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Students and teachers held protests outside their school and court in Michigan
The decision by a Michigan judge to send a 15-year-old girl to juvenile detention for violating her probation by not completing her schoolwork online during the coronavirus blockade has sparked protests and calls for her release.
The African-American teenager has reportedly been detained since mid-May.
Hundreds of students gathered outside their school and court to show their support for the girl known as “Grace.”
The state supreme court said Thursday it would review his case.
ProPublica highlighted Grace’s case in a report earlier this week. After interviews with Grace’s mother, the news site described how the teenager had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and had already been struggling with behavior problems.
She had been paroled in mid-April through a juvenile court hearing after facing an assault and robbery charge last year; One of the terms of probation was a requirement to do your school work.
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The teenager was arrested in May.
ProPublica reports that Grace’s release from parole coincided with the first days of remote school work, and she quickly became overwhelmed without the in-person support of her teachers.
At a mid-May hearing in the Oakland County Family Court Division to decide whether Grace had violated her probation, Judge Mary Ellen Brennan found the girl “guilty for not having submitted to any school work and getting up to school “and called Grace a” threat. ” to the community “due to the previous charges against her.
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Fellow students and their teachers at Groves High School, in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, came to their support at a rally on Thursday, and several thousand people have signed online petitions calling for his release.
“A lot of people fell behind on their work this semester, no one had the motivation to do anything because the teachers weren’t teaching and we were all online. I know a lot of people who didn’t do their homework,” 18-year-old student Prudence Canter told the Reuters news agency.
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Other teens argued that they had also been unable to do schoolwork during the pandemic.
Social studies professor Geoff Wickersham told Reuters: “It didn’t seem like the judge or social worker knew how the grades and due dates and things were structured during the pandemic shutdown in the spring. I think this is a great injustice. “
The “Black Lives Matter” signs were held alongside the “Free Grace” signs.
“I know if Grace were a 15-year-old white girl, she wouldn’t be in juvenile detention right now,” one mother, Sheri Crawley, told the local WDIV television news station.
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The Michigan Supreme Court said Thursday it would review Grace’s case after the teen’s attorneys filed a motion to request an emergency review.
“The Administrative Office of the State Court is working with the Oakland Circuit Court to review the proceedings in this case,” John Nevin, the court’s director of communications, said in a statement.
