'I am fighting because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.'
issued for possession of vaping devices and cannabis, disorderly conduct, truancy and other violations from August 2018 through June 2021.
Amara’s family, like so many others, was thrown into a system that uses a lower standard of proof than a criminal court. People ticketed for ordinance violations can be held responsible if the allegation is deemed more likely to be true than not, and the ticket itself is considered evidence. At every turn, the system and the officials in it encourage families to admit liability and pay a fine. And most do.
To Amara and her mother, the ticket — and the city’s commitment to prosecuting it — is another example of people in power discriminating against Black children. Only about 120 of the roughly 2,700 students at Naperville North are Black, and Baker hasA Naperville city spokesperson, responding on behalf of the city and its police department, said “the City categorically denies that race in any way played a factor in this case.
Amara’s family so far has paid at least $2,000 in lawyer fees to fight the case, Baker said. She and Amara stopped working with their most recent attorney in part because of the cost of going to trial and his recommendation that they accept a plea deal. That same day, Dean Jim Konrad went to Amara’s classroom to speak with her. According to the police report, Amara told the dean she had purchased AirPods months earlier and handed Konrad the ones in her possession. They turned out to match the serial number provided by the other student.
School officials didn’t discipline Amara, she and her mother said, but the police continued to pursue the matter. Two weeks later Baker met with the school resource officer and a sergeant at the police station. Baker brought the former police chief of Aurora, who is retired but acts as a liaison between police and Black community members in the Chicago area. Amara was not present.
“They said, ‘She’s not being charged, she’s being ticketed,’” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference — she’s still in the system. I felt that it might not have been investigated thoroughly.” A Naperville Community Unit School District 203 spokesperson said the district has worked to address concerns raised in 2019 about systemic racial inequities, including by adopting anthat commits to ending racial injustice, offering districtwide implicit bias training and examining hiring and requirement practices.
But the city’s prosecution of Amara continued. To make it easier to appear in DuPage County court, Amara has been taking her Spelman classes online, delaying a move to Atlanta. To pay her legal fees, she dipped into money she had saved for school as well as paychecks from a recent job. When reporters asked Naperville officials about Amara’s case, city spokesperson LaCloche suggested the matter could have been resolved without a ticket. She said the decision to issue the citation was made by police after they “initially considered addressing this matter via an informal out-of-court resolution.”
After lawmakers said in April that they planned to take action on police ticketing at school in response to “The Price Kids Pay,” Baker renewed her efforts to get authorities to help them. She contacted a state senator and the Illinois State Board of Education. A board employee last week told Baker that she couldn’t help because the case isn’t under school jurisdiction any longer — it’s a court matter. She encouraged Baker to email the state superintendent.
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