Public schools in Mississippi will no longer handcuff students.

 Jackson, MS- Public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, will no longer handcuff students to poles or other objects and will train staff at its alternative school on better methods of discipline.

Mississippi's second-largest school district agreed Friday to the settlement with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had sued over the practice of shackling students to a pole at the district's Capital City Alternative School.
Nationwide, a report from the U.S. Department of Education showed tens of thousands of students, 70 percent of them disabled, were strapped down or physically restrained in school in 2009-10. Advocates for disabled students say restraints are often abused, causing injury and sometimes death.
A 2009 report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that such schools "overemphasized punishment at the expense of remediation." That report urged that alternative schools focus instead on "intensive services delivered by a well-qualified staff in a highly structured but positive environment," so that students could return to and succeed at regular schools.
Nationwide, there are no federal standards, although legislation is pending in Congress. The U.S. Department of Education says Mississippi is one of 13 states with no statewide rules governing restraints.
National experts have said seclusion and restraint should only be used in emergencies when there's a threat of someone getting hurt. But people who aren't properly trained resort to restraints when students get out of control, they say.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-05-25/handcuffing-students-mississippi/55211598/1?csp=34news

Texas honor student with two jobs jailed for missing too much school.

The Texas judge who jailed an 11th-grade honor student for missing too much school unfairly punished the teen who works two jobs to support her siblings, one of her employers says.

"I can understand if a child is staying out of school, running around, a bad kid, getting into trouble, taking drugs," Mary Elliot, Diane Tran's boss at her weekend job, told ABC News this weekend. "I can understand why he would slap them into jail for 24 hours. But Diane doesn't do that. All she does is work and go to school."

Tran, 17, had already been warned not to miss any more time at her Houston-area school, but when Judge Lanny Moriarty heard she'd skipped again, he sent her to jail for 24 hours Wednesday, according to KHOU 11 News.

It's unclear how many days she missed but state law allows for only 10 unexcused absences in a six-month period.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-honor-student-jobs-jailed-missing-school/story?id=16437893#.T8PBOvURmFN