Advocates for Children’s Services
to host Equal Justice Works Fellowship
April 26, 2010 Media Release,
Advocates for Children's Services
(Durham, NC) –
Advocates for Children’s Services (ACS), a statewide project of
Legal Aid of
North Carolina, will host yet another prestigious national
fellowship beginning in September 2010.
Jason
Langberg, currently a Clifton W. Everett, Sr. Community
Lawyer Fellow at ACS, has been awarded a two-year
Equal Justice
Works (EJW) Fellowship to remain at ACS and intensify his advocacy
efforts in Wake County, North Carolina. Already working with
ACS under an EJW Fellowship is Cary Brege.
During his EJW fellowship, Langberg plans to: 1) provide holistic
legal advice and representation for students from low-income
families in school discipline-related cases; 2) draft community
education publications; 3) conduct presentations, workshops, and
trainings for students, parents, advocates, services providers,
educators and policymakers; and 4) create a community-based
diversion program as an alternative to suspensions and court
referrals.
Langberg suggests that his work will result in drastically fewer
suspensions and school-based court referrals, and a more empowered,
community-driven movement for educational excellence, fairness and
equity.
In recent months, Wake County has garnered national attention as a
result of the new school board majority eliminating the district’s
nationally-acclaimed socio-economic diversity policy. However,
the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) has also had another
on-going, although largely ignored, civil rights crisis: its
school-to-prison pipeline (STPP).
The STPP is a system of local, state, and federal laws, policies,
and practices that pushes children out of school and into the
criminal system. Students end up in the STPP in two primary
ways. Directly, they are arrested at school, or school-based
delinquency or criminal complaints are filed against them in court
because of an incident at school. Indirectly, they tend to drop out,
are suspended, or are otherwise pushed out; then suffer the
consequences of school exclusion (e.g., lack of supervision,
alienation, isolation, conflict with adults, etc.); and then become
involved in delinquent or criminal activity.
As exhibited by the follow data, WCPSS has had one of the largest,
most invidious STPPs in the nation.
During the 2008-09 state fiscal year:
• There were 802 school-based delinquency complaints filed against
students
in Wake County, which accounted for 32.9% of all delinquency
complaints
filed in the county. What is worse, in North Carolina, all youth
age sixteen
and older are automatically charged as adults. Therefore, the 802
complaints
doesn’t reflect the scores of criminal complaints that are filed
against Wake
County high school students each year.
• 84.3% of the school-based delinquency complaints were for
low-level
misdemeanors.
• The fourth most common school-based delinquency complaint was
“disorderly conduct.”
During the 2008-09 school year:
• Wake County public schools gave out 20,651 short-term suspensions
and 1,015 long-term suspensions. Its number of long-term
suspensions
was more than four times the North Carolina district with the
second
most (Hoke County) and nearly 22 times more than Charlotte-
Mecklenburg County.
• Wake County public schools accounted for 28.3% of all long-term
suspensions in North Carolina (an increase of 7.2 percentage points
from
the previous year), even though Wake County has only 9.4% of the
state's
students. In other words, more than a quarter of all long-term
suspensions
in the entire state came from just one of the 115 school districts:
Wake
County.
African-American students are disproportionately oppressed by the
WCPSS’ STPP. During the 2008-09 school year, they made up
26.1% of students in Wake County, yet they received 62.3% of
short-term suspensions and 67.5% of long-term suspensions.
Over the past five school years, 34 of the 36 expelled students in
Wake County (94.4%) were African-American. Moreover, during
the 2008-09 state fiscal year, 73.4% of the school-based delinquency
complaints were against African American youth.
In addition to the massive number of students whom Wake County
schools suspend and file delinquency and criminal complaints against
each year, the following factors combine to make Wake County’s STPP
especially destructive:
• Wake County’s racial achievement gap is larger than statewide
averages.
• In most North Carolina school districts, and as defined by state
law, a
long-term suspension means a suspension lasting more than 10 days.
However, a long-term suspension in Wake County always means a
student is kicked out for the rest of the school year, no matter
how early
in the year the alleged misbehavior occurred.
• Wake County eliminated all of its alternative schools that serve
non-disabled, suspended students.
• Many Wake County students with disabilities receive only 2 to 5
hours
per week of instruction during their long-term suspensions.
Prior to coming to ACS, Lanberg was a Public Service Scholar and
Champy Fellow at Boston College Law School and graduated magna cum
laude in May 2009. During law school, he was a clinical
student in the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project and in the BC
Defenders; he interned at the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts
and the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; and
volunteered for the New England Innocence Project, the ACLU of
Massachusetts, and ACS. Prior to law school, Langberg worked
at Advocates for Children in Youth, a statewide advocacy
organization in Baltimore, MD, and at Ramapo for Children, an
outdoor camp in Rhinebeck, NY serving children with a wide range of
emotional, behavioral, and learning disabilities.
Langberg is a native North Carolinian and graduated phi beta kappa
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives
in Raleigh with his wife Rachel, who is an elementary school teacher
and an advocate for at-risk children.
Equal
Justice Works (EJW) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization
that is dedicated to working for equal justice on behalf of
underserved communities and causes. EJW offers the largest
postgraduate legal fellowship program in the country. EJW's office
is located in Washington, DC. For more information, go to the EJW
website,
http://www.equaljusticeworks.org.
Advocates
for Children’s Services (ACS) is a statewide project of Legal
Aid of North Carolina that provides free legal representation to
at-risk children and children involved in the juvenile justice
system because they have been denied Medicaid, Special Education,
speedy permanent placement and/or the opportunity for a sound basic
education. ACS's office is located in Durham. NC. For more
information on ACS, go the ACS website,
http://www.legalaidnc.org/acs.
Legal Aid of
North Carolina (LANC) is a statewide, nonprofit law firm that
provides free legal services in civil matters to eligible,
low-income people in North Carolina in order to ensure equal access
to justice and to remove legal barriers to economic opportunity.
LANC serves all 100 counties of North Carolina through 24
geographically located offices across the state. For more
information on LANC, go to the LANC website,
http://www.legalaidnc.org.
# # #
Disclaimer
The materials contained on this website
are for information and educational purposes only and do not
constitute legal advice.
Also please note that Legal Aid of North Carolina does not
provide legal assistance by E-mail. Contact your Legal Aid of
North Carolina office or a private attorney if you need to speak
to an attorney regarding your particular situation.
See our
complete disclaimer.
Mission Statement
Legal Aid of North Carolina is a statewide, nonprofit law firm that
provides free legal services in civil matters to low-income people in
order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove legal barriers
to economic opportunity.