By Ellyn Fortino, Communications Intern
Ben Wolf, assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, spoke to the Chicago Tribune in an article Sunday about the difficulty for troubled youths to return to school after they have been incarcerated:
In some cases, officials refuse to re-admit students for fear they will disrupt classes or be violent but do not move to formally transfer or expel students as school rules and the law requires. In other cases, parents cannot navigate the school district's bureaucracy to re-enroll their children after they have been in custody or suspended.
While these troubled students are away from school, they lose more ground in an education system that already has proved difficult for them. Without an education, they are more likely to break the law, with increasingly serious ramifications, or become victims of violence.
....Critics, though, fear that schools, in refusing to readmit some students, are shirking their legal obligation to provide an education.
"The assumption ought to be that a kid is going back to a regular school," said Benjamin Wolf, assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "We think it's almost always illegal to refuse to take a child."
