The cost of flaws in Phila. schools' expulsion policy

Once unwilling to expel even the most violent students, the Philadelphia School District is doing a better job of getting dangerous pupils out of classrooms, critics say.

But the process is flawed - plagued by months-long delays, a staff unable to handle a heavy caseload, and violations of due process that the student advocates say flout state laws and harm innocent students.

School district officials say they are not breaking any laws but acknowledge they have a problem and say they are taking steps to fix it. But some students have already lost out.

Take Tauheedah Barnes, a 15-year-old whose expulsion from the School of the Future in Parkside is one of 75 cases expected to be voted on today by the School Reform Commission.

District lawyers have recommended that the commission toss out the expulsion charges against her, her attorney said.

But Barnes, who was accused of throwing a punch during a fight that put a classmate in the hospital, missed four months of school waiting for her hearing and the vote. She said she was afraid to go to a disciplinary school, and her mother said she didn't want to force her for fear Barnes might suffer more. She couldn't enroll in summer school, her mother said. The district declined to talk about individual cases.

She will likely have to repeat ninth grade, though she is not even sure where to report to school next month.

"They treated her horrendously for nothing," said LeVonda Barnes, Tauheedah's mother, who works in mental health. "She's never been found to do anything wrong, and she had to wait all this time. This traumatized her."

Sheila Simmons, education director of the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Public Citizens for Children and Youth, said processing 75 expulsions at once raises a red flag, and the cost of a move toward zero tolerance has been too high.

"They're addressing victims' needs, but they're also creating victims," said Simmons, a critic of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's zero-tolerance policy. "I am concerned with whether there are systems in place to deal with that many recommendations."

Ackerman, who instituted the new policy early last school year to include expulsions when appropriate, acknowledged in an interview that there have been "a few bumps in the road.

"The good news is that people took me seriously, that we are going to expel children who violate the serious rules of the district," Ackerman said. "The bad news is that we probably needed to hire additional staff right away."

Benjamin Wright, the district official in charge of alternative education, said this week that the district was hiring six employees to speed up expulsions and that more resources would be put into preventing problem behavior in schools.

Including the 75 it will vote on today, the School Reform Commission has considered 156 expulsion cases from the 2008-09 school year; about 25 remain in the pipeline, Wright said. Before December, the district had not expelled any student for four years, even those who brought weapons to school or assaulted teachers.

"We're fixing a system that's been broken for a while," Wright said. "I think we're pretty much on top of it now."

According to district policy, the expulsion process should work this way: A student accused of serious offenses is suspended with the intent to expel, followed by a principal's conference with parents, followed by an informal hearing. Students deemed a threat are transferred to an alternative school to await a formal hearing, to which they can bring an attorney.

But the informal hearings aren't always occurring, district officials acknowledge, so all students have been sent to alternative schools regardless of prior record or the circumstances of the incident.

"We can't say those have happened all the time," Wright said. "They will happen going forward."

The district and advocates also disagree on whether delays in formal hearings - some students have had to wait up to six months - are illegal.

Attorneys at the Education Law Center who have represented some Philadelphia students in expulsion cases interpret the school code as saying students should get a hearing within 10 days.

Wright said the district is not legally required to meet the 10-day rule, but plans to do so.

"We have to expedite the timeline," Wright said.

The mother of one student agrees and laments her son's lost senior year. The woman, whose son attended Olney West High School, asked that her name be withheld because she does not want her son's future employers or teachers to know about the incident.

The teen witnessed a fight in December, and initial reports implicated him in the brawl. He was transferred to CEP, a disciplinary school, and spent five months there until he was exonerated and permitted to return to Olney West at the end of the school year.

But he missed out on being in the yearbook and other senior rites of passage. There was a problem transferring his credits, so he had to go to summer school before he could graduate. He had planned to go to college, but couldn't. He worked instead and hopes to go back to school someday.

"It was depressing for my son, and stressful for us," the woman said. "I just hope they start looking at these cases in a timely fashion, so kids won't miss out like my son."

Tauheedah Barnes, the 15-year-old student at the School of the Future in Parkside, has been waiting for five months to hear her fate. In March, she witnessed a classmate's beating outside of school, on a Saturday. Both Barnes and her mother say that she did not throw a punch, that she was merely a bystander, there babysitting her young cousins.

No criminal charges were filed against Tauheedah Barnes. There was no police investigation. The girl had no previous behavioral problems, LeVonda Barnes said.

She was ordered to an alternative school but was too scared to attend, her mother said. Her daughter is quieter now, more afraid. And the district kept them in the dark throughout the process, she said.

"She was a child who was really motivated," LeVonda Barnes said. "She was in drama, she liked poetry. But now, she's lost her hope."

David Lapp, the Education Law Center lawyer who represented Tauheedah Barnes, said that it is politically popular to talk tough about school violence, but that the district must think of consequences for all students. Zero-tolerance policies are on the wane nationally, he said, and prevention is much more effective.

"I'm a parent of a kid in the district; I'm concerned about safety," Lapp said. "We recognize it's a huge challenge. We've seen a lot of clients who've made some mistakes, but they're not all threats to their schools, and their educations have been irreparably damaged."

Wright said that mistakes have been made, but "there are no throwaway kids."

But, he said, the first priority is safety.

"Kids cannot beat up adults, kids cannot bring weapons to school, kids cannot bring drugs to school," Wright said. "We're trying to make sure all our kids are safe."