A 15-year-old Black girl was sent to juvenile detention for more than a month during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic for failing to complete remote schoolwork even after the teen’s teacher said she was “not out of alignment” with most of the teacher’s other students. The teen, identified in a ProPublica Illinois article as Grace, was sent to suburban Detroit to stay at the Oakland County Children’s Village in mid-June, the journalism nonprofit reported.
Judge Mary Ellen Brennan of the Oakland County Family Court Division ruled that Grace was “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school.” Brennan also called Grace a “threat to (the) community” after she reportedly violated probation by not completing the schoolwork. Grace was originally charged with assault and theft. “She hasn’t fulfilled the expectation with regard to school performance,” Brennan said at a sentencing hearing. “I told her she was on thin ice and I told her that I was going to hold her to the letter, to the order, of the probation.”
Grace, who lives in a predominantly white community, was ordered to check in with a caseworker regularly, receive counseling, wear a GPS tether, and complete all schoolwork after an incident with her mother, Charisse, led someone to call 911 on Nov. 6, 2019. Grace pulled her mother’s hair and bit her finger when the woman didn’t allow the child to go to her friend’s house, according to a police report ProPublica obtained. The person who called 911 had heard Charisse crying, “Help me!” from the car the incident unfolded inside. In the incident, Grace was arrested but later released to a family friend.
It wasn’t until weeks after the incident when she was charged with larceny that she was made to appear in court virtually on April 21. “After I was caught, I felt instant remorse and guilt. I wanted to take back everything I had done,” Grace had written in a statement to police. She made a similar plea to Brennan. “My mom and I do get into a lot of arguments, but with each one, I learn something and try to analyze why it happened,” Grace reportedly said. “My mom and I are working each day to better ourselves and our relationship, and I think that the removal from my home would be an intrusion on our progress.”
Brennan spared the teen from juvenile detention but also berated her. “Most people go through their entire youth without having the cops have to come to their house because they can’t get themselves together,” the judge said. She added after detailing the conditions of Grace’s probation that she hopes the teen “upholds her end of the bargain,” ProPublica Illinois reported.
Initially, she did. But when Grace’s school hastily switched to remote learning, as many did at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Grace—who has ADHD—had a hard time focusing, according to records ProPublica obtained. Charisse confided in caseworker Rachel Giroux that Grace had been staying up late and sleeping in, and Giroux told the mother she "needs time to adjust to this new normal of being on probation and doing work from home." Still, when Charisse told the caseworker Grace had fallen asleep after one of their check-ins five days later, the woman filed a notice of probation violation and claimed in case notes that Grace “clearly doesn’t want to abide by the rules in the community." Giroux didn’t return a request for comment from ProPublica.
Katherine Tarpeh, Grace’s teacher, told Giroux that Grace was not responding abnormally. “Let me be clear that this is no one’s fault because we did not see this unprecedented global pandemic coming,” the educator wrote in an email ProPublica Illinois obtained. Grace “has a strong desire to do well” and “is trying to get to the other side of a steep learning curve mountain,” Tarpeh said.
Jason Smith, a policy director at the Michigan Center for Youth Justice, told ProPublica Illinois that “kids of color are disproportionately involved and impacted by the system across the board … They are more likely to be arrested, less likely to be offered any kind of diversion, more likely to be removed out of the home and placed in some sort of confinement situation,” Smith said.
A pandemic affecting more than 177,195 people in Michigan alone has been no equalizer. Black Michigan residents represent 40% of the state's COVID-19 deaths but only about 14% of the population, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
“Who can even be a good student right now?” asked Ricky Watson Jr., executive director of the National Juvenile Justice Network.
“Unless there is an urgent need, I don’t understand why you would be sending a kid to any facility right now and taking them away from their families with all that we are dealing with right now,” Watson told ProPublica Illinois.