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REMARKS by LILLIAM RANGEL-DIAZ Good Morning. Madam Chair and Commissioners, thank you for inviting me to participate in this panel. My name is Lilliam Rangel-Diaz. I am a parent of six boys, two of them with disabilities. I was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the National Council on Disability, the independent federal agency that provides advice to the President and Congress on all issues related to individuals with disabilities of all ages and all backgrounds. I am originally from Cuba and I live in Miami, Florida, where I work as an advocate for students with disabilities and their parents. I want to thank the Commission for holding this briefing on this very important issue of Zero Tolerance Programs in schools and how it is adversely affecting and violating the civil rights of our students. While these programs were created following the enactment of the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, schools are using suspensions and expulsions at alarming increasing rates and for incidents not related to possession of a weapon. In many instances, the punishment does not seem to fit the crime. Students are being suspended and expelled without even affording them and their parents the minimum rights available to them under the schools own policies and procedures, not to mention the due process rights available to them under our U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, schools are using adverse techniques, such as involuntary commitment of students, as young as elementary school age children, to mental institutions, under the Baker Act. Parents are not even contacted by the schools and learn of their children whereabouts by a telephone call from the mental institution or the jail whatever the case maybe. Some large school districts, such as the Miami-Dade County School Districts, have availed themselves of their own police force and police officers are routinely called to handle discipline issues in schools that do not necessarily warrant police involvement. It seems that school districts have become very good at bypassing the "bureaucratic hurdles posed by IDEA," as Ms. Bond referred to, of disciplining students with disabilities, as students with disabilities are the most affected especially those from poor and diverse cultural backgrounds. The suspension and expulsion rates of students with disabilities is double that of their non-disabled peers. For example, in the State of Florida, in the 1998-1999 school year, 13.2 percent of disabled students received in-school suspensions while only 7.5 percent non-disabled students received in-school suspensions; 14.9 percent of disabled students received out of school suspensions, while only 6.6 percent of non-disabled students received out of school suspensions. These figures were reported to the Office of Special Education Programs. In its 1998 position statement on the discipline of students with disabilities, NCD noted that "historically, the need for 'discipline' and 'order' has been a pretext for the full-scale exclusion from education of hundreds of thousands of children." Children with disabilities continue to be at greater risk of being subjected to disciplinary actions precisely because they have disabilities. In 1997, NCD held a hearing in Louisiana focusing on the needs of children and youth with disabilities from minority and rural communities. Advocates told NCD that discipline is disproportionately applied to students with disabilities who are members of minority groups. A Louisiana advocate who spoke about the problem of schools removing students for extended periods of time said: "Particularly in large urban districts, many such students are ignored and are never referred for services they need in order to learn. Not surprisingly, this contributes to behavior problems, which are then solved by expelling the students." NCD has continued to hear this from advocates and consumers around the country. These findings have been reported in many of our publications, specifically in three of our recently released reports: Back to School on Civil Rights: Advancing the Federal Commitment to Leave No Child Behind; in our report From Privileges to Rights: People Labeled with Psychiatric Disabilities Speak for Themselves; as well as in Lift Every Voice: Modernizing Disability Policies and Programs to Serve a Diverse Nation. I want to call special attention to the NCD report entitled, Back to School on Civil Rights: Advancing the Federal Commitment to Leave No Child Behind, which is the result of an independent analysis of the federal monitoring and compliance enforcement with IDEA recently conducted by NCD. NCD finds "that federal efforts to enforce the law over several Administrations have been inconsistent, ineffective and lacking any real teeth." The findings in this NCD report show that "every State is out of compliance with IDEA requirements to some degree; noncompliance persists in some States over many years." So while we speak about holding students accountable for their actions, how about holding schools accountable for the appropriate education of all students? Research has shown that there is a direct link between inappropriate education and discipline problems. I think that most of us would agree that schools should protect students and provide them with a safe learning environment. Recent events, such as those that occurred in Columbine High School, have served to heighten the level of security in our schools. However, in our zealous pursuit of safety in schools, we must exercise caution and vigilance that under the guise of Zero Tolerance Programs our students' constitutional rights do not continue to be violated. Regardless of how high the crime rates may be in our communities, the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" has been and continues to be the cornerstone of our judicial system, and great care is exercised to protect suspected criminals' due process rights. On the other hand, it seems that our schools have taken the attitude that students are not entitled to due process rights and are arbitrarily found guilty, denying them access to an education, in effect condemning them to a life sentence. Thank you. HOME | FAQs | NEWSROOM | SITE MAP | FEDERAL AGENCIES | RESOURCES |
