School officials shackled Ja'Briel Weston to a chair for being disobedient. Two days later, they did it again. Now his father is suing. Why we should all be concerned.
by Brentin Mock
Six-year-old Ja'Briel Weston was shackled by his ankle to a chair for disobeying his first-grade teacher. Two days later, he was apprehended by an armed security guard, dragged down a hallway and handcuffed to a chair for getting into a shoving match with another student. This didn't happen at some medieval-age boarding school. It happened this year, this May, in New Orleans, at Sarah T. Reed Elementary School.
When Ja'Briel's parents found out about this, his father, Sebastian Weston, met with the school's principal, Daphyne Burnett, who not only confessed to the child cuffing but also said that she'd have it done again if the child got out of line. According to a legal complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, "When [Ja'Briel's] father implored the school principal to stop these unconstitutional practices, she insisted that school policy required the arrests and seizures at the school."
The juvenile-justice advocacy organizations are helping the father sue not only the school and its security officers but also the Recovery School District, the city's public school system, for allowing the "required" policy to take shape. Since the incident, young Ja'Briel has suffered pain in his wrists and ankles, as well as longer-lasting harm to his emotional and psychological well-being. This is increasingly cruel, but unfortunately not unusual punishment, since New Orleans isn't the only city to cuff a 6-year-old. But if there is a city that could do with less emotional pain, it is New Orleans, whose children in the thousands, displaced as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have bounced city to city, school to school, ever since.
Read Full Essay @ The Root.com
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