COLUMBIA, Mo. - Stephen Shamburger spends his days trying to connect.
As a site administrator at the Columbia School District's suspension center, he works closely with students who have been suspended from their home school.
Rather than assigning extra homework, Shamburger makes it his business to understand each student's struggles.
"Oftentimes, it could be an isolated incident: You woke up in the morning and couldn't eat breakfast or you missed the bus," Shamburger said. "One small thing that happened in the morning can set in motion your feelings and actions for the rest of the day."
Shamburger's personable approach contrasts with techniques used by other Missouri educators. Many public schools in Missouri continue to use policies experts believe go against the best interests of at-risk students, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
These policies, which include zero-tolerance rules, school-based arrests and the use of alternative disciplinary schools, contribute to a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline, according to the ACLU.
Through this so-called pipeline, at-risk students are pushed from the classroom into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
Pushed from the classroom
The school-to-prison pipeline process is set in motion by harsh discipline policies that result in suspension, according to the ACLU. Suspensions have skyrocketed from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.1 million in 2000, according to the ACLU. In both years, roughly 50 million students were enrolled in elementary through high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Students who cause trouble in the classroom are sometimes reassigned to disciplinary alternative schools. Some of these institutions don't offer quality education, said Amanda Schneider, a St. Louis attorney at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri.
"Disciplinary alternative schools are not in the best interest of educating children," said Schneider, who works with families of children with limited economic means. "They are really about keeping them out of the general education setting but not with appropriate support. They are usually settings run without the same level of accountability as the general education setting."
Children who've been suspended or expelled become disengaged in the learning process because they're often left unsupervised or aren't assigned constructive activities, according to the ACLU. A child who's not interested in education has higher odds of getting involved with the court system.
"I've heard stories time and time again where children are suspended, and they fall behind in their credits," said Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis. "When they fall behind, it's very hard for them to catch up. So schools push them out of the system."
These children have no alternative but the street, she said.
"They turn to a life of crime, selling drugs to survive," Nasheed said. "They don't go back to school to get their GED, and the cycle just continues."
Vulnerable populations
Black students and students with disabilities experience disproportionate rates of suspension in many Missouri school districts, according to data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
In the Columbia School District, black students make up 20 percent of the student body but account for 50 percent of in-school suspensions and nearly 49 percent of out-of-school suspensions.
This trend isn't exclusive to Columbia. The black student population in the Jefferson City School District is 18 percent, but black students account for more than 34 percent of in-school suspensions and 42 percent of out-of-school suspensions, according to OCR data.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a systemic issue, Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal wrote in a piece for the St. Louis American. Chappelle-Nadal, who represents part of the Ferguson-Florissant School District, did not respond to requests for comment.
"We are not talking about any recent trend, and it is not just limited to isolated cases," Chappelle-Nadal wrote. "This pipeline between schools and jails is a long-standing cycle that has cost us everything, from the toll it has taken on courts and law enforcement to the dreams of those once-hopeful students, now deferred."
Officers in the classroom
Law enforcement presence in learning environments is one of the key traits of the school-to-prison pipeline, according to the ACLU.
An Oct. 26 video that shows a South Carolina officer flipping a student from her desk has generated discussion about law enforcement's presence in schools. The school resource officer (SRO) in the video, Richland County Sheriff's Deputy Ben Fields, was fired after the incident.
"The role of an SRO is not a disciplinarian. We're there to keep the peace and make sure people don't break laws," Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott told the Associated Press in October.
In 2011, 102 students in the Columbia School District were arrested while at school, according to OCR data.
All of Columbia's high schools have at least one school resource officer, Shamburger said. SROs are law enforcement agents who provide security and crime prevention services in schools.
Columbia Public School District Superintendent Peter Stiepleman did not respond to requests for comment.
No officers are stationed at the Alternative Continuing Education Center, the Columbia School District suspension center where Shamburger works. However, he said he's seen Columbia students positively interact with school resource officers in other institutions.
"The one who works at Rock Bridge, everybody calls her Officer Keisha," Shamburger said. "Whenever I would work there as a substitute, she was one of the kindest people I've met, one of the most welcoming people in the building."
Order in schools must be achieved through genuine interaction between officers and students, said Nasheed.
"I don't think they should be able to arrest students. I don't think they should be able to handcuff students," she said. "I think they need to have training where they can defuse a situation by way of communication."
Reversing the trend
Schools can tackle the school-to-prison phenomenon by having principals or superintendents examine a student's record and other facts before suspending a student, Schneider said.
"It's called using reasonable discretion. That is allowable under Missouri law," said Schneider, the St. Louis attorney.
Reasonable discretion allows school officials to consider a child's age, background, special needs and extenuating circumstances before handing down punishments under zero-tolerance policies.
To curb bias-based disciplinary measures, schools could file individual complaints with the Office of Civil Rights. However, school districts experiencing these issues don't file OCR complaints against themselves, Schneider said.
So, it falls to parents and students who feel they've been wronged to file an OCR complaint. This measure has yielded little result in Missouri, but it worked in New Jersey's South Orange-Maplewood School District.
The district had a black-white suspension gap of 12 percent in 2014. Additionally, students with disabilities were suspended 14 percent more frequently than students who did not have disabilities.
An OCR complaint by the ACLU of New Jersey led the school district to enter into a resolution agreement to reform district policy. Changes included the hiring of an independent consultant and the creation of a review team for all future disciplinary action.
Constructive alternative schooling provides another alternative. At Columbia's ACE tutoring program, educators strive to understand the root causes of a student's issues and apply "restorative practices."
Students can remain at ACE, which is housed in the local chapter of the Boy's and Girl's Club, anywhere from a day to a month. Sometimes students stay longer, depending on their infraction.
At the suspension center, students are encouraged to work through the actions that led to the suspension. Through a method called restorative conference, students find ways to repair the harm they've caused to fellow students, said Carla London, a supervisor at Columbia Public Schools.
"Because of the small number of students there, which averages about 20 on any given day, there are opportunities for small group work and some individualized instruction," London said.
Before students leave ACE, staff members help them incorporate helpful strategies into their behavior at their home school.
ACE monitors recidivism rates for the program. Sometimes, program staff visit students in their home building to check on their progress, London said.
Legislative efforts
Legislative action could also make a difference. In the past two years, two bills that tried to address the school-to-prison pipeline were vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon.
Senate Bill 493, filed in 2014, would have allowed school boards of unaccredited districts to vote on adding extra instruction hours. House Bill 42, filed in 2015, would have allowed charter schools to operate in provisionally-accredited districts unconditionally. The Legislature didn't override the governor's vetoes.
For the upcoming legislative session, Nasheed plans to sponsor bills to tackle the issue. She hopes to pass legislation about anti-bullying, individual learning plans for students and ending social promotion.
Social promotion refers to a school moving a student to the next grade when a student doesn't have the necessary skills to do so.
Nasheed said her bills would put mechanisms in place to identify at-risk students and help them build the necessary skills to get back on track.
"(Those mechanisms) looks like mandatory summer school. It looks like increased funding for tutoring at no cost for the parents," Nasheed said. "It looks like "looping,' where a kid can stay in the same classroom of a teacher they are familiar with" through more than one grade level.
The senator is hopeful her bills will become law.
"A lot of things that I've put into bills, people have supported," Nasheed said. "I'm sure if it's a standalone piece of legislation we can get some traction."