let schools teach kids values and keep kids safe — but in practice, we know our education system is failing.

Policymakers have mirrored our judiciary in treating schools like carceral institutions, adopting adult surveillance measures and zero-tolerance rules. Scholars say it’s because of the superpredator myth that came about in the 1990s — the racially coded idea that we would see a wave of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches.” The rise of school shootings — perpetrated largely by white young men — only motivated school authorities to intensify their policies. And with inadequate resources to address the complex needs of students with disabilities or trauma, schools resort to pushing “problem” kids out to maintain order.

More cops, fewer social workers

There are serious consequences to these fear-driven shortcuts. As schools pour money into staffing law enforcement officers instead of medical providers and social workers, students can find themselves handcuffed in the halls, interrogated without counsel and ferreted toward a cell.

Research on the school-to-prison pipeline proves that police exposure makes young people vulnerable to future lock-ups. In Illinois, one of the most common ways kids get exposed to police is through ticketing. Investigators found that from 2019 to 2022, police were involved in student incidents about 17,800 times in 200 Illinois districts and in more than half of these incidents, they issued tickets.

Rockford Public Schools, a district serving nearly 30,000 students, is an expert at ticketing. During the past school year alone, they issued 590 police referrals as of March 24. Every Wednesday at 1 p.m., when kids should be in school, Rockford City Hall holds its hearings for municipal tickets. Though kids can be as young as 8, these hearings are not privacy-protected. There’s no right to an attorney. And if a kid doesn’t show up, the default fine is $750.

I’ve also never seen a white student ticketed in Rockford. Data shows Black students are more than twice as likely as their white peers to receive a police referral, and Black students with disabilities are more than three times as likely. The disparity is so stark that the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center have filed a civil rights complaint against Rockford, alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination law.

The same disparities have been playing out across the state. In spring 2022, the Illinois attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the alleged discriminatory ticketing practice in one of Illinois’ largest school districts. There have been no updates.

To be sure, the safety of our children and a shortage of resources are serious concerns. But over-policing students has turned our schools into punitive institutions that devastate our most vulnerable. We need to do better.

For years, advocates have been trying to pass a bill that will end the ticketing practice — and for yet another year, the state has been resistant. It’s long past time for the state to do the necessary work to reform discipline in schools.

Zoe Li is a Liman Public Interest Fellow and civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, where she primarily focuses on policing in schools and police misconduct.

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