Monic Behnken News Today

The racial disparities in Iowa's state prisons continue to rank among the highest in the country. According to The Sentencing Project, the state’s Black to white prison ratio has decreased somewhat in recent years, but it’s still among the 10 worst in the nation.

Representatives of AYSAT and another local activist group called last month for the immediate removal of SROs from the districts schools and a review of classroom discipline procedures, based upon data from this year, and while the district will take more time than that in looking at the issue, action of some kind is coming in the months ahead. Task force to look at how SROs should be used in Ames, before board decision on whether to have them at all It currently costs Ames CSD and the city $2...

Ames Tribune After two girls allegedly got into a fight in the Ames Middle School restroom, an associate principal reported the incident to the school resource officer. The officer referred the 11-year-old and 12-year-old students to juvenile court for disorderly conduct, a simple misdemeanor. That same month, November 2018, Ames High School staff saw a 16-year-old boy walk out of a bathroom that purportedly smelled of marijuana. A series of resulting verbal confrontations ended with the stu...

Ames Tribune An Iowa lawmaker on Tuesday called Ames Black Lives Matter at School week an abuse of power and misuse of resources, while district leaders defended the importance of affirming diverse identities in the classroom. The district kicked off Black History Month on Feb. 1 with the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, during which teachers engaged students with a set of 13 guiding principles through free resources from outside organizations. Stated goals for the week included...

An Iowa House of Representatives committee wants to hear from Ames Community School District officials how classroom materials were prepared for the districts recent Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

/ The racial disparities in Iowa’s prisons are more extreme than almost anywhere else in the country, with Black Iowans imprisoned at a rate 11 times that of white Iowans. As part of our series of reports on systemic racism in Iowa, IPR examines how Iowa got here and the role that prosecutors play in these disparities. Stark racial disparities persist in Iowa prisons Iowa is one of the whitest states in the country, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that standing in a prison yard. Census n...