Let Atiya Haynes return to school

  • by: Chrysm WatsonRoss
  • recipient: Dearborn Heights School District No. 7 Board of Education

Atiya Haynes' expulsion from school is a powerful example of how zero tolerance policies subvert justice and fairness.  The school board had the option of revoking her suspension and chose not to.  We are calling on them to reconsider their position and let her return to school before she gets even further behind in her AP courses and other demanding classwork.

​(pulled from http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/10/atiya_haynes_case_zero_tolerance_school_choice_and_one_detroit_student_s.single.html)

When Atiya Haynes’ grandfather gave her a pocketknife in July, she was hesitant to accept the gift. The 17-year-old didn’t want to think she needed a weapon for protection. But her grandfather said that was not a luxury the southwest Detroit native could afford. One of Haynes’ two summer jobs was as a lifeguard in the nearby suburb of Dearborn Heights, and to get to the pool she had to bike alone through some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods. Haynes humored her grandfather and slipped the pocketknife into her bag, along with a bevy of other teenage summer essentials: lotion, sandals, hair products, a swimsuit. She luckily never found herself in a threatening situation and, Haynes says, quickly forgot about the gift.

None of that mattered to vice principal Cheryl Howard, who found and confiscated the knife on Sept. 26, during a spontaneous bag search at the Annapolis High School senior’s homecoming football game. Though Haynes cooperated fully with the search, handing over her purse to Howard, according to Michigan state law she was in possession of a dangerous weapon, and the administrators asked her to leave the premises. When she showed up at school on Monday, Haynes was told she would be suspended for a mandatory 180 school days—in other words, the remainder of her senior year.


Three days before Haynes’ pocketknife was confiscated, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Women’s Law Center released a report finding that black girls are more likely to be held back, suspended, or expelled than any other female demographic. Gender and racial stereotypes, disparities in resource distribution, and zero-tolerance punishment systems are to blame, write the report’s authors. (This follows a large Department of Education study, which found racial inequality in discipline and pretty much every other area of school life.)

But while zero-tolerance has been the focus of Haynes’ hearing, and while that policy can be ineffective and often applied with bias, her case seems to illustrate an even larger problem: a complete lack of understanding of urban students when suburban and city worlds collide through “school choice,” a system that allows students from outside the district to enroll in a school other than their own.

When Haynes looks out her bedroom window, she sees vacant houses, pit bulls, barbed wire, and streets clogged with trash—a far cry from the clipped lawns and strip malls that litter Dearborn Heights. In 2012, Detroit had a crime rate 3.35 times the national average, and there were nearly 14,000 burglaries and 441 reported rapes per 100,000 people that same year. Detroit, in other words, is a place where it might make sense for a 17-year-old girl to carry a small pocketknife.

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