Now my older daughter is 12 years old, and the school where many of her friends go, the school that is her zoned junior high school (full disclosure- she attends a private school), the school my sister graduated from, had a 12 year old arrested and handcuffed for doodling on her desk.

From the NY Daily News:

Alexa Gonzalez no longer faces a suspension for scribbling with a lime green marker, but principal Marilyn Grant told her mother, Moraima Camacho, that agency policy dictated that she calls the cops.

“[She said] that it wasn’t their fault that it was something they had to do,” Camacho said of her meeting with Grant at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills. “She doesn’t consider it doodling.”

A message left for Grant was not returned.

After Alexa scribbled her name, the date and a smiley face on her desk during a Spanish class on Monday, her teacher reported her to an assistant principal, who placed a call to cops, city officials said.

The cops arrested Alexa, escorting her out of the school with her hands behind her back in metal handcuffs, Camacho said.

The 112th precinct is right across the street from Russel Sage Junior High School, located in Forest Hills. The neighborhood and the students that go to the school is diverse but primarily middle class. The responses to this story have ranged from the “good, maybe that will teach the budding graffiti artist a lesson” to outrage at the waste of time and resources. And I wonder about the role that race and class play as well. The cases of children being handcuffed and arrested haven’t happened in the Upper East Side or Park Slope and the majority of children being handcuffed or sent to the psych ward, like 5 year old Dennis Rivera who dared to throw a tantrum his Kindergarten class, are children of color.

When my older daughter entered public school at age 5, I struggled against preemptive tracking based on language and ethnicity. With high stakes testing the determinant factor for funding and promoting students, I wonder if the NYPD run school safety department is being used a tracking system for our children? Or perhaps the actions of this young woman support the need for more arts in our school.