Dramatic drop in criminal citations issued to Texas pupils

The number of tickets issued to Texas pupils, including to elementary school aged kids, that could land them in front of a judge for school discipline issues has dropped dramatically in the wake of legislation tightening the rules on issuing criminal citations to school children.

This is a stark contrast compared to when ABC-13 last looked at the issue, in which kids were issued tickets to appear in criminal courts for fighting and making offensive gestures, but even for wearing too much perfume or volume too high on a computer.

See our previous reports here and here.

We looked at the Houston Independent School District in 2011 and 2012 and found 3,500 tickets written in Houston schools and 8,400 tickets written in the region.

Sarah Guidry runs a law clinic at the Texas Southern University Law School. She was defending many of those kids in court and concerned that Texas was taking pupils who had a bad day at school and starting them down a path that could end in prison time.

"We had new cases every day," Guidry said.

State lawmakers stepped in during the last legislative session. They made it tougher to file criminal charges against students for school discipline issues.

It appears to have worked: State statistics show an 83-percent drop in the number of school discipline tickets issued last year, which comes to 90,000 fewer tickets.

Guidry calls it a success story.

"I've not had a new case in six months," she said. "I am very encouraged. Some of the issues we were dealing with were just ridiculous."

She says the next challenge is to convince lawmakers to crack down on truancy tickets and make it harder to force students who skip school and their parents into court.

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