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A New Era for Student Interests and Government Equity
On Thursday, Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Eagan announced that she intends to resign from her position after serving in the role for more than a decade—a job that involves monitoring and evaluating public and private agencies in order to protect the best interests of children. The CT Mirror explains that Eagan has led the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) through investigations into issues like restraint and seclusion, mental health systems for children, and services for children with disabilities. In a press statement, Governor Lamont expressed gratitude to Eagan for her service and indicated that the OCA's advisory committee will begin the process of considering a list of nominees—from whom Governor Lamont will appoint the next Child Advocate.
Governor Lamont will also soon appoint a Chief Equity and Opportunity Officer. That's according to an executive order he issued yesterday, establishing a new Office of Equity and Opportunity that will seek to eliminate institutional and systemic barriers in state government. As explained by WTNH, under the new order, all state employees will be trained in DEI and agencies will be required to create an equity plan—much to the chagrin of Republican leadership in the legislature.
New Federal Report on Inequities in Student Arrests On Monday, Education Week covered a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which explored the racial impact of policing in schools. According to the report, the article says, “Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native students are arrested two to three times the rate of their white peers. Students with disabilities, meanwhile, are also arrested at higher rates than students of the same gender who don’t have disabilities.”
According to The 74, the GAO report showed arrests were twice as high in schools with a regular police presence than on campuses without one. The finding contributes to an ongoing debate about whether having police in schools makes the environment safer overall, or leads to inequitable disciplinary outcomes that have lasting impacts.
Among other recommendations, the GAO report suggests that the federal Office of Civil Rights begin to collect more detailed data so that it can disaggregate racial and gender information for students with disabilities. The report notes that, when these categorizations overlap, students can experience even greater adversities.
Here in Connecticut, echoes of the "overlapping" theme are also making news, due to a complaint that was recently filed with the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. It alleges that state agencies and several school districts are violating federal special education law when they outplace students with special needs to a specific private provider of special education services that has disproportionate rates of restraint and seclusion. The CT Post reports this week that the majority of students outplaced there were also boys and students of color.
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