CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. – Public defenders in Franklin County, Pennsylvania are questioning school discipline policies in light of a 540 percent increase in student arrests over five years, including for relatively minor offenses.

A Pennsylvania Department of Education Safe Schools Report shows that of 232 student arrests in Franklin County during the 2014-15 school year, 75 percent came from Chambersburg schools. The Public Opinion notes the number of arrests in Chambersburg has steadily increased from a mere 27 in the 2010-11 school year, and it’s the only district in the county on the rise.

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Local school officials and law enforcement contend the issue is one of more violent students than in years past, but public defenders aren’t buying it.

Chief Public Defender Kati McGrath said she believes local school police are simply filing charges against students that were typically handled through school issued discipline in the past.

“Do I think that schools need to be prepared for some of those horrific acts that have taken happened in other places? Yes I do,” she said. “But then I think it has trickled down to actually over-including a group of youth who would have not normally been charged.”

Juvenile public defender Kristen Hamilton said she’s received an increase in cases involving students who inadvertently broke the law, such as a student who forgot a knife in his backpack after a hunting trip and another student saw it and reported it, or other similar situations.

Hamilton and McGrath told the Public Opinion school officials could be setting students up for future problems if they don’t take intent or other circumstances into account when deciding whether to pursue charges. While some of the cases the prosecutor declines to pursue, they said, zero-tolerance or blanket discipline policies could create more problems than they solve.

“Statistics show low-risk youths need low-risk consequences that aren’t the same as with high-risk kids,” Hamilton said. “If you over-service them, you’re setting them up to re-offend. We’re lucky to have a DA that understands the long-term consequences.”

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“There is a lot of collateral issues that go along with charges, but it depends on how far into the system (student offenders) go,” McGrath said. “The farther into the system, the more ‘collateral damage’ so to speak, there will be.”

“Everyone makes a mistake,” she added. “If you truly want to make changes, it’s very easy to do that.

“We have to be careful to not over-service a low-risk offender and bring them into the system so that it could damage them for their future,” McGrath said.

Chambersburg school leaders contend they’re simply enforcing the law, and students are becoming more violent.

“We are taking, I think, a more intense approach to kids that break the law. Just like how you can’t do that at Chambersburg Mall, and you’re not going to do that here,” CASD board president Dana Baker said. “Based on what information I get as a school board member, kids are showing greater violent tendencies and so forth. So that’s an issue.”

The student discipline issues in Chambersburg come in the midst of a national conversation about school discipline policies, particularly those impacting urban schools and minority students, EAGnews reports.

In many school districts – from St. Paul, Minnesota to Los Angeles to Baltimore, Maryland – officials are using a new approach to student discipline designed to reduce suspensions for minority students, who are typically suspended at a much higher rate than other students.

The “restorative justice” model leans heavily on the concept of “white privilege” – that the “white supremacist” American society is hopelessly stacked against minority students and the only way their white teachers can understand is to “own” their “white privilege” by feeling ashamed for their skin color.

The new approach is peddled to schools through the Pacific Educational Group – whose minority owner reaps a massive financial windfall from teacher training contracts – and aided and abetted by mandates from President Obama for inner city schools to reduce minority suspensions.

The result in most schools with “restorative justice” – which replaces suspensions with counseling sessions where students design their own punishments – has been chaos in the classroom. Teachers in many inner city school districts contend students now fight, deal drugs, assault teachers, and engage in other illegal and dangerous activities at school with impunity.