How we reported on student ticketing in Illinois schools

Neither the state of Illinois nor the federal government tracks how often police give tickets to students in public schools for violations of municipal ordinances.

To understand how frequently and for what reasons police cited students, reporters from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica filed more than 500 requests for public records with schools and law enforcement agencies under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The requests were sent to 199 school districts: high school-only districts and large K-12 districts. Those districts encompass roughly 86% of the state’s high school students. The requests sought records that would show how many times police were involved in student incidents during the school years that ended in 2019, 2020 and 2021; how often students were arrested; and how often tickets were issued in those incidents. Reporters also asked for the race of students who had been referred to police.

Some school districts said they did not track whether police issued tickets to students, so reporters then filed requests with the hundreds of law enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction over high schools in those districts. The requests sought information on where each ticket was issued, the age of the ticketed person or an indication whether they were a juvenile, the race of the person ticketed, the alleged violation and the amount of the fine.

From those records, reporters built a database documenting more than 11,800 tickets issued by police in 141 school districts during the three school years examined. For records obtained from police, the database included tickets issued at a school address to persons younger than 18, while excluding tickets issued for traffic, parking or curfew violations. Records obtained from school officials may have included tickets issued to students 18 or older.

Reporters also collected information about ticketing in the ongoing 2021-22 school year in select districts. This data was not included in statewide analyses or in our interactive database but informs reporting on some schools mentioned in the investigation.

In addition to logging the number of tickets issued by each police department at each school examined, reporters documented the reasons tickets had been issued, how the tickets are adjudicated in each community, what the possible fines and fees are, and whether the community attempts to collect unpaid juvenile debts.

Because the forms used to document tickets varied between districts and police departments, reporters made informed judgments to group tickets into broader categories. For example, reporters classified tickets for possession of drug paraphernalia and tickets for cannabis use into one category for drug-related tickets.

A separate team then took a selection of records and spot-checked them to ensure that data had been entered consistently and to look for systemic flaws in the data entry. No widespread problems were found; any small errors that were identified were fixed.

If a school district or police department provided the race of the young people who were ticketed, that information was documented in a separate database. In all, reporters were able to compile racial data for tickets issued at schools in 68 districts.

Reporters then excluded from the analysis schools where tickets were rare — those where fewer than 20 citations had been issued over the three school years — and schools where race information was missing for more than 25% of tickets. That left about 4,000 tickets that had been issued at schools in 42 districts. In total, those schools enroll more than one-fifth of Illinois’ high school students. For districts and some individual schools, reporters estimated total enrollment and enrollment by race by averaging the actual enrollment figures reported to the Illinois State Board of Education for the three school years being examined.

To identify potential racial disparities in ticketing, reporters first calculated the total enrollment for the schools in the database, as well as the total enrollment for various racial groups. They then calculated how many tickets were issued for each racial group and compared those rates to those groups’ share of total enrollment. In a few cases, race information was omitted from the ticket or marked as unknown. These cases were included in the ticket totals to ensure that the resulting racial disparity calculations were conservative.

In some cases, the race of the student ticketed was indicated but the ethnicity was not, meaning it wasn’t possible to tell the true number of Hispanic or Latino students ticketed. For example, some police departments indicated clearly if a person ticketed was Black or white but left blank the part of the record that indicates whether someone is Hispanic or Latino. That incomplete documentation meant some Latino students who received tickets likely were classified only as white.

Some police departments and school districts provided detailed records for each ticket, including the reason the ticket was written and the race of the student. That allowed reporters to check whether racial disparities differed by type of violation, based on a set of roughly 3,000 tickets issued to students in 33 districts across the state.

To conduct that analysis, reporters standardized the ways different police departments and schools had documented students’ race, then placed each ticket into a category based on the alleged violation. For example, tickets involving disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, “activity constituting a public nuisance” and “prohibited conduct on school property” were labeled as conduct-related tickets. Tickets involving tobacco, drugs or paraphernalia were labeled as substance-related tickets.

Reporters calculated how many tickets in each category went to students in different racial groups, then compared those rates to the groups’ share of overall enrollment.

Nine districts contacted by the Tribune and ProPublica did not provide records on police interactions at their schools: Belleville Township High School District 201, O’Fallon Township High School District 203, Streator Township High School District 40, Vienna High School District 133, Bethalto Community Unit School District 8, Collinsville Community Unit School District 10, Harlem School District 122, Indian Prairie Community Unit School District 204 and Community Unit School District 200 in Wheaton.

Twenty-three police departments either did not provide records or excluded information in ways that prevented reporters from determining whether tickets were issued to students at a school in their jurisdiction: Belvidere, Cahokia Heights, Calumet City, Channahon, Crete, Dolton, Fox Lake, Grayslake, Harvey, Kankakee, LaSalle, Lemont, Mount Prospect, North Chicago, Northbrook, Pinckneyville, Richmond, Rockton, Rolling Meadows, Streamwood, Summit, Waukegan and Wood Dale.

To understand how tickets are handled after they’re issued, reporters attended more than 50 hearings across Illinois, observing hundreds of cases. They spoke with dozens of families affected by the process; with school, police and municipal officials; with attorneys and hearing officers; and with juvenile advocates. Reporters consulted with families about how to identify family members in the story and, as a result, did not include full names of all of the young people.

This story is a collaboration between the Tribune and ProPublica. Smith Richards is a Tribune reporter. Cohen is a Chicago-based reporter for ProPublica.