Editor’s Note: This story was supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Seated inside a Starbucks café last February, Grace Bellido, 14, shares some of her favorite books by penciling the names in a small floral notebook. “Song of Achilles … the Percy Jackson series.” She reads mostly fantasy, tales of bygone or imagined lands far from the realities of her school life in the north Houston suburb of Klein. It’s apparent that even communicating through writing is hard for her.
Grace’s blue eyes are wide and guarded, her wavy brown hair streaked with pink. Her hands, wrapped in knit fingerless gloves, clutch the notebook as headphones quell her anxiety, driving out surrounding sounds that hem her in.
It has been two years since her arrest at school left this once-talkative teen mute. “I made a joke,” she writes about how the incident started.
At the time, Grace was a 12-year-old straight-A student who had always loved school and never gotten in trouble. She was ecstatic about starting sixth grade at Strack Intermediate in Klein Independent School District (ISD), attentive in class and boisterous on breaks. Then, during lunch on February 8, 2023, she jokingly said, “Eff God,” to a friend who’d teased that God was watching her.
Another group of girls at the next table started shouting that Grace was going to hell, she and her mom, Charo Bellido, later told the Texas Observer. The girls came over and kicked and pushed the petite tween. Grace kicked back, but when they didn’t stop, she walked away to escape. She didn’t report the event—the girls were known bullies, she said, but the school never disciplined them.
“They kept following me around,” Grace writes.
Around 2:30 p.m. the next day, Grace evaded the girls during P.E. outside. A soundless copy of a surveillance video obtained by the Observer shows two teachers leaning against a wall, looking off in another direction. They don’t seem to be paying attention as the girls pursue Grace. She veers left and right for several minutes, then sinks to the grass. The girls swarm.
“They kicked me when I sat down,” she notes.
Only 13 countries lack a minimum age at which children may be criminally charged.
Charo, who was first shown the video of the episode a month after the incident (a version with sound), said the other girls taunted her daughter and said things like, “You’re going to hell,” “You’re a bitch,” and “You’re a piece of trash.”
They yanked Grace by her hair, dragging and thrashing the 90-pound sixth grader before Grace hit one girl back with the combination lock she normally used for her locker, according to Grace and Charo’s recollections, the video, and a complaint Charo later filed with the district. The commotion finally drew the teachers, who ran over and pulled the girls apart.
Charo started panicking around 4:30 p.m., when her daughter didn’t get off the school bus. She attempted to reach Grace by phone, not knowing then that Grace had repeatedly requested that her mom be called after school administrators confiscated her cell phone. Fearing Grace might have been kidnapped, Charo left a message with Vice Principal Christian Mullins saying she was about to call the police. That’s when Mullins called back, around 6:30, saying Grace was still at school. Four hours had passed since the attack.
When she arrived at Strack, Charo said, she found her daughter “in shock.” Chunks of Grace’s wavy brown hair, which had been ripped out, were strewn over her clothes. Scratches and bruises lined her face and arms. She clutched her broken glasses. Half an hour later, she would be the only one involved in the fight to be arrested—on misdemeanor charges of terroristic threat and assault.
Grace is one of thousands of children ages 10 to 12 whose lives were upended by around 8,000 arrests or criminal citations made in 168 Texas public school districts from the 2021-22 through 2024-25 school years, an investigation by the Observer has found. Like Grace, many of these children were criminalized after fights—physical or verbal conflicts often born from bullying that was ignored, overlooked, or dismissed. The students were most commonly charged for minor offenses similar to Grace’s—which can be based on normal schoolyard misbehavior such as angry remarks, poking, spitting, or shoving—circumstances in which school administrators and police officers have broad discretion to offer students positive behavioral interventions rather than arrests and prosecution. When that discretion is abandoned, kids enter into a juvenile justice system that leaves them less likely to finish school and more likely to enter the adult carceral system, research shows. The affected kids are disproportionately Black.
As in Grace’s case, many children arrested in schools are not immediately allowed to review the evidence against them or consult their parents or an attorney. And, while other states and countries are moving to protect children from criminal penalties, Texas seems to be moving in the opposite direction, refusing to raise its age of criminal responsibility and passing laws that increase police presence in schools and promote harsh disciplinary policies.
“School is supposed to be a safe, nurturing environment where a child can make mistakes and learn from them,” said Renuka Rege, a senior staff attorney with the nonprofit Texas Appleseed who’s represented many children in situations like Grace’s. “Instead, schools are exposing young children to arrests—one of the most traumatic experiences a child can have—which can quickly turn a child’s life upside down.”
This March, Grace, who is now 15, uses an iPad that helps her communicate. (Shelby Tauber/Texas Observer)
Back in the Starbucks, Grace writes in her floral notebook: “They said my story didn’t match up with the other girls.”
Right before Grace was arrested, Vice Principal Mullins said the others had accused her of assaulting them and threatening to stab them with a large knife, according to Charo. Grace did have a box cutter in her locker that day, but it wasn’t in her possession during the confrontation. Charo requested to review surveillance video before Klein ISD police officer Nancy Gonzalez arrested Grace, but her request was denied. No one told Charo the names of her daughter’s accusers.
Over her mom’s protests, Grace was handcuffed, taken to a local police station, fingerprinted, and photographed for a mug shot. Her mom was told to wait at the Klein ISD police department office. Grace was released into her custody after being processed by the county.
She was suspended from school, later entering a juvenile diversion program to avoid probation. She switched temporarily to homeschooling. The juvenile arrest, though it’s supposed to remain confidential, still casts a long shadow over her life. For months, she was suicidal. She stopped eating. She stopped speaking.
On March 6, 2023, Charo filed a complaint claiming that Klein ISD—which had one of the highest rates of criminalization of young children in a subset of districts analyzed by the Observer—is failing students like Grace. “It’s clear the school does not protect those who are being bullied. They did not even bother to fully investigate or even make sure that my daughter was OK after the incident,” the complaint reads. “Instead of helping her, they grilled her, scared her, and would not even call her mother after she repeatedly requested they call me.”
The Observer asked for an interview with Klein ISD Superintendent Jenny McGown and emailed detailed questions to McGown and Chief of Staff Christina Cole. Neither answered the questions. Cole responded by email: “In Klein ISD, we enforce the student code of conduct and support students in adhering to our expectations for student conduct with behavioral instruction, academic recovery, and counseling to address any underlying student challenges.”
When Grace returned to Strack nine months after the attack, she found that most of the administrators involved no longer worked there. District and school leaders never apologized, Charo said. But the new principal, Robert Gilbert, promised that Grace would now be safe. The other girls were forced to sign what Gilbert called a “Stay Away Agreement,” prohibiting any contact.
Still, Grace remains silent, rarely talking to anyone other than her immediate family. Charo said that since Grace returned, “There’s schoolteachers and most of her friends at school who have never heard her voice.”
The United States is among only 13 countries worldwide that lack a minimum age at which their children may be criminally charged. Many nations set this floor at 14 years old. Jay Blitzman, a juvenile court judge and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, told the Observer that 14 is an appropriate minimum, since most younger kids lack the maturity to meet the U.S. Supreme Court’s threshold to stand trial, which requires a defendant to have “sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer” and “rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him.”
In Texas, the minimum age of criminal responsibility is 10—when kids are in fourth or fifth grade, learning basic arithmetic, and in many cases haven’t even started puberty. Among states, that places Texas somewhere in the middle of the pack. Twenty-four states have no established minimum, and seven set theirs at 12 or 13. In August, Minnesota will raise its threshold from 10 to 13. But similar efforts in Texas have so far failed, as the state has also moved to establish a police presence in every school, including elementary, which research shows will increase arrests: A 2024 study by the federal Government Accountability Office found that arrests double when cops are on campus.
Out of about 1,200 public school districts statewide, the Observer sought data for this investigation on the criminalization of 10-to-12-year-olds at 210 districts with unusually high rates of out-of-school suspensions, a severe form of discipline that often follows an arrest. Of these, the Observer gathered data for 168 districts.
From fall 2021 through spring 2025, these 168 districts collectively accounted for a yearly average of nearly 2,000 arrests or citations of students 12 and younger—a number similar to the population of two or three suburban elementary schools. In the four school years analyzed by the Observer, all subsequent years had higher totals than 2021-22, with 2022-23 having the highest. Among the 168 districts, the median annual rate was around 1.3 arrests or citations per 1,000 students. The top 25 districts, including Klein ISD, had rates that were more than three times that median. Three districts registered rates in the double figures.
The analysis is based on criminal offense data provided to the Observer by school districts directly, by separate local police agencies, or via the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). A 2023 state law requires all law enforcement agencies, including district police departments, to report criminal offenses to DPS—which maintains a public-facing dashboard that lets users explore the data—though a DPS official told the Observer that many agencies fail to do so. This reporting system includes three categories of “arrest”: two in which the person is taken into custody, either with or without a warrant, and a third in which the person receives only a citation or court summons. That third category is not generally considered to constitute arrest, outside of this data system, but even in cases where students are not handcuffed or taken to jail, a criminal charge still enters them into the juvenile justice system and puts them in jeopardy of future arrest if, for example, they don’t show up to court.
This arrest data cannot be independently verified, since juvenile criminal records are confidential. The Observer provided districts with data obtained from DPS for comment or clarification, and one district responded with a different set of figures.
In cases like Grace’s, some experts and advocates say that Texas kids’ constitutional rights are effectively being violated. While children are entitled to be read their Miranda rights before being interrogated in criminal custody, that obligation doesn’t extend to questioning by school administrators during disciplinary procedures, explained Travis Fife, a staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. Texas minors often sign disciplinary forms without first speaking with a parent or an attorney; state law requires that parents be “promptly” contacted but doesn’t require their presence during interrogations. And everything children say and write can then “be used against them in a court of law,” Fife said.
Kids are also likely to falsely confess under pressure from authorities: 86 percent of exonerees who were accused at 14 years or younger gave false confessions, according to research published in USA Today and other outlets.
Black students end up bearing the brunt of these criminal charges. Statewide, the percentage of arrested or cited students who were Black was nearly twice their enrollment rate, according to the Observer’s analysis.
Texas does have some legal protections intended to shield young children from excessive disciplinary and law enforcement action, including laws passed by the Legislature over the past 25 years. But the Observer found multiple examples of arrests of 10-, 11-, or 12-year-olds during which the existing laws failed to protect Texas kids.
In 2011, state lawmakers passed a bill that prohibits disciplinary measures against “a student who, after an investigation, is found to be a victim of bullying, on the basis of that student’s use of reasonable self-defense in response to the bullying.” In Grace’s case, Klein ISD arrested and suspended her without investigating whether she was being bullied or acting in self-defense. In addition, another state law requires that students who engage in one of the behaviors Grace was accused of—terroristic threat—be reported to a threat assessment team that will evaluate the proper intervention. This did not happen prior to her arrest, and administrators told Charo they did not even review the school’s own video and instead relied on others’ statements before Grace was taken away in handcuffs. Administrators also suspended Grace, even as yet another state statute on suspensions and expulsions requires schools to consider the student’s disciplinary history and whether the student acted in self-defense.
In an additional case reviewed by the Observer, a 10-year-old with a disability in Forney ISD in North Texas was subjected to “illegal restraints” and “repeatedly brutalized and injured,” without notice to her parent, in violation of both state law and a Texas Education Agency (TEA) rule, according to a formal complaint filed with the TEA. In a separate case covered by CBS News, a 10-year-old girl with autism was restrained, handcuffed, and arrested by officers in Conroe ISD.
An 11-year-old named Timothy Murray, attending Brownsville ISD, was also held in solitary confinement for three days and handcuffed and shackled while in court, as the Observer previously reported. A 2022 Texas Supreme Court order limits the use of restraints on juveniles during court proceedings, while the 2023 “No Kids in Cuffs” law restricts school police and security guards from using handcuffs on students in fifth grade or below.
Timothy Murray, now 13, had his life derailed by an in-school arrest in Brownsville. (Gabriel V. Cárdenas/Texas Observer)
Although school districts or the TEA have sometimes sanctioned teachers accused of improper restraint—including in 2024 when a San Antonio TV station aired a video that showed a teacher restraining an autistic 9-year-old student in Northeast ISD—the state’s laws were written with little or no provisions for enforcement, and consequences are rare, said attorney and Democratic state Representative Gene Wu.
“There’s no actual accountability there,” Wu said. “Because there’s no provisions in there to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna cut your funding,’ or, ‘We’re gonna call you in,’ or, ‘You’re gonna have to answer to a judge.’”
TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky told the Observer that if parents complain, “TEA thoroughly reviews all complaints received, regardless of subject matter, to determine if the nature of the complaint falls within the agency’s jurisdiction.”
The state refers complaints involving discriminatory disciplinary actions to the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, but that agency has been targeted by President Donald Trump for elimination.
Jeff Daniels leads the police department for Ector County ISD in the West Texas oil patch. Of the 168 districts in the Observer’s dataset, Ector is near the top in both the total number of and rate of criminalized children ages 10 to 12, according to information the district reported to DPS. Daniels’ agency, which serves children in the flat and arid town of Odessa, has been around much longer than other district police departments. It was formed in 1985—three years after a federal court ordered the district to desegregate.
Daniels, a former Odessa patrolman, joined the department in 1998 and became chief in 2022. He helped build a 72-person force, which had a presence on every campus well before a 2023 state law required that.
“We’ve been in existence for so long,” Daniels told the Observer. “We are embedded in our school environment.”
The DPS statistics show that Ector County ISD officers arrested or cited 658 students ages 10 to 12—more than twice the number in Houston ISD, a district five times larger—from 2021-22 through 2024-25. That Ector total amounts to a yearly rate of 17 per 1,000 students, the second highest in the dataset. Black students accounted for nearly 18 percent of criminalized students in this age group during that four-year period, though they make up less than 4 percent of the district’s population. Two-thirds of the criminal charges in Ector schools were for misdemeanor assault, with 75 percent of this subgroup being Black. (As of 2025, only two Ector ISD police officers were Black.)
Bills to raise the minimum age died in the Senate in 2019, 2021, and 2023.
After being presented with the Observer’s findings, Daniels responded that in cases of Class C misdemeanor offenses—commonly known as “fine-only” offenses that do not carry possible jail time—Ector ISD police simply refer cases to the municipal court. “ECISD does not press charges or make arrests for Class C misdemeanor assaults (or any Class C misdemeanor offense, actually),” Daniels said.
Ector ISD then provided its own data, separating out “Class C referrals.” This data, which did not include racial identification, showed that the district had arrested 168 students ages 10 to 12 from fall 2022 through spring 2025—making for an annual arrest rate of 5.7 per 1,000 students, which would still place it in the top 10 in the Observer’s sample of districts.
In both Ector and across the Observer’s set of 168 districts, the most common criminal charge was misdemeanor assault, which can range from Class C to the highest class of misdemeanor and cover essentially any type of unwanted contact or verbal threats, attorneys said.
Daniels attributed his district’s numbers to its blanket approach to breaking up fights and to responding to complaints from students. “We had a zero-tolerance [approach] in those times when it came to simple assault. If you were involved in a fight, we filed a charge,” Daniels told the Observer. “If a victim comes forward saying, ‘Hey, I want to file charges, because this person has done this to me’ … and it meets the elements of the offense, by law, we have to take that case.”
The Observer requested an interview with Superintendent Keeley Boyer, who responded with a written statement: “Our first duty is to provide safe learning environments for all of our students and safe work places for all of our staff members. Our ECISD police force is fully staffed with veteran, highly trained, and fully certified peace officers who enforce the law equally and fairly at our schools. If a student breaks the law, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, that student will be charged appropriately.”
Daniels told the Observer that his department simply “follows what’s mandated,” but Gaven Norris, a 41-year-old attorney born and raised in Odessa’s Black community, called that explanation “bullshit.” In the past decade, Norris said he’s represented many young Black students who were unjustly arrested in school. In case after case, Norris said, officers and administrators failed to properly investigate and students were discriminatorily targeted.
Norris said he recently represented one middle-school student who’d endured months of verbal and physical harassment. The boy’s mother repeatedly complained, but nothing changed. One day, after bullies knocked his glasses off his face, the boy fought back. A campus police officer then singled him out, lifted him up, and slammed him to the ground, according to Norris. The boy was taken to juvenile detention and held for 10 days. The other students, who weren’t Black, were not disciplined until after Norris intervened.
“If justice were blind, going by the letter of the law would be fine,” he said. “But justice isn’t blind, and justice isn’t fair, and it’s especially not fair for people who look like me. … Going by the letter of the law is really just a farce and a cover-up if you’re not applying it in the same way.”
Up until the early 2000s, Norris, a former teacher, added, local school officials would have helped resolve disputes between younger kids without resorting to arrests or restraints: “People would just say, ‘These are kids being kids,’ ask them to cut it out, and just have a conversation.”
State law prohibits police officers, including those in Daniels’ department, from carrying out “routine student discipline,” and school administrators have broad discretion to handle disputes and other behavior that could technically qualify as misdemeanor assault. Ector County ISD’s Student Code of Conduct lists more than 20 disciplinary strategies—from providing counseling and behavioral coaching to assigning extra school duties—to use before resorting to suspensions and referrals to law enforcement.
In her statement, Boyer said, “The chief of police reports directly to the superintendent, and he and I meet regularly to discuss safety and security.” But Daniels previously suggested his officers work independently: “We’re two totally separate elements here. We handle the law enforcement side. The administrator handles the administrative side. So we would work our case and the administration would work their case. We don’t really have to wait for the other.”
Dawn Miller, the lone Black member of the Ector ISD school board, said she was not aware of the district’s high and racially disproportionate criminalization rates before the Observer reached out.
“I’m speechless,” Miller said. “I would have hoped that these things would have been curbed, but without knowing that they were even occurring, I wasn’t even able to speak to them.”
In Forney, a fast-growing suburb east of Dallas, Renee, an 11-year-old Black student with ADHD, and her mom, Denise, say they faced retaliation—and an unwarranted arrest—after the local school district failed to provide Renee with required disability services. The two, who have filed a formal complaint against the district, asked the Observer to use their middle names for fear of more backlash from Forney ISD.
Denise always knew Renee had ADHD. Even as a toddler, Renee was rambunctious, and Denise grew accustomed to calls from teachers about excessive talking or hyperactivity in class. They often described Renee as bright but easily bored. For years, Renee received classroom support under her Individualized Education Program (IEP), as mandated by federal law. That changed when Denise moved to Forney believing the school district would offer “a better opportunity for my kids’ schooling.”
Within three years, her daughter would be pushed out of one school, then repeatedly and brutally restrained at another, and finally arrested by Forney ISD police.
The Observer’s analysis shows that Forney ISD, which has around 20,000 students, ranked among the top 25 districts by criminalization rate of kids ages 10 to 12 (though the district provided data to DPS only for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years). Four out of every five cases in Forney were for allegations of misdemeanor assault. Black students were twice as likely to face charges.
State law requires schools to consider a student’s disabilities before taking disciplinary actions. Texas districts in the Observer’s dataset said they could not provide information about how many kids faced with criminal charges had disabilities, as they did not track this on incident reports, but an analysis of separate disciplinary data tracked by the TEA for the 2021-22 through 2024-25 school years shows that special education students in Forney ISD were nearly twice as likely to be suspended. The Observer found similar patterns in districts statewide.
Robert Winterode, the attorney for Disability Rights Texas who’s representing Renee and Denise in the complaint against the district, said schools are disciplining students based on expediency. “It’s easier for the districts to suspend them and send them to disability or disciplinary alternative education programs than it is to actually provide the special education services,” he said.
(Illustration by Clay Rodery)
During a special education meeting before Renee was to start at her local elementary school, Forney ISD administrators told Denise that they could not teach her daughter there; instead, they were sending her to an alternative district program called ASPIRE.
“They said they didn’t have the appropriate teachers to teach her because she is a special ed student with an IEP. And they said they didn’t have [services] at the regular school,” Denise told the Observer.
At the time, Denise didn’t know—and wasn’t told—that all public schools must provide special education services under federal law. Nor was Denise told that the ASPIRE program was a segregated school only for children with disabilities, even though federal law and TEA regulation also require those students to be educated with all others to the maximum possible extent.
“I didn’t know what kind of school this was,” Denise said. “They basically threw me to the wolves because I didn’t understand what was going on.”
In a 2024 report, Disability Rights Texas criticized so-called “shadow campuses and segregated schools [that] house students with complicated disabilities and behavioral challenges without a clear path back to a general education campus.” The organization, which did not mention Forney ISD in its report, found that many programs were “over-relying on physical means to subdue students without oversight.”
Renee was at ASPIRE for more than a year. In retrospect, Denise said, “She was in jail. That’s basically what that was. A jail.”
Renee languished, confined to a room where the teacher devoted most of her time to children with more-severe disabilities. For nearly the entire school day, Renee said, she filled out worksheets, often a year or more below her grade level. The effect was disastrous for a child with ADHD, who’d previously been meeting academic standards. Renee started sleeping in class and becoming aggressive.
Instead of providing more-appropriate assignments or counseling, as outlined in her IEP, ASPIRE employees repeatedly resorted to restraints, according to Renee, her mom, and a complaint Disability Rights Texas filed with TEA in August 2025. In an interview, Renee recalled how one teacher “pushed me in a little room. I pushed him back, and he just grabbed my arms and restrained me real tight. He put me in between his legs and then he started squeezing.”
Denise was supposed to be informed whenever her daughter was restrained, but after receiving two initial reports, which lacked detail, she stopped receiving notices at all. Then, on September 6, 2024, Denise noticed that Renee arrived home with a deep gash on her neck.
She learned from her daughter that as many as five teachers had manhandled her 65-pound 10-year-old that day. “They were trying to put me in a room by myself,” Renee said. “There were five of them, and one of them cut me and was trying to blame it on me. … They were like, ‘She looks like she probably did that to herself.’”
After that incident, Denise turned to Winterode. In the TEA complaint, Winterode wrote that Renee had been punished and abused illegally, “provided with meager to no behavior supports and intervention strategies,” and “deprived of a [Free Appropriate Public Education].”
School administrators later responded to Disability Rights that three adults were “transporting” Renee, while two others acted as “witnesses” during the 2024 incident.
With the organization’s help, Denise filed a grievance on September 16 of that year against the campus for using restraints and injuring her daughter. Two days later, campus police officers arrested Renee at ASPIRE, charging her with terroristic threat for, they alleged, saying she planned to bring a gun to school.
Renee, who is now 12, was arrested right after turning 11. She said she was never allowed to explain herself. “It was around when we were going home, when they got the police. … The principal said, ‘Can I talk to you real fast?’ and then the principal left me alone with the police officer. And then the police officer, he said, ‘So now you’re going to be arrested for terroristic threat. And then I was just like, ‘What did I threat about?’ Because at the time, I didn’t know what ‘terroristic’ meant.”
She explained that she had told some teachers she was getting a gel blaster gun for her birthday, a toy that shoots watery gel balls that dissolve on impact. She never brought that toy to school.
Denise told the Observer she believes the officers made up the threat in retaliation for Denise’s grievance. “They were going too far. It got to the point where they wanted to kick her out … and the only way to do that was if they can find some legitimate way to get her kicked out of the school. So they started putting charges on my daughter,” Denise said.
The Observer requested an interview with Superintendent Justin Terry and sent questions to Terry, Chief Operations Officer Kimberly Morisak, and board members Scott Regan, Greg Pharris, Michael Idemudia, Hanna Bateman, Chad Johnson, Becky Dobbs, and Katrina Burkhalter. District leadership refused to answer the Observer’s questions, and spokesperson Kristin Zastoupil responded, “Forney ISD has high expectations for all of our students and is committed to providing a safe environment for all of our students. The Board of Trustees adopts a Student Code of Conduct each school year as required by law. The Code of Conduct sets out the appropriate school disciplinary consequences for student infractions.”
In the past, parents like Denise might have turned to the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, but that division has all but shuttered under the second Trump administration. Another Disability Rights Texas lawyer told the Observer that she’s directed her attorneys “to not spend resources filing [office for civil rights] complaints anymore.”
That leaves parents like Denise feeling even more helpless.
But, at the local level at least, Renee did find some measure of protection. At her first court appearance last year, a Kaufman County district court judge dismissed the case against her. After additional advocacy from Winterode, she was able to leave ASPIRE in September 2025 and enroll in a regular Forney ISD middle school.
“I’m free from that place,” Renee said.
A Democratic state representative in Houston since 2013, Gene Wu has also represented juveniles in criminal and Child Protective Services cases.
“The vast majority of crimes that are being filed on kids under 12 are almost on the extreme end of petty,” Wu told the Observer. “Basically nonsense stuff that you would expect [from little kids].”
As a legislator, he joined efforts to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility. In his research, he found “for many years there were just zero murders by kids under 12. … It’s extremely rare. You don’t have a lot of 11-year-olds committing aggravated robberies or rapes. It just doesn’t happen.”
Wu filed bills to raise the minimum age to 12 or 13 years old in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Similar bills passed the House in 2019, 2021, and 2023, but they died in the Senate. For a few years, he and other lawmakers seemed to be building bipartisan support to reduce “zero-tolerance” policies and maximize positive behavioral support in schools.
But, in the years following the 2022 killing of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, state lawmakers have moved to expand police presence in K-12 schools—even though a lack of officers was not among the problems at Robb. A 2023 law specifically mandates an armed police or security officer on every campus, setting the table for more arrests of young children. Other measures passed in 2025 allow for in-school suspensions to be unlimited in duration and make it easier for schools to suspend homeless students and kids below third grade.
Jesse Rizo, a Uvalde Consolidated ISD school board member who lost a niece in the mass shooting, said, “It’s really important to have a lot of eyes on the staff and children.” But he is not a supporter of aggressive school arrests of young children, adding that any disciplinary incident needs to start with family meetings: “You work with the kid; you consult with the family; you have a parent-teacher meeting and let them know that it’s a serious matter.”
As police presence ramps up across Texas campuses, more crackdowns will come, Wu said. With cops, “Everything looks like a nail to a hammer. And if your job, if your training, is to stop people and arrest them, what other course do you have?”
Already, Texas schools have increased police presence. Among the 168 districts the Observer examined, the ratio of security personnel to students increased by an average of 86 percent from 2021-22 to 2024-25. Over a fifth of the Texas districts now employ more police than counselors.
Chief Daniels in Ector ISD told the Observer he expects other districts will soon see criminalization rates spiking as high as those in his own. “The numbers are gonna go up once you add more officers into any area,” Daniels said. “More offenses are going to be reported, because there’s more eyes out there.”
That’s a chilling prospect for parents like Charo Bellido.
“It’s a huge mistake for schools to be calling the police immediately for everything,” she said. “The schools are choosing not to teach but instead pass the child to the police for punishment.”
In the year since she first spoke to the Observer, Charo said Grace has been doing better. The family is learning American Sign Language and using it to communicate with her, though Charo does still “try to get her to say something or laugh, so I can hear her voice again.” Now in high school, Grace writes on a whiteboard to communicate in class and eats lunch apart from other students in a special education room.
Charo considers Grace lucky, at least compared to the many kids who reenter the juvenile justice system after being arrested at such a young age. Still, Charo said, “Her life is forever altered.”
Grace and Charo exit their home to head to the park in March. (Shelby Tauber/Texas Observer)
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