Picture a seventh grader. He struggles to sit still, struggles to fit in, gets frustrated easily — and when he does, it comes out sideways: a shoved desk, a raised voice, a confrontation that sends him to the principal’s office instead of prompting anyone to ask what might be wrong.
The school responds the way schools often do. A suspension. A disciplinary referral. A record begins to form.
By the time he reaches high school, he is behind academically, has cycled through alternative programs and has had more interactions with school police than with a counselor who knows his name.
At some point, the institution stops seeing him as a student and starts managing him as a problem to contain.
This story is not hypothetical. Some version of it unfolds in schools across the country every day. Most people who witness it understand it as a story about race, poverty and the school-to-prison pipeline.
They are not wrong.
But they are not seeing the entire picture.
I know what that trajectory looks like from the inside. I am a first-generation college student at Columbia University and a research fellow studying mass incarceration and disability justice. I lived a version of that story myself: the behavioral flags, the escalating institutional responses, the accumulation of disciplinary labels that nearly determined my future before I had the chance to shape it.
What I understand now is that what happens to many of these students is not simply an educational failure. It is also a legal one.
[Related: Young people aren’t giving up — they’re losing trust]
Federal disability laws — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act — require schools to identify, evaluate and support students with disabilities, including those whose disabilities manifest through behavioral or emotional dysregulation. When students are repeatedly suspended or referred to law enforcement instead of being evaluated and supported, schools may not simply be making poor decisions. They may be violating federal protections designed specifically to prevent that kind of exclusion.
Too often, behaviors linked to ADHD, trauma, learning disabilities or emotional disturbances are treated as misconduct rather than signals that support is needed.
Punishment becomes a substitute for accommodation. And students pay the price.
Federal law is explicit about this. When students with disabilities face repeated removals, schools are required to determine whether the behavior is related to the disability and provide support rather than punishment if it is. Too often, that process becomes a paperwork formality instead of a meaningful intervention.
This dimension of the school-to-prison pipeline is often overlooked despite longstanding evidence. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that students of color and students with disabilities were disciplined at disproportionately high rates across school settings. A 2024 Department of Justice settlement with Wichita Public Schools — Kansas’ largest district — found discriminatory practices affecting both groups, including unnecessary law enforcement referrals and excessive use of seclusion and restraint.
Wichita matters not because it is exceptional but because someone examined the district as a whole. That rarely happens.
Courtesy of Jeffrey Vazquez
Jeffrey Vazquez
The federal enforcement is largely complaint-driven, relying on families who know their rights and can navigate a slow process tilted toward districts. What it rarely examines is whether district-wide policies and disciplinary cultures are producing illegal outcomes at scale.
[Related: Structure, control and leaving room]
A district can resolve individual complaints while maintaining conditions that make genuine compliance impossible: underfunded evaluation systems, discipline codes that treat manifestations of disability as misconduct, behavioral intervention plans that exist only on paper.
The enforcement model is designed to see incidents.
It is not designed to see systems.
And the families least likely to file complaints — those without legal knowledge, institutional access or English fluency — are often the very families whose children face the greatest risk of exclusion and criminalization.
That is not a coincidence. It is the architecture.
Treating the school-to-prison pipeline as only a racial or economic issue misses a critical part of the story. It is also a disability rights enforcement crisis. Taking that seriously means asking harder questions: Are schools meeting their legal obligations to identify students with disabilities? Are manifestation determinations being conducted as required or treated as a formality? Are districts being held accountable when discipline becomes a substitute for support?
I was that student once. I made it to the other side.
And too often, the difference is not intelligence, effort or character. It is whether someone intervened before the institution decided punishment was easier than support.
We keep calling this a pipeline as though it were accidental — as though no one built it, maintained it or benefits from its continuation.
But when schools repeatedly fail to identify and support vulnerable students despite decades of federal disability protections, we should stop describing the outcome as unfortunate.
We should start calling it what it is: systemic legal failure.
The laws already exist.
What we have lacked is the infrastructure — and the will — to enforce them.
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Jeffrey Vazquez is a sociology student at Columbia University whose work explores the intersections of disability justice, educational inequality and mass incarceration. Drawing on firsthand experiences with disability, poverty and school discipline systems, he examines how institutions shape opportunities and outcomes for vulnerable youth.
