Black children in Florida face harsher school discipline, new SPLC report shows
Five years ago last month, people across the country were shocked by a video showing the arrest of Kaia Rolle in her Orlando, Florida, school.
She was just 6 years old, not even 4 feet tall and weighing about 50 pounds. Her wrists – too small for metal handcuffs – had been zip-tied behind her back by a police officer who arrested her for misdemeanor battery. He walked her to a police car, lifted her into the back seat, and drove her to a nearby juvenile assessment center (JAC).
The video captured Kaia sobbing and pleading: “Help me. Don’t put handcuffs on me. Please let me go. I don’t want to go into the police car. Please give me a second chance.” At the JAC, she was fingerprinted standing on a table and detained – without her custodial grandmother’s knowledge.
Kaia had thrown a tantrum earlier that morning after a teacher confiscated her sunglasses. The severity of the tantrum, however, was caused by a physiological sleep condition that school administrators and teachers already knew about. By the time the officer arrived, Kaia was sitting calmly on the floor with a coloring book. Still, he arrested her “without probable cause that a crime had been committed,” according to a lawsuit filed on Kaia’s behalf. The officer can be heard on the video telling Kaia he arrested her because she “didn’t listen to him.”
Later the same day, the same officer arrested an 8-year-old student at the same school, also for misdemeanor battery – also a Black child like Kaia and also without probable cause.
Kaia was possibly the youngest child ever arrested in Florida, and her story is included in a new Southern Poverty Law Center report that documents the state’s harshly punitive approach to school discipline and the consequences faced by many children – disproportionately Black – who commit what often amounts to little more than childish misbehavior.
The report – Only Young Once: The Systemic Harm of Florida’s School-to-Prison Pipeline and Youth Legal System – is part of a series examining the criminalization of children in each of the SPLC’s five focus states. Together, the reports paint a grim picture of youth criminalization in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and now Florida. A report on Georgia will be published this winter.
“Black kids are more likely to be expelled from school, arrested and incarcerated,” said Delvin Davis, the report’s author and the SPLC’s senior decarceration and criminal policy analyst. “But what’s novel about Florida is that we have a minimum age of prosecution lower than any state that has a minimum age. A 7-year-old can be put in handcuffs and taken to a police precinct to be fingerprinted and stand for a mug shot.”
‘Vastly disproportionate’
The new report shows the discrepancy between Gov. Ron DeSantis’ youth justice policies and his frequent claims that his administration “champions children” and “puts kids first.”
The state’s prolific use of school resource officers (SROs) – law enforcement employed directly on school campuses – has led to increased criminalization of children, the report says, despite the state’s contention that SROs keep schools safe. In fact, SROs “lead to harsher discipline for minor infractions, especially for students of color,” according to the report. And in Florida school districts that employ more than three SROs per 1,000 students, arrest rates are “more than double” the rate of districts employing fewer than two SROs per 1,000 students. (The SRO in Kaia’s school was the person who called police, not the school’s head administrator, who did not want her arrested, according to one of her attorneys.)
The SPLC report shows in granular detail how the state continues to send children down a path toward imprisonment. The results are eye-opening: high rates of school expulsions, dropouts, imprisonment and recidivism – particularly among Black youths, who are transferred to adult court for prosecution at nearly three times the rate of their white peers.
The report also makes clear that the state has no interest in rehabilitation. Punitive measures annually cost taxpayers over $130,000 per child – 2.5 times the annual cost of an education at Florida State University and the University of Florida combined – whereas positive alternatives to incarceration cost less than $3,500 a year per child.
“Florida’s punitive, zero tolerance approach makes schools less safe, not more,” said Sam Boyd, senior supervising attorney with the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team.
“Children of color are disproportionately harmed by this failed policy.”
Reports paint grim picture
Florida lawmakers responded to the national outrage over Kaia’s arrest by passing the 2021 Kaia Rolle Act. Signed into law with bipartisan support, the law would have prevented Kaia’s arrest. However, it only raised the minimum age for such an arrest to 7, instead of 12, as Kaia’s family and the SPLC sought in the legislation.
Since passage of the law, the SPLC Florida policy team has made raising the legal age for arrest to 14 one of its top legislative priorities. The law’s final form dropped restrictions on how children could be arrested and where children could be held, and the team wants them added to the current law.
“There is no medical or societal reason for an adult to put metal handcuffs on a child,” said Jonathan Webber, SPLC Florida policy director. “When police officers show up, they tend to use the tools they know – handcuffs, arrest and Baker Act seizures. Instead, children should be helped by people with training in youth behavior and mental health.”
This approach is backed up by studies concluding that the brain of a young child – even a teen – is more susceptible to immature and irrational decision-making. Considering Kaia’s known physiological condition, her age, and her calm state before her arrest, “she should have been seen as a child who needed help, not a criminal,” Boyd said. “That kind of treatment can lead to years or lifelong trauma.”
Boyd helped draft the initial Kaia Rolle Act legislation and was co-counsel in the 2021 lawsuit against Palm Beach County on behalf of students with disabilities.
The new report offers an overview of the state’s broad maltreatment of children who get into trouble at school and links together some aspects that have been examined in previous SPLC reports, such as Keep Her Safe: Centering Black Girls in School Safety, a joint project with the National Women’s Law Center, and Costly and Cruel: How Misuse of the Baker Act Harms 37,000 Florida Children Each Year.
The misuse of Florida’s Baker Act, which permits the involuntary detention of people who by reason of mental illness pose an imminent danger of serious bodily harm to themselves or others, also has a disproportionate impact on Black children. Over 31% of children between 5 and 10 who were detained under the Baker Act in 2021-2022 were Black, though Black children comprised only 21% of Florida’s youth population that year, according to the new report.
If incarceration were not punishment enough, the state makes “excessive use of solitary confinement,” according to the report, which can cause young people to commit self-harm and suicide. The United Nations calls for an end to solitary confinement of children for its “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
The report recommends that Florida stop the excessive solitary confinement of children and the incarceration of youth in adult facilities. It recommends alternatives other than incarceration for nonviolent offenses, in addition to reform of the Baker Act.
Another major recommendation is to amend the so-called direct file of minors, which gives prosecutors the sole authority to charge a child in youth or adult court, and instead include input from others.
No apology for Kaia
Kaia Rolle was released to her grandmother several hours after she was arrested, and the charges were later dropped. But the damage was done. The arrest left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and other damaging effects.
Kaia’s mother filed a lawsuit in 2022 on Kaia’s behalf against the city of Orlando and four police officers, charging them with “excessive force, false arrest, and malicious prosecution” in violation of her 14th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
The suit also asserts that the police department had an “unwritten practice/policy that permitted police officers to arrest and/or charge children as young as six without probable cause that a crime had been committed” and that the department’s failure to provide special training in de-escalation techniques for dealing with young children in mental distress led to her arrest.
In response, the city claims that her arrest was not “in and of itself” unconstitutional and that “whether and how” it trains its SROs is “discretionary.”
A U.S. District Court judge in Orlando ruled against the city’s motion to dismiss the case in April, and a trial is set to begin on April 1, 2025.
“The city leadership hasn’t yet accepted that Kaia Rolle is meaningful to them,” said Bobby DiCello, an attorney for Kaia. “If they cared about her, we would have come together and decided in 10 minutes what should be done for her. I’m waiting for them to say, ‘We care about Kaia. Let’s talk.”
In the narrow sense, DiCello believes the arrest happened because the arresting officer was not trained properly and abused his authority.
But in the broader sense, he sees Florida and the country at large as objectifying its youth, especially children of color, instead of protecting and taking care of them.
“Basic human kindness would have avoided this, but deep in our national conscience is a sense that people who are different racially, culturally, socially are hard to identify with – to see as a person.”
Kaia and her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland, declined to be interviewed for this article, but through another attorney for Kaia – Justin Abbarno – Kirkland relayed the following message, which she said she wants the public to hear:
“Just because Kaia isn’t interested in talking right now or presently in handcuffs doesn’t mean that she still doesn’t experience the trauma of being in handcuffs or that her family isn’t helping her battle through this trauma herself every day. She doesn’t want the perception that it’s over. It was a life-changing experience.”
Picture at top: Meralyn Kirkland, custodial grandmother of Kaia Rolle, in a photo from 2019. That year, Kaia, then age 6, was arrested without Kirkland’s knowledge after having a tantrum at school. Outrage over Kaia’s arrest led to Florida’s Kaia Rolle Act, which raised the minimum age for arrest to 7. (Credit: Sarah Espedido/Orlando Sentinel/TNS/Alamy)
