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Two national civil rights groups accused Illinois’ third-largest school district on Tuesday of relying on police to handle school discipline, unlawfully subjecting black students to tickets, arrests and other punishments.
In a 25-page complaint against Rockford Public Schools filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the National Youth Law Center and the MacArthur Justice Center said Rockford police officers were “addressing minor conduct that parents, teachers and school leaders should treat as an education issue, not as a law enforcement issue for police officers.”
“Black students are bearing the brunt of this harm,” the complaint further states.
The groups, who provided copies of their complaints to ProPublica, asked the Department of Education to find the district violated federal laws banning discrimination and order it to change its disciplinary practices and reliance on police. Using data from the Rockford School District and Rockford Police Department, the groups argue that the district’s partnership with police means that black students are referred to the justice system but white students are not, even if they commit the same infractions at school.
A Rockford School District spokesman declined to answer questions from ProPublica, saying the district had not been notified that a complaint had been filed by the Office of Civil Rights and that if an investigation is opened, “we will respond accordingly.”
The two national groups have previously won civil rights cases in school districts and have pushed for changes on criminal justice issues such as solitary confinement in prisons. The groups began investigating school-based ticketing in Rockford after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune conducted a 2022 investigation into ticketing in Illinois and obtained a database of thousands of student tickets issued across the state, including Rockford.
The “The Price Our Kids Pay” investigation found that although Illinois law prohibits school officials from directly fining students, school districts get around the law by cooperating with police, and that black students are twice as likely as white students to be fined at school.
In Rockford, city tickets for violations of ordinances such as vaping, truancy and disturbing the peace can carry fines of up to $750 and are difficult to fight. The tickets have left some families in debt and with other serious financial consequences. Unlike in juvenile court, students cannot hire a public defender at local ticket hearings.
Rockford is the second large school district in Illinois to face a civil rights investigation over racial discrimination in traffic tickets since “The Price Our Kids Pay” was published. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office announced Monday that its investigation into Township High School District 211, the state’s largest high school district, began in May 2022 and is ongoing. The district denies the allegations that students’ race plays a role in discipline violations.
The Rockford School District has about 28,000 students, of which 26 percent are white, 31 percent are black and 32 percent are Latino. The district oversees 41 schools that serve students from kindergarten through high school. Over the past three years through March, black students were more than three times more likely to be referred to school police than their white peers, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that disproportionate police involvement makes black students more likely to be ticketed. For example, at least nine black students have been ticketed by police this year for “trespassing,” or being on campus without permission. During the same period, 27 white students were accused of trespassing, but none were reported to the police or ticketed.
Representatives from the two legal groups said they attended about a dozen administrative ticket hearings held during school hours at Rockford City Hall in May and found that the students who were ticketed were almost exclusively students of color.
“We saw at City Hall parents and families who had been fined for these things who were extremely confused and upset,” Zoe Lee, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center, told ProPublica in an interview. “It was a little surprising that there were not a single white child at the fine hearing in Rockford.”
Illinois lawmakers and advocacy groups have twice introduced bills to curb ticketing in Illinois schools, including this spring, but both efforts failed. Though the state’s schools superintendent and the governor have said they support ending the practice, some lawmakers and school leaders worry that a ban on ticketing students could inadvertently limit when police can intervene in more serious cases.
But violating the ordinance is not, by definition, a crime. For example, a student who brings a weapon to school typically is arrested but not ticketed. The Rockford case is a good example of the harm that tickets cause and the need for state law to change, said Angie Jimenez, a justice and equity attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which has been pushing for reform of the Illinois law.
A young black woman who was ticketed at school as a teenager is suing an Illinois city for violating her civil rights.
“We plan to continue pursuing legislative support to stop the practice of ticketing schools,” Jimenez said, “and we hope this complaint will help support those efforts overall.”
The complaint also highlights racial disparities in discipline across Rockford: Black students are more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, even when the district’s code of conduct calls for less severe punishments like detention, the group found.
The Rockford School District had been the subject of discrimination complaints before: In 1993, a federal judge ruled that the district illegally segregated students, including by placing black and Latino students in lower-class classes. As a result of its discriminatory treatment of students, the district was subject to a federal desegregation order until 2001.