Friend,

When D.P. got upset one day, his teacher allowed him to leave class and take a short walk, giving the 9-year-old boy with autism enough time to calm down before rejoining his classmates.

But on another day, in November 2018, the boy met with a very different response. This time, two adults held him face down on the floor. It followed an incident in which he reportedly threw a stuffed animal in the classroom and made statements that showed he was distraught. A few days earlier, a family member had died.

The situation escalated further, and the third-grader found himself handcuffed in the back of a police car. Instead of taking D.P. home, police transported him to a mental health facility for an evaluation. He was handcuffed for a total of 90 minutes.

Sadly, many other children in his Florida school district and across the state have been subjected to similar traumatic experiences. In fact, the use of the Florida Mental Health Act, also known as the Baker Act – which allows police officers with limited or no mental health training to subject children and adults to involuntary psychiatric examinations – has become so common that people who are detained under the law are said to have been “Baker Acted.”

Across the state, a shocking number of children – nearly 38,000 – were subjected to involuntary examination under the Baker Act during the 2018-19 school year, many of them seized in school for exhibiting normal childish behavior or behavior linked to their disabilities, according to a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report that describes the improper and often illegal use of the act by schools across Florida.

D.P. and his grandmother, who is his guardian, are among the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit brought by the SPLC and other civil rights advocates against the School District of Palm Beach County over its illegal use of the Baker Act.

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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center