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 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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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.”

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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Advocates, community members and Spokane Public Schools administration in Washington state came together during a 2016 school district meeting to address the high suspension and expulsion numbers of students. It was during that meeting that the superintendent signed an initiative bringing restorative justice to all 54 schools.

Restorative justice, or restorative practices, is a philosophy that focuses on restoring community relationships rather than punishing the offender as a way of discipline. 

“When we treat that individual student with respect and provide the support they need that benefits everyone,” said Julie Schaffer, restorative practices manager in the Office of Family and Community Engagement for Spokane Public Schools. “The whole community is safer and healthier because of that.” 

When students misbehave in schools in the U.S., they are often punished through punitive measures that lead to school exclusion. These measures come from zero tolerance policies which aim to address “disruptive and/or violent behaviors,” according to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report. 

In recent years, schools, districts and communities in over 27 states, including several school districts in California and the Dekalb County School District in Georgia, have started incorporating restorative justice as a way to “shift the culture from discipline to accountability and problem solving,” according to the same report.  

The Spokane school district has a three-tier process in its restorative justice effort, with the first tier used to help build community relationships so that students feel they can approach teachers with problems, the second tier uses restorative strategies to address problems in the classroom and the third tier aimed at mediation. 

In a Spokane Public Schools presentation on the district’s restorative approach, the differences between a restorative and punitive approach are highlighted as being more focused on why someone may have acted out and how they can work to fix the problem rather than what rule they broke and how the student should be punished.

Schaffer said that teachers within the schools have a freedom in how creative they implement the practices in classrooms.

“It could be like get to know you, games, where there’s a lot of movement or you know, and it depends on the age of the student,” Schaffer said. “So that tier-one classroom level, it’s really the proactive staff.”

Throughout the district, the use of classroom circles, mediation and conferencing are used in a three-tier process focused on building community, resolving conflict, repairing harm and reconnecting students. 

“It’s giving the youth an opportunity to really reflect and come up with their own idea of what needs to be done to repair the harm or the relationship if there was another person involved in the incident,” Schaffer said, describing some of the methods they use in the classrooms

In 1998, Bob Murphy moved to Spokane, Washington, where he became focused on restorative justice after spending a career in education in Alaska as a teacher and principal. 

He spent eight years as a program director for a dispute resolution center where he was involved in a victim-offender mediation program, before being contracted as a restorative justice mediator with Spokane Public Schools.

“From the schools or the juvenile justice system, we really owe it to kids and families to have alternatives where they have an opportunity to learn a lesson from those [mistakes], right,” Murphy said. “And not be hamstrung the rest of their life by a mistake they made as a kid.”

During the 2014-2015 school year, Spokane Public Schools district had 5,506 exclusionary discipline consequences, or any disciplinary actions by teachers which includes warnings, suspensions and expulsions. 

Just four years later, the number of exclusionary discipline consequences dropped from 5,506 to 4,166 by the 2018-2019 school year. The district formed a Superintendent Work Group on Restorative Practices, a collaboration between district staff and community members, to focus on exclusionary discipline. 

Nikki Lockwood, speaking of her experience as a community advocate before being elected as a board member for Spokane Public Schools, said for the first three years the work group met monthly to go over discipline data and worked in subcommittees to propose any changes to address issues. The group currently meets quarterly to continue to address any issues and how to better implement restorative practices.

Modern restorative justice practices have been around since the 1970s, with programs focused on reconciliation between offenders and victims. These practices aim to bring accountability and acknowledgement of the harm caused to the community, while also restoring relationships and aiming to reduce crime. Some restorative justice practices include victim-offender dialogues, conferences and peer circles. 

The philosophy behind restorative justice has its roots in cultures across the world including within Native American communities, the native Maori people in New Zealand and more, according to the International Institute for Restorative Practices. 

In the U.S. larger school districts like Oakland Unified School District in California began implementing aspects of restorative justice in the early 2000s, even decreasing the amount of suspensions by 86% in one middle school.  

However, while restorative practices are implemented, Schaffer said that they can work alongside exclusionary discipline. 

“So maybe there still is a suspension or that student needs to take some time away from the school building,” Schaffer said. “But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t also be a restorative intervention. And sometimes exclusionary discipline could be shortened based on the student’s willingness to engage in a restorative intervention.”

Nicole Rosenkrantz, community partnerships manager in the Office of Family and Community Engagement for Spokane Public Schools, explained the district recently received two grants to fund an in-school diversion program that will have mentors address student mistakes and behaviors in the school rather than sending them to juvenile court or dealing with exclusionary practices. The program is currently ready to roll-out for the next school year.

“When people are given an opportunity to accept…responsibility for the role they’re playing in something… not only is it an opportunity for a lesson,” Murphy said. ”But it really can fundamentally change how people approach life.”

Source photo courtesy of Spokane Public Schools

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