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A mother's saga: School, police, arrests and a son with mental illness
Jessica Bliss | Nashville Tennessean | 2:30 pm CDT September 10, 2018
Lawanda Mckinnon cries as she talks about her son who has been diagnosed with a serious mental health illness.
Lawanda Mckinnon's son sat alone in the back of the police cruiser as it pulled away from his elementary school.
Lawanda Mckinnon cries as she talks about her son who has been diagnosed with a serious mental health illness in Nashville, Tenn., Monday, Aug. 20, 2018.
Lacy Atkins / The Tennessean
His face fell in resignation, his forehead rested defeatedly against the window as the car stopped at a red light.
In her vehicle in the next lane, Mckinnon looked at her boy through her own driver's side window and tears cascaded down her cheeks.
How could he, a child, be in such a scary situation?
It wasn't the first time her son had been handcuffed in the hallways of his school. And it wouldn't be the last.
Last year, 113 students ages 12 and under were arrested in Metro Nashville Public Schools.
The youngest was a 7-year-old African American boy at Cockrill Elementary considered a runaway.
There was also a 9-year-old caucasian girl from Warner Elementary. She was charged with disorderly conduct.
And there was Mckinnon's then-12-year-old son.
He has a diagnosed mental illness. They call it disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. It can cause frequent, intense outbursts. He has had an Individualized Education Plan for emotional disturbance since he was in kindergarten. His mother lugs around four backpacks crammed with documents describing his challenges and his medical and behavioral needs.
Still, she struggles to get him the support he needs at school.
What she gets instead is phone calls from the office in the middle of the workday informing her that her son is being taken to juvenile detention. Again.
"Imagine a sense of pain, panic, fear, devastation, disbelief, embarrassment and then anger," says Mckinnon, who first experienced this rush of emotions when her son was arrested in the fourth grade, then sixth and most recently seventh.
The arrests — and expulsions and out-of-school suspensions — of young students, particularly those with special needs, must be stopped, she says. And a group in Nashville led by public defender Beth Cruz is working to do just that.
'It just harms the child'
PASSAGE, which stands for Positive and Safe Schools Advancing Greater Equity, is a community initiative developed in 2014 to address school discipline issues.
It focuses on racial disparity in punishment and works to eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline — a well-documented national trend where children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
Many of those children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, neglect or mental illness. Experts believe they would best benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are often isolated, punished or pushed out of classrooms and schools.
PASSAGE worked closely with the Metro Nashville school district to rewrite its code of conduct, focused primarily on eliminating discipline disparities and introducing positive intervention strategies.
Now, it is asking the Metro school board to end all out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and arrests for elementary-age students, except in the most serious offenses involving drugs, weapons or violence.
The school district's governance committee will consider the new policy before Tuesday's board meeting. If approved, it could be up for a board vote as soon as Sept. 25.
"It just harms the child," says Cruz, who has two students in Metro schools and also leads the Education Rights Project for the Public Defender's Office. "And it harms our community."
Emotional disturbance and the fight for education
At 3 years old, Mckinnon's little boy didn't act like other toddlers.
He woke up angry all the time, shouting and throwing tantrums. At daycare, he would turn over chairs and trash cans and try to run out of the building.
Mckinnon, a working, single mother raising two boys paycheck to paycheck, often would be called to leave her job to pick up her disruptive son. It was a parent's nightmare.
All she could think was: "What am I doing wrong?" She was scared, crying all the time, and in a frenzy hoping to find a fix.
The early feedback for her son's behavior, before the depths of his mental illness were truly understood, was "the diagnosis they give everybody," Mckinnon says, "ADHD."
In kindergarten, teachers called her during the day to say her boy was hiding in the bathroom crying because kids made fun of him. In first grade, he hit a parent with his backpack. And in second grade, he angrily upturned the contents of the school's P.E. office one afternoon after being asked to put a ball away.
School administrators determined he had an "emotional disturbance" and created an Individualized Education Plan to help assess and address his behavioral needs.
Then in 2012, at age 7, he was given the diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, which is a persistent pattern of anger, irritability, arguing, defiance or vindictiveness.
"At that point, it was fight or flight for me," Mckinnon says. "I chose to fight. To fight for my son's rights and fight for his opportunity to have a free, fair and appropriate education."
But in school, not every action — and reaction — was appropriate.
Racial disparity in discipline: 'We are losing a generation'
In matters of school discipline, PASSAGE points to the disparity in those being punished — 100 percent of elementary school students expelled and two-thirds of those arrested while in school last year were black males, according to numbers presented to the school board by Jennifer Wade, a magistrate at Davidson Country Juvenile Court.
The majority, like those of Mckinnon's son, were punished for non-violent offenses.
The consequences of such extreme disciplinary action can be dire.
Children who are suspended or expelled from school are more than twice as likely to be arrested during the month of their suspension or expulsion, according to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
Being suspended or expelled also is associated with a three times higher likelihood of coming into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year, the Council of State Governments reports.
Nashville sits at the core of this issue.
A study released this year by the Brookings Institution found that Nashville's 37208 zip code had the highest rate of incarceration in the United States. One in seven children born between 1980 and 1986 were in prison by age 30.
"We are losing a generation," Cruz told the Metro Nashville school board at a meeting last month.
But, added Linda Robinson, a task force chair for Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH), "We can save our babies."
A son in handcuffs at school
Mckinnon did everything she could to save hers.
She sought services and counseling support from resources across town. She went to Centerstone, a behavior health-focused nonprofit, and looked into parenting classes offered through the state's Regional Intervention Program, designed for kids with extreme behavior issues.
She got support through Youth Villages, which helps emotionally troubled kids. And while certain techniques and interventions helped her son, his mental struggles remained.
"I was looking for a foolproof resolution," Mckinnon says through her tears. "And I wasn't getting that."
She questioned her own parenting. She fretted over how her son — who, she says, already had two strikes against him as a black male — would handle a third, the stigma of mental illness.
Of the 1,021 students pre-K to 4th grade who were suspended in Metro Schools last year, approximately 34.2 percent were students with disabilities.
She spoke to every teacher and administration who would listen about his challenges.
"I wanted the teachers to be safe, I wanted the children to be safe, and I mostly wanted my child to be safe," she says.
There were teachers loved her child and welcomed him and wanted him to be successful. She was thankful for them.
But many teachers, she says, were not equipped to help. Suspensions didn't change his behaviors, they only put him further behind in his school work. By fourth grade, he wasn't on grade level. And it felt like he was constantly being pushed out the door.
Then, one day she got the phone call from school that crushed her. The police were arresting her 10-year-old son. She assumed the worst. He had hurt a classmate or a teacher.
Lawanda Mckinnon's son has a diagnosed mental illness. He has been arrested at school three times for non-violent offenses. She will share her story on Sept. 24 at the next Nashville Storytellers.
Jessica Bliss
It turned out he simply had refused to go to class. When school administrators stepped in, his reaction escalated, cursing to the point of being uncontrolled. But he never became violent, Mckinnon asserts.
The call was a courtesy — a one-time occurrence — the district policy now states the parents cannot be called until a child is transported to juvenile court.
She sped to school. She saw her son in the back of the squad car. One of the responding officers told her that when they arrived, her son was calm, but as soon as he saw the uniformed men in the office doorway, he freaked out, landing him in handcuffs.
Mckinnon could do nothing but drive to the juvenile justice center to meet her boy.
"It devastated me," she says.
Mobile crisis, an ambulance or police
If the PASSAGE policy passes, the group will work with the district to provide alternatives to current disciplinary actions, including out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and arrests.
Some question whether such a policy would take a tool away from educators and make schools less safe. "The truth is many arrests are for non-violent offenses," says Wade, a juvenile court magistrate.
"The trauma induced by the arrest and booking process far outweighs any legal consequence that that child will face," Wade told the school board last month.
To help, PASSAGE wants to create an action plan using positive intervention experts already employed by the district's Social Emotional Learning Department — but, Cruz says, not always fully utilized — to focus on restorative justice and trauma-informed interventions. The policy would not eliminate in-school suspensions.
Elementary school is just the first step, Cruz says. PASSAGE would like to see the arrest policy extended to young middle school students down the line, ending disciplinary practices that are detrimental to a student's social and mental well being.
"When a child is arrested at school — taken, in front of their peers, out of the school building, sometimes in zip ties because cuffs are too big — they are usually not told what's going on," Cruz says.
"They are put in a police car by themselves. ...They enter through the sally port in the back and are brought up to booking where they are put on a bench and wait sometimes for hours until something occurs.
"Those children are not competent. If they are 9 or under, they will not stand trial for charges. You have to think there is an alternate option."
In some cases, Cruz continues, if a child is having a serious mental health crisis, it may be more appropriate to call the state's mobile crisis response team or an ambulance instead of the police.
'He will shine'
When his brain is not derailed by the mental illness he faces, Mckinnon's boy is as sweet as any loving mama's boy.
He plays football and baseball, he helps her make dinner.
His smile reveals bright teeth and lifts his full cheeks. His remorse, and his hugs, are genuine and strong.
"Where we are is a lot better than where we were," his mother says. "Where we were was traumatic."
Still, his past experiences with police at school create concern even now, with the common trust between teacher and student violated and broken.
"He was ashamed, embarrassed and he thought the school hated him," Mckinnon says.
Mckinnon continues to fight for her son every day, meeting with his school administrators, speaking in front of the school board, telling his story.
He has an updated diagnosis, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD), a childhood condition of extreme irritability, anger, and frequent, intense temper outbursts. He attends counseling at Vanderbilt.
And his mother believes with all her heart in his purpose. Perhaps it begins by helping bring about change at school for others like him.
"No matter how he's designed or how he's made," Mckinnon says of her son, "he will shine."
Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and jbliss@tennessean.com or on Twitter @jlbliss.
NASHVILLE STORYTELLERS: Inside the mentally ill mind
Nashville Storytellers puts remarkable local people on stage to talk honestly about their lives.
Their stories inspire us, connect us, make us laugh — and, often, they explore life's more complicated truths.
At the next Nashville Storytellers, we look at dispelling the stigma associated with mental health.
Depression. Anxiety. Bipolar disorder. Addiction. We share stories from people who live with — and the first responders who encounter — mental illness.
When: Sept. 24; doors open at 6 p.m., storytelling begins at 7 p.m.
Where: St. Thomas Midtown Hospital's Gladys Stringfield Owen Education Center (2000 Church Street, Nashville)
Tickets and more info: storytellerstickets.tennessean.com
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Originally Published 6:00 am CDT September 10, 2018
Updated 2:30 pm CDT September 10, 2018
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