"Everyone change, grab your bags, and line up," the officer ordered, her voice cold and commanding, as she stood near the entrance to the locker room. A group of girls, no older than 16, quickly pulled on their clothes, anxious to get out of the room as swiftly as possible. Their movements were stiff, as though the weight of the moment—being watched, being controlled—was already heavy on their shoulders. Once they had gathered their things, the inspection began. Each bag was searched. Each girl was patted down. No one was allowed to leave without the thorough check. Their personal items, their privacy, all scrutinized before they were allowed to leave. They had exactly five minutes to get from the gym to their next destination.
As the people moved through the hallways, they passed a series of locked bathrooms. In two buildings with 4,355 people, only two restrooms per building were open—located at the front of the building, far from where most students had their classes. These restrooms, too, were heavily monitored. Security guards were stationed outside, ensuring that no one could enter without being observed. The intent was clear: no hiding, no vaping, no breaks. The people were forced to endure outside until the first person came out with little time to actually use the facility.
The few people who needed to use the restroom were forced to wait, with just five minutes to get in and out and to their next location. It was not just a matter of time—it was a
matter of control. Every student was watched, through the tight, monitored hallways. No one was free.
"You would not make it in college if you were not in honors courses," my College Prep Writing teacher told us. "The quality of this high school’s regular courses is below the state average. They are very easy to pass, but not if you want to attend college." She said this to a class of 18 Hispanic students and four Black students. These 22 students were among 4,355 total enrollees at the school, 97.5% of whom were minorities: 81% Hispanic, 12.9% Black, with the remaining students from other backgrounds.
Sixty-eight percent of the student body were low-income, many of them first-generation college students.
Some students were forced to balance their studies with part-time jobs or taking care of younger siblings. Many could not afford college and some students, would attend the local tech school offered as an elective during school hours.
Meanwhile, the school itself was desperately underfunded. Counselors were overwhelmed with caseloads, unable to provide the support that so many students needed. For a student body of over 4,000, there were only four counselors per grade level, and a mere three social workers for the entire student body.
Beyond that, extracurricular activities were sparse—and those that existed were poorly advertised. Clubs and sports were just out of reach for some students, and would miss the opportunity to provide valuable skills and college applications boosts.
The school was split into two campuses: one for freshmen and sophomores, and another for juniors and seniors. Each campus was monitored by its own officer an unspoken reminder that discipline, not education, was the priority.
Most of these students faced significant academic challenges. The school did not even teach essential skills like APA and MLA formatting, how to email professors, or how to prepare for the ACT or SAT. They did not have the resources to help students succeed on standardized tests, and they did not have the time to teach students the skills that could set them apart when applying to college.
The state’s average SAT proficiency in math and reading was 20%. In my district? It was a mere 7%.
In a place where authority and surveillance were a priority, where students' movements were monitored and their freedom restricted, it was easy to forget: this was not a prison. It was a school.
But in so many ways, the distinction does not matter. The path that was set long before them and to some it was all too familiar—paved with obstacles, limited opportunities, and few opportunities to escape. For many of these students, the school-to-prison pipeline is an every day reality.
The school-to-prison pipeline refers to policies that push at-risk students, particularly those from marginalized communities, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. It usually begins with underfunded schools, where overcrowded classrooms, unqualified teachers, and insufficient resources like counselors and special education services create environments that foster disengagement and higher dropout rates. In some cases, schools get incentivized to push out struggling students to boost test scores, a practice that increased by accountability measures like the No Child Left Behind Act.
In response to low performance and safety concerns, many schools have adopted zero-tolerance policies that impose severe punishments for minor infractions. These policies
disproportionately affect students of color and often push them deeper into the juvenile justice system. Suspended or expelled students are left unsupervised, fall behind in their coursework, and become more disengaged, increasing their likelihood of dropping out or facing criminal charges.
As these penalty measures become more widespread, and due process protections are increasingly bypassed—especially for students with special needs, who are already disproportionately affected by the system. Additionally, many underfunded schools rely more on police than educators to maintain discipline. School resource officers, often untrained in youth engagement, contribute to a rise in school-based arrests, typically for non-violent offenses like disruptive behavior.
It is important that we address these systemic issues by advocating for better resources, ending zero-tolerance policies, provide proper training for school staff, and ensuring fair treatment. We must prioritize education over punishment, and work towards a system where all students are given the tools and support they need to succeed.
Works Cited
Counseling. Waukegan High School. (n.d.). https://whs.wps60.org/educational_services/counseling
What is the school-to-prison pipeline?. American Civil Liberties Union. (2008, June 6). https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-school-prison-pipeline
Waukegan High School. U.S. News & World Report. (n.d.).
I remember the shock and dismay I felt when I went to the high school orientation for my eldest son here in Springfield, at Southeast High School. Rather than talking about the academic program or the excellence of teachers or the achievements of the students, the welcome messages was mostly about discipline and behavior and punishments and that sort of thing. I knew that Southeast was the only high school in the area that significantly outperformed a model of student achievement (I created a predictive model based on demographics and income status of the area's high schools to estimate the standardized test scores students should have scored based on their backgrounds, and I knew that while the "better" schools of Springfield High and the high school in Chatham had better scores than Southeast, they were just hitting the predicted scores based on their student bodies, whereas Southeast was having its students perform half a standard deviation higher than the model's prediction). But, at that orientation, the message I received was "we care mostly that your students follow the rules an if they don't, we'll make them pay for their insolence" and not "we will work with your students to help them achieve whatever they are capable of achieving".
Illinois makes school report cards available to the public. The Waukegan High School in the Waukegan Unified School District, (School District #60, in Lake County), which includes 21 schools and had approximately 14,000 students enrolled in August of 2024 has some amazing statistics. There are 1,736 English learners; students who do not speak English at home and whose English abilities are such that they need some degree of translation support to understand content in some of their courses and spend some of their study time in English-as-a-Second-Language classroom. There are nearly 500 (498, to be exact) students with individualized educational plans (IEPs), meaning they were identified as having some form of disability or difficulty that required a specialized plan to help their learning or development. This is about 12% of the total enrollment with IEPs. The school is actually drawing from a catchment area that is (very slightly) financially better-off than the average Waukegan school, as “only” 68% of the students are considered “low income”, whereas overall in District #60 the average is 73%. In the previous school year (Academic Year 2023-2024 there were 1,489 discipline actions for 643 of the students, resulting in 474 students receiving out-of-school suspensions (a total of 843 out-of-school suspensions, so many of those students had out-of-school suspensions multiple times).
Examining scores on SATs, Waukegan High School had 2.1% of the students exceeding grade level, and 8.5% meeting grade level performance standards in English language arts; in mathematics, 0.2% and 6.3% were exceeding and meeting performance standards. Statewide, in 2024 about 10.9% of high school students exceeded English performance levels for their grade, and 20.2% met standards, while in mathematics statewide, 6.2% exceeded standards and 19.9% met standards.
Given the demographics and income backgrounds of the students, there are some areas where the school is not especially far behind. Of the freshmen in 2020-21, 79.6% had graduated from high school by 2024 (statewide average is 87.7%). About 43% had entered a college (community college or 4-year college) within 12 months of graduating high school (the statewide average is 66%). Of those who graduated, 35.6% were in community colleges and taking at least one remedial course (a course that wouldn’t count toward an associate degree, but would help prepare the students to take courses that would count toward their associate or bachelor’s degrees).
Those students who suffered out-of-school suspension (and those who may have been arrested by the law enforcement personnel in the schools) are the ones most likely in that school-to-prison pipeline you described. On one hand, violence among youth in Chicago has attracted national media attention, and people in the greater Chicago area may have lost patience with young persons who behave violently as a result. So, some people may justify this “tough-on-violence” approach as a way to protect students in the schools. In 2023, young persons from birth to 19 accounted for 18.2% of the 602 homicides in Chicago (543 shooting homicides and 59 non-shooting homicides that year, 109 victims were under 20-years-old). Waukegan is pretty far north of Chicago, but is still in the wider Chicago metropolitan area. However, Waukegan is not plagued by a high rate of violent (only 10 homicides in the city in 2023, 102 robberies, and 168 aggravated assaults and battery; rates of 1.1 per 10,000 homicides, 11.6 per 10,000 for robberies, and 19.2 per 10,000 for assaults and battery in the city with its 87,642 residents). By comparison, my son lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, which has 0.4 shooting victims (fatal and non-fatal) per 10,000, but boarders Humboldt Park, which had 2.5 homicides per 10,000, and Humboldt Park borders East Garfield Park, which had 9 homicides per 10,000. Logan Square had 30 robberies per 10,000; Humboldt Park had 58.7, and East Garfield Park had 89.7. Logan Square had 17.0 aggravated assaults per 10,000; Humboldt had 48.3; East Garfield Park had 82.9. So, Waukegan is considerably safer than those types of Chicago neighborhoods. I don’t see that things are so bad in Waukegan that they could justify some sort of no tolerance policies toward misbehavior in schools.
There are many other ways to handle student discipline aside from out-of-school suspensions. The Fullmind consulting and service-providing group out of New York specializes in alternative approaches to out-of-school suspensions (for fees, they provide virtual teachers to work with students who have behavior problems or who have medically fragile situations), and their website lists ten alternatives to suspension in schools. The American Civil Liberties Union (a group that I regularly contribute donations toward, and that opposes the school-to-prison pipeline) reports on evidence-based alternatives to school suspension.
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