Ticketing policy change a win for LAUSD students


Last month, the Los Angeles Unified School District changed its policy to handle minor offenses — such as fighting and possession of alcohol or small amounts of marijuana — with counseling rather than ticketing or other legal actions.

The original ticket policy was enacted to create accountability for students, as schools needed a way to control unruly behavior. Ticketing kept schools safe for students by removing repeat offenders from the classroom. In addition, students who caused fights or carried illegal substances were immediately punished for their actions. In theory, this punishment would discipline the student and prevent further misbehavior.

Though this decision is controversial, it should become the standard for school districts across the country. Students with just one arrest on their record are twice as likely to drop out of school. A majority of colleges now look at criminal records as a part of their admission process, so for students who do finish high school, university prospects with an arrest history can be bleak.

For security reasons, the decision to handle offenses with counseling includes the provision that police will be involved if a victim has an injury requiring paramedic attention, according to the LAUSD website. This exception balances protecting students from unfair penalties while protecting students from battery or other harm.

Preventive intervention is an alternative to current LAUSD programming. At-risk youth would receive programming as early as first grade to prevent fights, drug use and other criminal behaviors. A 2010 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that students who underwent preventive intervention had a lower probability of juvenile arrest.

Difficult long-term habits can detract from the education of a student and his or her peers. Arresting or ticketing students is not the only way — or the best, for that matter — to prevent long-term issues, however. Preventive intervention, followed by intensive counseling for problematic behavior, keeps the most students in the classroom and outside of juvenile detention facilities.

Even if LAUSD does not adopt preventive measures, the study gives hope that counseling can be an effective measure to reduce troubling behavior.

It is not feasible for school districts to completely eliminate ticketing and arrests from their disciplinary policies, but they should at least enact a three-strike policy and only involve the police in drastic cases. A three-strike policy would protect students from repeat offenders at their schools. It would also give the offenders a second chance.

No school should be allowed to involve the police for a first-time incident regarding a minor offense. Twenty percent of student arrests are the result of fights, according to the Los Angeles Times. Disputes between teens should be solved through counseling, not the criminal justice system. Fighting in school should be minimized, but one altercation should not put students’ futures in jeopardy. According to the Department of Education, a single high school dropout costs taxpayers over $500,000 on average in loss of tax revenues and social services and incarceration costs.

The policy change will also help curb the disproportionate number of arrests of black students. Though black students make up 10 percent of LAUSD, they are involved in 31 percent of these student arrests, according to the L.A. Times. The move towards counseling and away from arrests will level the playing field.

This change will hopefully show that ticketing is not the only way to teach students accountability. Counseling programs are designed to force students to take responsibility for their actions and devise punishments that do not alter a student’s future prematurely for the worse. Teens belong in class, not in juvenile detention centers. Los Angeles made a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the rest of the nation’s school districts will soon follow.