The Equal Justice Society, National Center for Youth Law, ACLU of Northern California, and ACLU of Southern California today filed an amicus brief (PDF) in a case related to the discriminatory expulsion of a student.
This case involved a sixth-grade student who was expelled by the Natomas Unified School District for bringing BB guns to school, even though the student was remorseful and not shown to be a continuing danger. The expulsion was not mandatory under California law.
The Sacramento County Office of Education reversed the school district’s expulsion decision, but in response the Natomas Unified School District challenged that decision in court to uphold the student’s expulsion. The amici filed the brief in support of appellants the Sacramento County Board of Education and the student.
The amicus brief focuses on the harms of exclusionary discipline, the pervasive racial disproportionality in school discipline, the role that implicit racial bias plays in those disparities, as well as the laws that were put in place to combat these problems and the ways that school districts fail to follow these laws.
EJS is part of a group of Racial Justice Amici including National Center for Youth Law, ACLU of Northern California, and ACLU of Southern California, ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties, Collective for Liberatory Lawyering, Inland Counties Legal Services, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, Public Advocates Inc., and Youth Justice Education Clinic.
The case is Natomas Unified School District v. Sacramento County Board of Education, Case No. C093475. Download a PDF of the amicus brief.