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Still Haven’t Shut Off the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Evaluating the Impact of Florida’s New Zero-Tolerance Law By, ACLU of Florida Advancement Project Florida State Conference of the NAACP Dear Education and Juvenile Justice Policymakers, In the spring of 2009, the Florida legislature amended its harsh zero-tolerance school discipline law with the passage of SB 1540. The law enacted some significant changes, such as encouraging schools to handle petty disciplinary infractions and misdemeanor offenses in school instead of relying on the juvenile justice system and exclusionary discipline. It seemed like after nearly a decade’s worth of embarrassing news reports and multiple studies about the devastating effects of harsh school disciplinary practices in Florida schools, Florida was finally moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, our analysis demonstrates that meaningful reform has still not reached most of the schools – and students – across the state. While there has been some encouraging progress, the implementation of Florida’s new zero-tolerance law has fallen substantially short of what is needed to adequately address the over-criminalization of Florida’s youth and the over-reliance on exclusionary discipline by Florida’s schools. For example: Nearly half of all Florida school districts had more or the same number of referrals to the Department of Juvenile Justice following the passage of SB 1540 than they had the year before. 67% of student referrals to the juvenile justice system were for misdemeanor offenses, meaning there were over 12,000 referrals just for these lower-level offenses. Racial disparities in referrals to the juvenile justice system actually got worse after the passage of SB 1540. Most school districts’ policies still allow for extremely severe punishments – such as arrest, referral to law enforcement, and expulsion – for relatively minor infractions. Because Florida’s students continue to have their educational op