A student sent a swastika to a Jewish California lawmaker’s daughter. The response led to his new bill

In response to his daughter receiving a swastika on social media, a California Jewish lawmaker is pushing for a bill that would give school administrators authority to suspend or expel students if they cyberbully fellow students away from school and outside of school hours.

But Long Beach Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal’s Assembly Bill 2351 is coming into conflict with California’s recent reforms intended to prevent students of color from being expelled and suspended at disproportionate rates.

The ACLU and other social justice organizations oppose Lowenthal’s bill. The bill’s critics told the Assembly Education Committee earlier this month at the bill’s first hearing that giving school administrators authority to punish students for behavior that occurs off campus could result in the return of “racially biased and disparate” punishment that puts students on a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Lowenthal told the committee that as a socially-conscious Democrat, he previously couldn’t “imagine a scenario where I’m on a different side” from the ACLU, but he said his daughter’s experience highlighted why the law needs to change.

“Only a decade ago, school bullying ended once you got home and were safe,” he said. “Today, many of these activities are now taking place online, off campus, in the digital ether, and outside regular school hours, and there is nowhere and no time that our kids are truly safe.”

Lowenthal told the committee that administrators at his daughter’s middle school told him they didn’t have authority to expel the student who sent his daughter a swastika on the online messaging app Snapchat. He said the school lacks authority to police off-campus activity and her school was following a “legal interpretation of how the law is written” that places an emphasis on “restorative justice” instead of punitive actions such as suspensions.

According to the bill analysis, “The trend in recent years, in California as well as nationally, has been to reduce the rates of suspension and expulsion (following) a large body of research (that) has identified adverse impacts,” including disproportionate rates for students of color.

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