Chloe Jones – Kids Imprisoned https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog A News21 investigation of juvenile justice in America Sun, 23 Aug 2020 20:59:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/cropped-Artboard-1-copy-5-32x32.png Chloe Jones – Kids Imprisoned https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog 32 32 Exploring self-image through art https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/exploring-self-image-through-art/ https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/exploring-self-image-through-art/#respond Mon, 10 Aug 2020 15:00:00 +0000 https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/?p=745 An Arizona education researcher explores how kids view themselves and how they feel their schools view them through art.

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Photo illustration by Michele Abercrombie

When Jayanti Demps-Howell was 9 years old, he was suspended from school in Flint, Michigan, for a cartoon superhero drawing he had made at home and brought to school. 

He had done the same thing plenty of times before — drawing artwork at home and then bringing it to school. When he was upset about receiving a bad grade, he expressed his feelings through his drawings. He drew a cartoon strip of a teacher entering a classroom giving out bad grades, and a superhero blowing her up.

He was suspended for three days for “threatening a teacher.” 

Dawn Demps, his mother who has had a career in education for much of her adult life and is currently earning her Ph.D. in education policy and evaluation at Arizona State University, said he was expressing himself in a healthy age-appropriate way, and was concerned that this “threat” would show up in the future.

“It makes it look like he came in there and he threatened the teacher,” his mother said. “Like he never spoke to the teacher.”

Jayanti Demps-Howell experience isn’t an anomaly. A 2019 study by Princeton University found that Black students are four times more likely to receive suspensions than white students.

This was the beginning of the now 15-year-old’s aversion to school. His mother remembers his attitude towards school changing after the suspension. 

Dawn Demps said her son isn’t much of a talker, and when it comes to serious stuff he expresses himself through art, so she asked her son to draw self-portraits of how he views himself and how he thinks the school views him when he was 13.

Jayanti Demps-Howell drew himself as Goku — his favorite character on Dragon Ball Z. 

“What I was saying is that I perceive myself as being awesome and being cool, to me in my own eyes,” Jayanti Demps-Howell said.

But when he drew himself from the school’s perspective, he drew himself reaching for a graduation cap with a target locked on his chest. He said it represents how people don’t want Black men, like himself, to succeed.

“And as an educator, that kind of hurts. But as a researcher, I understand,” Dawn Demps said about her son’s feelings towards school. 

That drawing led Dawn Demps to construct a project asking other kids who had been suspended to draw the same thing. She found that most kids saw themselves achieving their dreams, but thought the school viewed them as failures. She is currently writing an article about her project to discuss the results.

“These kids are very deep. They are not lost on what’s going on,” she said. 

As part of her dissertation, Dawn Demps is studying the Black Mothers Forum, a local Arizona collective of Black moms working to dismantle the school to prison pipeline. When Dawn Demps shared the artwork with the group, Debora Colbert, executive director of the Black Mothers Forum, said it showed how many kids, especially Black kids, feel predestined for prison.

“Imagine being 5 years old. And having your hands handcuffed behind you because a teacher said you were a threat,” said Colbert. 

A student’s drawing from Dawn Demp’s project in Flint, Michigan. (Photo courtesy of Dawn Demps)

A 5-year-old in Arizonan did get handcuffed for this reason, and the Black Mothers Forum helped the family advocate for themselves, Colbert said. When Dawn Demps’s son was suspended a second time from his Arizona high school, the forum helped the the family as well. 

Colbert said a big focus of the group is empowering parents to advocate for themselves and their children when it comes to school discipline. Currently, they are helping parents navigate the reopening of schools amid COVID-19.

In the wake of closed Arizona schools, Dawn Demps is working to create a curriculum to educate her son through experiences rather than a classroom. Part of this curriculum is connecting him with successful Black men in the community to show Jayanti Demps-Howell a variety of career paths.

The first man he spoke with was Ronald Young, who goes by Chef Ron. After their conversation, Jayanti Demps-Howell made an Instagram account — @jaycookz_04 — to showcase his cooking, and Jayanti began looking into culinary schools. His mother said this was the first time he showed interest in education after high school.

Dawn Demps said that even if schools open back up, she’s not sure if she wants him to return.

About her son being home, Dawn Demps said: “I know my son is safe. I know nobody is targeting him. I know nobody is stereotyping. I know nobody is going to call the police on him for him doing something that teenagers do.”

Source photo courtesy of Dawn Demps

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The myth that left a legacy for young offenders https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/super-predators-a-myth-that-left-a-legacy/ https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/super-predators-a-myth-that-left-a-legacy/#respond Fri, 07 Aug 2020 16:00:00 +0000 https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/?p=711 In the 1990s criminologists predicted a new breed of children would grow up to be super-predators. While the myth was debunked, the legacy lives on.

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Photo illustration by Nicole Sroka

During the mid to late 1990s, a fear of violent youth crime swept the nation, fueled by inaccurate estimates from criminologists and media reports. 

A substantial rise in youth violent crime in the 1980s through early ‘90s prompted criminologist and then-Princeton University professor John DiIulio to write an article in 1995 predicting that a new breed of juveniles were going to terrorize the nation: “super-predators.”

The youth violent crime rate began to significantly decrease that same year, but by the time this was recognized, the damage had already been done. 

James Fox, a criminologist and professor at Northeastern University predicted the same thing as DiIulio. In his report for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, he forecasted that by 2005, the juvenile violent crime rate would increase by 20%.

At the time, DiIulio and Fox said their logic made sense. The youth violent crime rate was already at 30 per 100,000 in 1994, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and with even more children being born as a consequence of the baby boomer generation, they said the rate would rise with the population. 

But, DiIulio and Fox didn’t account for outlying factors that could have contributed to crime in their estimates. Instead, they said these children were born different.

The youth crime rate fell faster than it rose. In 1995, the same year DiIulio first coined the term “super-predator,” it had already fallen by nearly 6%, and continued to fall at this rate until it reached about 11 per 100,000 in 1999, where it has flattened out.

A report by the National Consortium of Violence Research found that the quick increase and decrease of youth violent crime during this time could be attributed to the crack cocaine epidemic, an economic recession, high unemployment rates and other factors.

Fox said in an interview with News21 he doesn’t regret what he said because he helped raise an alarm about the need for measures to prevent youth crime, like after school programs, and to an extent it worked. He noted that many cities implemented preventative crime measures, but acknowledged that the conversation created a lot of harsh and punitive laws. 

DiIulio, who now teaches at University of Pennsylvania, later said he regretted spreading his “super-predator” theory, but was not available for an interview. The U.S. Department of Justice deemed his theory a myth in 2000.

Legacy on Life

The Bureau of Justice Statistics first began tracking the number of youth in adult jails in 1993, when there were roughly 4,300 kids incarcerated. By 1999 — six years later — this number more than doubled. Nearly 9,500 kids were in adult jail, and 91% of them were being tried as adults. 

Catherine Jones was one of these kids. 

Jones was 13 years old when she and her 12-year-old brother, Curtis Fairchild, were among the youngest children to be charged with first-degree murder. On Jan. 6, 1999 they shot and killed her soon-to-be stepmother, Sonya Speights, in their Brevard County, Florida, home.

Her uncle, a convicted pedophile who lived in the same home, had been sexually abusing her since she was five. She told a pastor about the abuse, and it was reported to the state. She remembers nothing changing after the abuse was reported. She remembers her father not believing her.

But one person did believe her: Her brother, because it was happening to him too. 

Jones said when Fairchild told her that he was being abused, her 13-year-old mind couldn’t think of an escape other than death. She remembers being in the shower, and her uncle coming into the bathroom and opening the shower curtain to masturbate. When he finished, she said he left 35 cents on the toilet seat. Her father and stepmother were in the other room.

“And I vowed in my head that now, to me, everyone’s responsible,” Jones said. 

When she was arrested, she said she told the investigators and her lawyers about the abuse. In most cases, this kind of trauma would have been a factor in deciding if she and her brother would be charged as adults and, if found guilty, how long their sentence would be. 

Tod Goodyear, who was one of the homicide investigators on the case and now the public information officer for the Brevard County Police Department, said he remembers the abuse coming up, but that his job was to investigate the homicide. He said Jones told him their motive was that Speights was getting in the way of the children’s relationship with their father, but Jones said she did not say this.

Local headlines read, “Police: Jealous kids plotted killing” and “Shooting ends fight for dad’s attention.” Jones said she remembers watching herself be described on television news as “remorseless” and “not appearing to have emotions” because she didn’t cry in court hearings. But she said this reaction was her usual defense mechanism to cope.

“From the time that I was arrested and I received that infamous label of a super-predator or a child killer or the youngest female killer, I was never referred to by my name in headlines,”  Jones said.

Catherine Jones sits at her desk, where she works remotely for the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth on July 28. She said working for the campaign is one of the best things to happen to her, because she gets to make a difference for children like her. (Portrait taken remotely by Chloe Jones and Calah Schlabach / News21)

Legacy of Language

The way Jones was described was exactly how DiIulio and Fox described the incoming cohort of juvenile criminals.

Fox said he didn’t agree with the word “super-predator,” but instead used phrases like “teenage blood bath” and described children, particularly teens living in “urban” areas, as having “little to live for and to strive for, but plenty to die for and even kill for.”

Fox said his use of the super-predator rhetoric was not racist because the increase of violence he predicted was among both white and Black youth. Critics disagree. 

“If you introduce a framework that dehumanizes a population, you are nevertheless joining ranks with a discursive practice that has long, long existed,” said Geoff Ward, a professor at Washington University who focuses on the racial politics of social control.

This dehumanization is a mechanism of “othering,”  Ward said, and people, especially white people, use it to justify and protect themselves from what is happening to other populations.   

Ward said this concept isn’t new. This framework was used when European colonizers called indigenous people “savages” to justify taking their land. He added that it is used today by the current administration to rationalize harsh immigration policy by labeling certain immigrants as rapists and criminals.

James Forman, a law professor at Yale University and expert on mass incarceration, said people were already scared from the spike in crime rates in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and fear of crime is often a result of the systemic racism the country is built on. 

“The willingness to think of Black people as the other, as the criminal element, is what made people able to mobilize on that fear, to create these harsh laws,” Forman said. “Because people thought, ‘Well, these harsh laws are aimed at somebody other than my child.”

Black and Latino youth were not only disproportionately incarcerated during this time, but they were also disproportionately shown on television and in newspapers being arrested for crimes, reinforcing negative racial biases without explicitly saying it, said Ward. And they still are. 

Jones said when she watched news reports that depicted her as a “remorseless” super-predator at 13-years-old, she began to believe it. 

“I didn’t realize I was numb because of everything I had went through,” she said. “I really thought maybe I was just incapable of feeling.”

Legacy of Law

In the 1996 election, both Republican Bob Dole and Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton ran on platforms to be “tough on crime” and restore “law and order.”

 A 1996 speech by Hillary Clinton came into headlines in 2016, another election year, when a Black Lives Matters activist interrupted a private campaign event to ask for an apology for the mass incarceration of Black Americans under her husband’s administration. 

“These aren’t just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy,” Hillary Clinton said in the speech.

Advocates say initiatives under the 1994 Crime Law passed by President Bill Clinton contributed greatly to mass incarceration, and the super-predator myth added to it by funneling more people, specifically Black and brown Americans, into the adult prison system for longer periods of time.

A U.S. Department of Justice study found that legislatures in nearly every state revised or rewrote their laws to make it easier for jurisdictions to transfer kids to adult court through lower age limits, automatic transfers and handing off the decision-making from juvenile court judges to criminal prosecutors.

It took 21 days for the courts to decide to transfer Jones and her brother to the adult court system, where they were charged and convicted. As soon as their case moved to adult court, they were treated like adults. 

At 13, Jones said she didn’t understand what the right to remain silent really meant. She signed a plea bargain for second-degree murder that gave her 18 years of incarceration and life on probation. She was told if she didn’t, she would spend the rest of her life in prison.

She was sentenced within 10 months without having a trial.

Over 75% of the over 2,800 people currently serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed under the age of 18 were incarcerated during or after the 1990s, according to the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth. 

The campaign also found that Black children are sentenced to life without parole at 10 times  the rate of white children, fueling the racial disparities seen in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

“You cannot separate the creation of a justice system from the society that’s asking it to be created,” said James Bell, founding president of the Burns Institute, which works to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. 

Legacy to be changed

Laws passed in response to the super-predator myth are slowly being reversed. The 2012 landmark Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama ruled that it is unconstitutional to sentence a child under 18 to life without parole without considering how children are different from adults.

Steve Drizin, clinical director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions who has experience representing juveniles charged with serious crimes in the ‘90s, said he began to see a slight reversal in these punitive laws when the juvenile death penalty was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. 

Around this same time, he said, more robust research on brain development emerged, showing that children’s brains don’t fully develop until their mid-20s, which helps explain impulsive crimes and those that are reactions to trauma.  

While there have been great strides to repair the impact the super-predator myth had on juvenile incarceration, advocates say there is still work to be done. There are 13 states without a minimum age to try a child as an adult and about 95,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons each year.

Jones was released in 2015 when she was 30 years old. She said she left the worst part of her life behind her.

“The air smelled different. It felt different,” she said. “Once you got past that control room with no barbed wire, it was like everything became so big.”

Jones said when she was first in prison, she thought she deserved to be treated like a “super-predator.” She said the guilt of taking away the life of her stepmother destroyed her, and she lives with it every day, but now it fuels her to create change. 

Jones now works full-time at the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth advocating for children to be treated as such in the criminal justice system. She said children need to be held accountable for their actions, but they need to be held accountable in age appropriate ways.

Between the campaign and volunteering with Fresh Start Ministries to support abused women, she juggles two toddlers. She said she wants her kids to have the security she didn’t have, and wants them to know she will always be there for them.

“Instead of a super-predator, I’m a super-mom,” Jones said. 

Source art courtesy of Newspapers.com

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‘Young Kings’: school empowers students beyond classroom https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/young-kings-school-empowers-students-beyond-classroom/ https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/08/young-kings-school-empowers-students-beyond-classroom/#respond Tue, 04 Aug 2020 15:00:00 +0000 https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/?p=733 Ron Brown College Preparatory High School aims to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline while empowering students as it provides a safe space for Black male students.

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Photo Illustration by Michele abercrombite

When Ron Brown College Preparatory High School first opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016, some community members initially pushed back. In a Washington Post article, people commented that the “young kings” sounded like a gang and accused the school of segregating D.C. students.

But this didn’t stop Ron Brown College Prep from creating a safe space for its Black male students using restorative justice principles as a foundation. Instead, “young kings” who enter through the doors of the high school are greeted by staff who aim to empower their students through a loving and supportive environment.

After desegregation, Black schools that once served as safe spaces either replaced Black teachers with white teachers or disappeared altogether. As a result, Black students have been overrepresented in the school-to-prison pipeline ever since, researchers and child advocates say.

Ron Brown College Prep hopes to dismantle this. 

The public high school specifically curated for male students of color was a product of Benjamin Williams’s experience in school and his drive to make a difference. 

Williams, the founder and former principal of the school, grew up in foster care with his brother, living in many homes and attending many different schools. While Williams was more successful academically, he said his brother was just as capable –– he just needed different support. 

He said he and his brother would have benefitted from a school like Ron Brown.

Williams was observant growing up. He said he always noticed how people who looked like him were treated: first in his middle school, high school, then college. When he began a career in education, he saw it firsthand.

Researchers from Princeton University found that in 2019, Black students were 2.5 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement, 3.5 times more likely to be arrested and 4 times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

This is when Williams said he realized, “It’s not just me and my brother, it’s more than that.” 

Charles Curtis, a psychologist and restorative justice coordinator at the school, said if school were in session right now, students would probably be talking about police brutality in their morning community circle, which starts off each day connecting them with one another.

Community circle is really where we connect. We also get in the habit of being together, sharing ideas, doing social and emotional work,” Curtis said. 

Curtis said that Black spaces like the school are important, especially for boys in their adolescence who are growing up in a country that doesn’t accept them.

“It is fundamentally hostile to their existence, to their mental health, to their opportunities to progress,” Curtis said. “They are criminalized. This is their life.”

Built on restorative justice

The morning circle is fundamental to the restorative process at Ron Brown. This process focuses on the reason behind the student’s behavior and connects them with the community and the person they may have harmed, rather than suspending and expelling students as a default. 

Curtis said schools often look at situations warranting either restorative justice or exclusionary discipline. 

“There is no ‘which’ at Ron Brown. It is always restored,” he said. “Even in the most severe scenario where the young person did get suspended, our effort is always restorative.”

Curtis is a part of the CARE Team, which supports students and teachers in restorative practices. It’s made of counselors, psychologists, social workers, a director of empowerment and culture, and other school administrators.

The team addresses school culture, climate, restorative practices, and social and emotional learning, according to the Ron Brown website.

Teachers are also encouraged in their classrooms to address any conflicts or disruptions instead of sending kids out of the classroom. Students participate in peer circles, which use a restorative justice model to address and repair situations between classmates. 

Williams said he was intentional in bringing restorative practices into the school to help students learn accountability.

“You also have to make sure that you hold yourself in a way that you are willing to speak up for yourself. And that’s not something that most of our young men were expected to do prior to walking into the space,” Williams said.

Curtis said involving students in these practices is important because it helps them cultivate skills to not only help them navigate their experience in school, but outside of it as well.

A culture of love

Christian Johnson, who goes by CJ, was heavily involved with the school’s restorative justice practices when he was a student. He led morning community circles and sat in on restorative justice circles as part of the junior CARE team.

Johnson, who graduated with the inaugural class in June 2020, said his experience at Ron Brown shaped him into the leader he is today. He still remembers his first day walking into Ron Brown. 

“I had my jacket newly dry-cleaned, my tie was perfect, my shirt was pressed,” he said. “I was ready.”

As soon as he walked in, he and his fellow classmates were called “young king” by school staff. He said the day started with a morning community circle and greeting his brothers, a ritual that took place every day of his high school career. 

Calling students “young kings,” was a part of a constant push to empower students to take control of their own fate, Curtis said. He said this is deliberate because Black students are often exposed to narratives about what is wrong with them.

“We were intentional about every time we speak to them or of them that we were naming what was right about them,” he said. “You are special. You are important. You are a ruler. You are most of all the ruler of yourself. You decide where you are going.”

Johnson said he remembers Williams stressing the importance of taking advantage of the opportunities the school had to offer. 

The school takes students on college tours as early as ninth grade. Curtis said this exposure is important, because it shows the students that they have options and opportunities to create their own destiny.

Johnson said the moment that stuck out to him the most during his time at Ron Brown was when his stepfather passed away in June and the whole school reached out to him. He said he didn’t expect to be embraced the way he was, but that it speaks to the family culture intrinsic to the school.

“The school hours end when they end, but we don’t ever stop belonging to each other,” Curtis said.

Johnson said Curtis is like his uncle, and that he continues to ask Curtis for advice about both  small and large life decisions. Their relationship extends beyond the school walls, and Curtis continues to support Johnson as he begins the next chapter at Howard University, playing basketball and studying finance.

Johnson said he thinks Ron Brown was built on culture, and that restorative justice contributes to the positive culture he experienced. 

“The loving and the caring that the teachers have and the staff have for everybody is Ron Brown itself,” Johnson said.

Source photo courtesy of Christian Johnson

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What was lost in Brown v. Board of Education https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/07/what-was-lost-in-brown-v-board-of-education/ https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/2020/07/what-was-lost-in-brown-v-board-of-education/#respond Fri, 24 Jul 2020 16:11:55 +0000 https://kidsimprisoned.news21.com/blog/?p=647 The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education landmark Supreme Court decision desegregated schools, but it also laid groundwork for the school-to-prison pipeline.

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Photo illustration by Michele Abercombie

In most schools, the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education is taught as a major victory for reaching equality in education. The 1954 decision desegregated schools and united Black and white students under one roof. 

What they don’t mention is what the nation lost after Brown versus Board of Education, and how it laid the groundwork for the school-to-prison pipeline.

In a 2019 study by Princeton University, researchers found that Black students were three times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

Forty-five years ago, this rate was the same. 

The first national study on school suspensions by the Children’s Defense Fund in 1975 attributed this statistic to racism among white teachers, specifically in the South. It pointed directly to the school-to-prison pipeline before the term was coined. 

It noted how vague codes of conduct leave room for teachers to assert biases, how exclusionary discipline harms students, and how this kind of discrimination can push a child into juvenile deliquency.

It asked the  federal government to set up a compliance policy to hold schools accountable for “widespread and systematic” discrimination. Although the U.S. Department of Education now has a guidebook and sometimes conducts its own investigations into school districts, no official compliance policy has ever been implemented.

“The U.S. school system was never designed for us,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis. “When the Black community started to build their own schools and develop their own systems, that was essentially and literally destroyed through Brown v. Board of Education.”

Before integration was law, Black schools served multiple functions in their communities. They created classroom environments designed to teach students they could be whatever they wanted to be. Black educators were advocates in their communities and networks of support for their students, said Vanessa Siddle Walker, an education historian and professor at Emory University who has studied the effects of the landmark court case. 

Some, like the Valena C. Jones Elementary School in New Orleans, taught their students to become productive American citizens. The elementary school was fashioned after a Republic with each classroom designated a state with a governor, judge, policemen and other government officials. 

Before there was a Voting Rights Act protecting their Black teachers’ right to vote, Black students were learning to be part of a government. 

After the 1954 decision, historians estimate about 38,000 Black teachers in the South lost their jobs. White parents didn’t want their children to be taught by Black people. If Black schools didn’t shut down, white teachers replaced Black teachers in them. In 1966, American Teachers’ Association, the Black teachers’ organization, merged with the National Education Association, which is still in operation. 

“It became clear that the NEA, particularly in the beginning, was less interested in equality in merging and more interested in just accomplishing a merger,” Walker said. 

The impersonalized approach resulted in a negative environment that does not encourage Black children to have aspirations and lacks advocates, Walker said. By dropping Black students into white schools, desegregation created a harmful environment without specific efforts to address Black students’ needs.

Tiffanie Harrison attended school in Round Rock Independent School District, where she now teaches in Round Rock, Texas. The district is 9% Black. 

“I think that as a student in a largely white community, I was really encouraged to be color blind, which is really harmful because it’s not a thing,” said Harrison. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see people.”

Studies after studies show Black students achieve most when they are taught by Black teachers, and they achieve least when taught by white teachers. 

In Los Angeles, where Southerners had increasingly fled Jim Crow, a school police department was created in 1948 to patrol increasingly integrated schools and protect against foreseeable property damage, according to a study by The Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. 

These origins have led to an atmosphere of mistrust and overcriminalization of Black and brown youth in public schools, said Maria Fernandez, the group’s senior campaign strategist. She said this atmosphere does not address the root issues of a child’s behavior, and instead intensifies them.

For Rosemarie Allen, a social justice educator in Denver with expertise in early childhood development, this feeling is familiar. Black girls receive more discipline in school than any other student.

Allen began attending school about a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She said she was taught by all white teachers, and was suspended and disciplined often. She remembers one teacher describing her behavior as “demonic.”

Allen with her father at her graduation from California State University, Long Beach, in the early ’80s. (Photo courtesy of Rosemarie Allen)

After the third grade, Allen said, she remembers feeling resentful toward school. She was then pushed out of three middle schools. If she didn’t have a father who constantly supported and fought for her, she said she would have entered the school-to-prison pipeline.

As desegregation efforts progressed, scholars said different types of segregation emerged. 

Special education is one of them, said Steven Nelson, a professor in educational leadership at the University of Memphis and former education advocate at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Black students are overrepresented in special education settings for learning and behavioral disabilities, according to the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools

“I have personal experience with it when I kept getting in trouble,”  Allen said. When she was in school, her teachers tried to place her in special education, but the criteria in the 1960s, when Allen was in school, was an IQ test. Her test results led to her being skipped ahead a grade. 

In the 1970s, while Black students were being bused to white schools, the beginnings of the special education legislation of today emerged. 

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education. However, for Black students, advocates say it does the opposite. 

“We may have them in the same school building, so the school building level numbers look OK,” said Nelson, who also taught and advocated on behalf of students with special education needs. 

“But when you look at the special education programs,” Nelson said, “one of the things you see is that you have this disproportionality of Black students being served in those settings, especially in those self-contained settings.” 

The segregation of Black students into special education, he said, contributes to Black students in those settings becoming stagnant. 

Angela Mann, a school psychologist and assistant professor at University of North Florida, said academic performance of students in special education is often not included in the performance of the whole school. She said this can lead to stigma, substandard instruction and low expectations, making it difficult for these students to succeed. 

“It doesn’t matter what curriculum you teach if the child doesn’t feel like he or she can do it,” said Walker, the education historian and professor at Emory University.  

Even though she was smart and did well in school, Allen said her guidance counselor told her she wasn’t college material. She said she got into California State University through the Educational Opportunity Program.

As a college student, she said she still noticed the differences between how Black and white students were treated, and the disparities that existed in higher education. 

“But it never broke my resolve that I was going to make a difference,” said Allen.

She remembers reading the first study on classroom climate while she was pursuing her doctorate degree in Equity and Leadership in Education at the University of Colorado, Denver. It was from 1973.

The study specifically picked students that had the same intellectual abilities. It found that Black students were given less attention, ignored more, praised less and criticized more. It said it appeared to be a “disturbing instance of white racism.”

But there was one sentence that resonated with Allen: “It is the gifted Black who is given the least attention, is the least praised, and the most criticized.”

She said this was the first time she realized and believed that she was not the label her teachers gave her. She said she wished she could call her dad, but he had already passed away. 

“I must have cried for an hour,” Allen said. “If I could just tell Daddy, that it wasn’t me all those years. That it was [racism] and the fact that we didn’t prepare each other for each other, you know? And we still don’t, which is why I do what I do.”

Source photo courtesy of Florida Memory Photos

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