Special Education is individualized instruction that is designed to meet the needs of a student with a disability. Special education should be sufficiently designed to enable a student with a disability to access their education similarly to their non-disabled peers.

A District’s failure to meet a student’s disability-related needs can cause a student to struggle with frustration, anxiety, depression, and increased behavioral difficulties.

A District’s failure to support a student with a disability can lead to further struggles that can show up as school avoidance, refusal to complete work at school and at home, and physical and verbal outbursts.

Resultant stages of the pipeline include:

• Truancy citations

• Academic failure and difficulty achieving credits needed for graduation

• Suspension and expulsion

• Denying a student access to pro-social extracurricular activities

• School push-out (disciplinary removal of a student to an alternative educational setting)

• Summary citations for school-based behavioral incidents

• Referral to juvenile court for school-based behavioral incidents

• Reporting of school issues to a child’s juvenile probation officer and judge, leading to failure to complete the terms of juvenile court supervision

• A child’s failure to complete the terms of juvenile court supervision can lead to increased court-ordered restrictions, up to and including out-of-home placement

• Removing a child from their home can lead to increased academic challenges, as students fall farther behind their peers when they are pulled out of their home school’s curriculum for weeks or months

Decades of research has shown that children with multiple school suspensions are significantly more likely to be arrested both as children and as adults. This is the school-to-prison pipeline.