Schools in Texas have historically been safe places for teachers to teach and students to
learn—even in high crime neighborhoods, yet student discipline is increasingly moving
from the schoolhouse to the courthouse. Disrupting class, using profanity, misbehaving
on a school bus, student fights, and truancy once meant a trip to the principal’s office.
Today, such misbehavior results in a Class C misdemeanor ticket and a trip to court for
thousands of Texas students and their families each year.

It is conservatively estimated that more than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to
 juveniles in Texas each year based on information from the Texas Office of Court
 Administration.

            Texas Appleseed
            Texas’ School to Prison Pipeline:  Ticketing, Arrest & Use of
            Force in Schools, How the Myth of the “Blackboard Jungle”
            Reshaped School Disciplinary Policy (December 2010).

The Institute began the “Juvenile Justice Project” in November of 2009, through a grant from the Texas Bar Foundation, to address the rising number of student ticket cases faced by students accused of school misconduct. The project’s primary purpose is to provide direct legal representation to students in Class C Misdemeanor cases pending in Justice and Municipal Courts in Texas.  The project’s secondary purpose is to provide information to the legislators, schools, and the larger community about the long term effects on students that stem from criminalizing ordinary school misconduct.  

The project seeks to highlight and reduce the burgeoning and disparate use of student tickets amongst minority communities.   African American students,and to a lesser extent Hispanic students, are significantly overrepresented in discretionary suspensions and disciplinary alternative school referrals for nonviolent offenses.  The high correlation between school misconduct and later incarceration which led to the phrase, “the school to prison pipeline” is now widely acknowledged and researched.  As demonstrated in the Texas A&M Public Policy Research Institute’s recent finding that, “the single greatest predictor of future incarceration in the juvenile justice system is a history of disciplinary referrals at school.”  The simple numbers show that more than 80 percent of Texas prison inmates are high school dropouts, while one in three juveniles sent to the Texas Youth Commission are also high school dropouts.  

By directly confronting the issuance of these student tickets the Juvenile Justice Project intends to ameliorate the impact on students, particularly minority students, and thus decrease the student drop-out rate and the correlating increased rate of future incarceration.

To accomplish the project goals, we provide the following services:

•    Legal Advice & Consultation
•    Review of Student Records
•    Meeting with Parents
•    Negotiating with School Districts & Prosecutors
•    In-Court Representation
•    Legal Services related to Administrative Hearings & Meetings to Challenge School Disciplinary Actions

Anyone needing those services is eligible to receive FREE legal representation from our Project.  Our geographic service area is generally Harris County and its contiguous counties (Brazoria, Galveston, Chambers, Liberty, Montgomery, Fort Bend, & Waller).  We do not have any income guidelines associated with our services.  Intake is conducted Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. by calling 713.313.1139.

The Project is also available to make group presentations upon request.