 kind of rainy, drizzly, a little bit icy. How many of you are coming from beyond Gustavus? Other parts? Oh, that's wonderful. I just got here from the Twin Cities. I was really happy that the weather wasn't too icky for that drive. It seems like it's just gone somewhere that ice is really going to impact. I know. I know. Let's just keep melting. Well, my name is Letitia Basford. At any time, if you need me to project more through this mask, you just let me know because sometimes it can be a little bit hard to hear. And every now and then, I'm going to go like this because I'm still, yeah. So I'm going to talk today about the school-to-prison pipeline and the practices that interrupt it just out of a curiosity. Five feeling like, yeah, I've heard this. I know what this is. And one being not familiar, too familiar with the term the school-to-prison pipeline. I'm just curious where we are in this room. Yeah, so a lot of a big range. Okay, that's great. That's great. Well, I'm glad you're here. I'm going to talk about a family's experience through the school-to-prison pipeline, a family that I got to work with really intimately and still do. And then I'm going to talk about the second part of my research has been studying schools that are actively doing powerful things to support kids who've been in the pipeline. So they've been through juvenile justice. Some of them have been incarcerated and these schools are just really changing, changing the pattern, moving forward. But also societal things that we can do, things that we even not in teaching can do to interrupt it. My background is in teacher education. So I work with future teachers. Anyone in here a future teacher? Yeah, a current teacher. Yay. I think you deserve a round of applause. I'm in teaching right now. It's something. It's really something. Yeah, but that's my background. That's how I came to this topic. So I'm just going to dive in. I'm going to stop every now and then for a little interaction. And then at the end, I'm going to say 15 solid minutes for Q&A. So if questions pop up, keep track of them. Let me know and we'll talk. I've got a little bit of a guide here so that I'd stay on track. But I'm going to start by dedicating this talk to this young man, Philip Orr Nelson, who was tragically shot and killed about five years ago, April. And his family story is what I'm going to be sharing first. This is my research partner, Dr. Joe Lewis. And he and I have been working with his family for 10 years and he would be so proud to know that his story continues to educate others. He began after he shared his story and we published it. He began talking to my classes. Then he began talking to other teacher at classes. And then he began coming with us to conferences. He would be here right now with me if he was still alive. And he would be far more mesmerizing and wonderful to listen to than me. So I am devastated that he is not here. But he would be so proud to know that people are learning about the pipeline and learning about ways to prevent it. So I'm going to share the story of his family's experience. During the summer of 2012, I taught a class at Hamlin University where I teach in the Twin Cities called Diversity and Ed. And throughout that class I had a graduate student, a mother in her 40s, a white woman who was speaking openly and clearly to the sea of mostly white female teacher candidates saying that both of her sons had experienced the school-to-prison pipeline. And at the time of that class, both were incarcerated. And her sons identified, well, they were biracial, but they identified as black. And she talked about how basically from the start, she felt the schools didn't help her and certainly potentially did more harm. So I'm going to share some of what she said about her son's negative experiences in schools. She began her family's story by telling me I was a young single mother on welfare and not a very confident mother. I was pretty trusting of the school system when my son's first entered. I thought it would be good for my kids to go to school and to be guided by people better educated and more mature than myself. My sons came from a broken home. They were growing up in a cracked neighborhood. There were forces to contend with other than school. It would have been nice if I could have relied on schools as a means of improving our lives. But they actually impeded my son's success. I'm not exactly sure what schools could have done, but I just know that what they did do didn't help and often made things worse for them and for me. Phillip, whose picture you saw said with his schooling experiences, I've probably been suspended from school plus to 40 times. I'm just going to pause there for a minute. That was in a three-year period. I remember being suspended three days for sticking up my middle finger. I've been suspended for smelling like marijuana, but never offered chemical dependency treatment. I've been suspended for fighting and cursing, but never offered anger management. Going on and off of suspension for kids is like going in and out of jail for adults. It becomes acceptable in one's life and leads kids to believe that they are part of the trouble, so they may as well stay that way. So I'm going to stop here and just to each other, what do you notice about these family Bridget and Phillips quotes? Would anything stand out in those quotes to you? Let's talk to the people next to you. So I'm Eve Strupping and I'm Eve Strupping on your conversation and that's exactly what it seems like we're punishing people most in need. Most in need of social services, a steady, reliable adult guidance, and it's true, it's a disproportionate number of students who receive the most severe punishment in schools are the students from single-parent households, foster care, they may be homeless or experiencing chronic housing situations. Our poor, we seem to be doling out the most severe discipline for those who are in the most need of support. So the school or prison pipeline is really it's a metaphor for taking, for serving as a conduit from schools directly into incarceration rather than a space for opportunity and growth. It's tracking kids out of the educational system and into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. And for Jordan and Philip, this began when they were just 14 and 15 years old. As I mentioned, you know, Philip was suspended upwards of 40 times. And imagine just put yourself in that like you're chronically suspended. He was expelled several times too. You get so used to that that that next level of punishment, right, isn't too far away. You get used to being known as that trouble. So over the last 40 years, I always talk to my students about this, you know, schools are microcosms of society. And in our society over the last 40 years, our U.S. prison, its populations just exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million, six to times more than any other industrialized nation. And today, one out of every three black males spends time in prison. And in schools, boys and girls of color experience suspension and expulsion at disturbingly high rates too. And they're labeled as problems in school and pushed out of school. Today, I'm going to be talking about four different causes for the school to prison pipeline, including zero tolerance policies, schools as pathways to prisons, bias and under resourced schools. So I'm going to dive right in to talk about zero tolerance policies. I just want to pulse check too, how many of you like five feel pretty strong, you know, a lot about zero tolerance policies and one not so much that's somewhat in school specifically. Yeah, okay, okay. So you may have heard about these in society on a societal level, like the three strikes you're out era, right? Same thing schools mirror society. So zero tolerance policies in the U.S. became widespread in 1994, after federal legislation required states to expel for one year. Any student who brought a firearm to school or lose all federal funding. And this firearm thing was actually fairly loose. It could be any kind of weapon. And sometimes that was where we got into really gray territory. These policies were created as a deterrent for students bringing weapons. You know, this is post Columbine, right? Columbine had major impact on schools. And they were cracking down on even minor violations. So they were, you know, promoted as a way to prevent drug abuse and violence. However, their intent wasn't so wasn't always aligned with what actually was happening. So I'm going to give you an example of this. When Philip and I were presenting to a school district, this kindergarten teacher shared a story with us. And I just want you to be thinking about how you would want to respond if you were that kindergarten teacher of that five year old boy. So she's in, she's in this, she's got this little boy in her kindergarten class. It's the fall of their kindergarten year. And he's increasingly getting angry at a classmate who's been repeatedly teasing and harassing him, even choking him in one instance. During recess, the teacher's not there. They're on the playground and another teacher witnesses the young boy yelling, I could kill you to his tormentor. Another teacher on the playground witnesses this and sends him to the principal's office for saying this. So talk again. What would you want to do as that, that little boy's kindergarten teacher? What would you, what, what would make sense in how to handle this situation? Just spend a minute talking. So I hear, I hear a lot of people saying they want to talk to the little boy, right? And teach him how dangerous those words are. Maybe his parents didn't, didn't know to prepare him on those words. But those words in this school was an automatic expulsion, not just suspension. He was removed from the school, removed as a little kindergartener in the fall of his kindergarten year. So I see a lot of faces like, it lacks humanity, right? It lacks compassion, it lacks the desire to educate this kid. I can't tell you how many times my two daughters have told each other that exact prints in moments of angst. And I know enough, I have that capital to know, don't you ever say that at school. You could get in serious trouble. But, but not all parents have this. So these types of zero tolerance policies that lack this humanity are happening all over. And I'm not going to read through all this, but I'll skim. You know, you've got an 11 year old who was with Boy Scouts. He had his knife still in one of his pockets. He was arrested, suspended and transferred to another school at 11 years old. Well, a 10th grader caught with a small pair of scissors and an immemorial detector after wrapping Christmas presents, arrested, suspended, transferred to another school. Gerald 15, sent to an alternative education program after having a fun night in his backpack, handcuffed to a chair until Philadelphia police came and arrested him. It's, it's, it's all across our country, these experiences of zero tolerance policies, they're typically in schools with poorly written policies, right? But surprising how, how, how truly rampant they are. So the same experience happened to Jordan in Minneapolis, he was going to a Minneapolis public school. And I'll read to you what happened. So he was eight. One day in Mrs. Johnson's classroom, they were celebrating birthdays. And some kids joked about having birthday spanking. Apparently, this kind of talk concerned Mrs. Johnson. So she reminded them that the school had a zero tolerance for hitting. And if you hit someone, you could be sent to the principal's office and suspended or expelled. Now to Jordan, her words seem to be critical. He had been repeatedly hit, pinched and poked by some girls in the class without any consequence. So in response to her lecture, he get, he proceeded to get up out of a seat, walk up to Mrs. Johnson and slug her in the arms. And then looked at her in a cheeky kind of way and was like, can I go to the office now? Since she had just given the class lecture on zero tolerance for hitting, she had to follow through. So okay, I'm going to just have you talk one more time. What would you do as that teacher or who, what would you want to, what's the consequence? He hit, he hit the teacher. And what's the consequence for that? What would be a, what would be a good consequence for that? An apology. An apology. Yes. And then he might get out. Hey, you haven't been protecting me from these girls as they do what they do to me, right? What, anything else? I mean, this was wrong. He was a tough, and both these kids were tough. No, no ifs, ands or buts. They were not easy kids to work with in the classroom. They've both talked about that openly. For this experience, he was immediately suspended for eight days. And then on that eighth day, his parents were called in to the office and told that they would be, that he would be sent to another school. And there was no opportunity for Philip to tell a side of the story. No opportunity to give an apology to the teacher. No opportunity to tell her why he, what he was experiencing. No opportunity to learn from it. He was just sent to another school, which was by the way illegal. You should, you must consult with parents before you transfer a kid to another school. So he, so Bridget said, his mom said Jordan was being categorized as a violent black male at the age of eight. There was no discussion, no opportunity to learn. As Bridget put it, thus began the nightmare. So it's important to just consider, had he been white, had he been a child of middle or upper class family, had he been a girl? Had he been a girl? What is behavior have been described as violent? Might have been interpreted and therefore handled differently. So Bridget's other son, Philip, followed a similar trajectory. He's the one that was suspended so many times, 40, upwards of 40 times during a three-year timeframe. He said once his teachers characterized him as a troubled kid, he felt he needed to be that way of holding an image I thought was cool, but an image I did not create myself. I began to go to school to start trouble and became known as the troubled kid. And I won't pretend I was easy at a lot of issues, but isn't it up to schools to support all aspects of life? Again, that theme of what, what are, what is the goal of schooling? So zero times policies have led to the increased use of police authority and intervention in schools, which is the second cause of the school to prison pipeline that I'll talk about today. This is unfamiliar to many of us who went to school at a time when if we were smoking marijuana in the bathroom, we'd get sent home. Today you have these school resource officers, often who are licensed police officers, that you might actually end up being charged. You might be taken in a police car to police office. And what's ironic is that our societal paranoia about school safety has steadily increased when actually the number of violent incidents has dramatically declined, about a 30% decline by some measures. So from metal detectors to drug tests to increased policing, public schools reflect society that's been fixated on crime and security and violence. And this was very evident to Jordan. And we have more police presence in these, in low income schools, more metal detectors you walk through more guards that you walk through. And I'm unsettled all the time in St. Paul, where I work and I take my students into schools as much as I can and middle schools with, with police officers patrolling the hallways, it just, it's with little 11 year olds, you know, it's just, it's something from, it's never gotten used to it. Jordan says, the police presence in my high school was very strong. The police had their own office and officers would take you there, threaten you. They would even arrange drug busts. I was taken to the office one time for an altercation and the police threatened me. Since the murder of George Floyd, school districts like Minneapolis and St. Paul have made the decision to stop their SRO program. They, they made the commitment no more police in schools. And I need to make sure we, we, we problematize, we make this complex, because it's just not that easy. There was a huge letter that came out from several Minneapolis, St. Paul principles saying, don't you take our SRO away. I mean, this SRO is a family member to our students. And it was published in the New York Times, you know, had a lot of, so this isn't an easy issue. So I want to acknowledge that when you have carefully selected trained, compassionate individuals working in your school, it can be a beautiful, beautiful thing. But we can't ignore the fact that since 2013, more than 30,000 children under the age of 10 have been arrested in the US. And, and there's videos, if you Google this, and I actually, these are late. And I'm not going to play them because they're too heart wrenching, they're just, they'll devastate you for the rest of your weekend. But little six year olds being zip tied and led to police cars. And it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's a problem that we have in our schools that we never had years prior. So we have to, we have to make sure we're, we're aware of this. So in the same way that low income neighborhoods of color have higher rates of arrest and incarceration, the same thing is happening for low income schools. The kids like Jordan and Phillip are labeled as bad boys, problem kids early on and bias does play a significant role, which is the third cause that I'll talk about. So as the years went by Bridget noticed this in her, in her kids as early as, you know, first, second grade, she started to pick up that her kids were watched more carefully and harshly. Her kids came home, you know, talking about that, that the white kids seem to be liked better by the white teachers than they did. They were aware that there was this sort of hyper-disciplining happening in, in their classrooms. The special ed classrooms, the lowest track classrooms were filled with boys that looked like Jordan and Phillip. And they weren't, I mean, amazing that they were aware of this at such a young age, how, how kids were getting trapped. And historically, we have looked at schools, in schools, we've looked at the students and their families as the source of the problems. You know, what's, what's wrong with them. But we're becoming more and more aware of school factors, how educators view kids from a deficit perspective plays a huge role. You know, when they are, they may not, we may not even be aware that there's this belief of this inferior intelligence, which leads us to send them to get diagnosed for special ed services or to go down to this special reading resource room. And Bridget was definitely aware of this Bridget deficit perspective. Her boys would come home angry, complaining. If I have time, I'll play this little video at a later point, but it's a beautiful summary of, of how this bias plays out. Basically highlighting that there's something powerful as a white teacher to look at my white student as, whether we realize it or not, potentially my child, I can see you in my as my child. And there's something different when we're teaching kids that don't, that we don't see as our future children. The fourth and final cause that I will talk about today is the under resourced and inequitable school funding. And I think this is a really critical place to push back on you know, and defend teachers here, because teachers are working in our, in our, in our neighborhoods with the highest poverty, they are working in the most under resourced schools. And I can't, I can't emphasize how much this, this is, it's a struggle across our country. Children are often coming to school with trauma. They need teachers who are trauma informed. They need teachers that can give them attention. They're often going to classrooms that are bursting with numbers. My own kids go to Minneapolis public schools. I have a middle school student who has 40 kids in some of her classrooms. And how do you, you know, my kid is going to be okay with that, without that immediate attention. But when you have a kid that's struggling, that's going through some home life trauma that maybe is having mobility, you know, housing crisis, that kid is going to need far more attention by teachers and by staff and by counselors. And it's exactly the opposite of what we're experiencing. And I thought I would just highlight how this plays out. You might remember Michael Brown from Ferguson, who in St. Louis, who was shot by the police officer, he went to a school called Normandy, high school, about five miles from a pretty wealthy area that had a high school named Clayton. I just want to show you how the resources play out in these two different schools. So Normandy, where Michael Brown went was 98%, predominantly African American students. This school was 96% white. So to begin with, we might look at teacher salary. The teacher would be paid 71 here and 59 at Michael Brown School. We might look at the graduation rates, but we might also look at the percentage of high school classes not taught by highly qualified teachers. That means the teacher has a license. If they're highly qualified, they have a teaching license and some content knowledge in what they're teaching. So if they're teaching chemistry, they've had chemistry instruction. That's a highly qualified teacher. Most of you were taught by highly qualified teachers. That's what we want for all of our students. At Clayton, just 1% would be a sub or not a highly qualified. At Normandy, nearly 40% were long-term subs taught by sort of a revolving door of not licensed highly qualified teachers. This makes a huge difference, a huge difference. I see this everywhere I go and especially right now with our shortage of teachers, I go into these buildings and there are just revolving door of substitutes in our highest poverty schools. So if you want to learn more about that, I really recommend this podcast called The Problem We All Live With that talks about Michael Brown's school and it's a fascinating hour-long podcast on hyper-segregated schools. So the influence of a teacher on students' learning experiences is enormous. So I'm going to just read to you some quotes by Philip about his reflections on school. A lot of teachers that I had did not seem to be as dedicated as they should have been. I remember Mr. Kerry, my 7th grade teacher, who used to just put movies in and let us watch them all day, day after day, often leaving us for almost the whole class period. Sometimes he would stay and go to sleep after drinking his coffee. He never interacted with the class. If I'd heard about this in my classes, I'd be all over the principal. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I had some behavioral problems in school. Ms. Drew would send me to the principal's office and just leave me there for hours. I would miss the majority of my education in 5th grade. I wasn't perfect, but this teacher gave me no breaks. The only time I didn't get out was when she read a book called Where the Red Burn Grows. No one ever asked me what I liked and what kept me interested. And again, and this goes back to how trained are these teachers, how supported are they, and how to connect kids to the curriculum. He had one teacher in 7th grade that was phenomenal, and he wasn't suspended once that year. So I just think that it's clear when teachers matter in huge ways. We have to find a way to support kids in these high-poverty areas. So I've gone over the four causes that I see as the dominant reasons for the school-to-prison pipeline. The consequences for chronic suspension and expulsion is that these kids leave school feeling rejected and unwanted. They don't want to go to school. They feel shame, humiliation, anger. They don't trust their teachers. They don't trust the school, would you? If you're constantly pushed out and they have an enormous difficulty catching up, and we actually don't talk about this piece enough, there's more shame than just being thrown out. It's also the shame of not understanding in the classroom. They're home. This is, we've really seen this because of COVID. Unsupervised at home increased likelihood of deviant behavior. I mean, who's watching over me? My mom is working all the time. I'm free. So a high risk for permanent dropout. And we have this happening across our state right now because of COVID, but because of the pandemic and all the kids being home and unsupervised. In St. Paul, they have a term for these kids that have disappeared. They call them ghost kids. They can't find them. They don't know where they went. And there are many, many, many kids that are just missing. And they've just decided school isn't, it isn't for them. So some solutions. Some solutions. So in schools, we must expose the problem. I mean, imagine had the schools that Phillip been going to, had they been tracking how many times he was being suspended and expelled, and they sat down on a by, you know, twice a year to say, what is going on with this kid? This kid needs intervention. Something needs to happen here. And imagine, so we need to be aware. We need to provide anti racism training so that teachers are aware of their bias, whether they're conscious or unconscious behavior. And we need to limit in school arrests. You have to be really thoughtful about who we're bringing into our school as SROs. We should be focusing more on reparation and restorative practices. So imagine if Phillip and Jordan had been taught at a young age skills to handle their anger or their impulsivity. Imagine if he'd been given a chance to apologize to his teachers or apologize to the peers, right? Or if a tension at school, what, what, when he was a second grader, he was called the N word by another little second grader. And he punched him. He was suspended. The other kid was not. But imagine if those two boys had had a chance to sit down with, with one another and talk about how, you know, to educate one another. And we need to create inclusive and compassionate school environments so that everyone's on the same page about how we handle tensions. We need to resist the criminalization of minor behaviors. I think this is a fascinating statistic. 95% of out of school suspensions are for disruptions like tardiness and disrespect. But tardiness, your suspending gets with this. It's just typical, isn't it? It's a fascinating, I mean, it's no doubt a problem. But to suspend them for that, you know, it doesn't make sense to me. Truancy is the number one predictor of youth delinquency, leading to arrested incarceration. So forming a task force of school and community members, students, figuring out why, why this is happening and figuring out solutions collectively. We have in the last 30 years, 40 years, the spending for public education has just dramatically gone down. And so you might be aware of the strikes that are pending in Minneapolis and St. Paul for public school teachers. I don't know what they're going to do about that. You know, the superintendent Ed Graff of Minneapolis is saying, I want to pay you more. I want you to have less than 40 kids in your class. But how am I going to find this money for you? How do I find this money for you? So we have to, and this is where I think all of us have to think about how we invest in public schooling. We need more counselors. We need more nurses, social workers. Minnesota is the 50th state. We have the lowest counselor to student ratio in our country. One counselor to every 500 kids is our ratio. And at a time, I almost said post-pandemic. But during this pandemic, we really need these counselors in a state with a surplus. I mean, every time these surpluses get talked about, I think about why are we not thinking about our schools? And then finally, what I'll share with you is some really hopeful research I've been doing on these alternative programs in the Twin Cities for kids that are highly vulnerable. So Joe and I have been studying for the last five years. A few schools. One City Academy, which is a charter school in St. Paul. It serves 120 students, almost all who've been in our juvenile system. At both of these schools, the majority of kids have been truant, suspended, expelled, experienced the criminal justice system. Many diagnosed with special needs in a dramatically higher way than traditional public schools. Upwards of 60% have experienced homelessness and high poverty. So both of these schools, we've been studying, they've been incredible for like reaching out to these kids who've given up on school, bringing them back in and implementing incredible ways to really give them the support that they need. So here's some of what they do that's so remarkable. And as I read a little bit about this, I just want you to think about how we can do this in our regular public schools. So in both of these schools, school is like a family. So teachers are eating lunch with the kids. The students are, they have these incredible advisors that are in charge of these kids that have them on speed dial on a phone. So if they don't show up, they may even, and they're not teachers, but these advisors may even go out and pick them up and drive them to school. And for some of these kids, they're living without any adult guidance. So imagine that kind of support. They're checking in constantly helping them navigate their classes. They've got a flexible learning environment. So they've taken like normal high school semesters and they shrunk them down to six week increments. So kids can kind of move in and out of them if they need to, if they're just struggling, if they have a child they're taking care of, there's some flexibility in how they get those credits. They carefully select and then they train their staff. So they have this staff interviewed by the students and they are trained in trauma. They are trained in restorative justice practices and they're ongoing training constantly. This high school for recording arts has a recording arts studio. It's like, I mean, it's a million dollar studio that they read a grant for and it hooks kids out. Like the kids are like, yes, I want that. But in order to use the studio time, they have to get their credits. So they do a little bit of, you want this? You have to do this. And over here, they have a trades program. So these kids are building homes and they're learning how carpentry work, they're getting licensed, they're getting an apprenticeship, they're getting paid $10 an hour, but they don't get paid unless they go to school. So imagine just versions of this, right? Versions of this in our public schools. I know it's, it's hard to do all of this, but I think we can think of different ways to support our most vulnerable students. So all right, I'm going to just conclude with one last slide. And it comes from a speech from Arthur Martin Luther King 50 years ago. And he said, he was describing two Americans, one of prosperity and the other of rejection and poverty. It was a time of upheaval riots, violent responses to inequities. For why the riots were occurring, King described the lives of America's poor black citizens, how they had worsened over the years. America had failed to keep the promises of freedom and justice. And white society seemed more concerned about tranquility and status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And he captured, and I'll quote, our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And then he asked urgently, America, do you hear this? Are you willing to go all the way? And I find this fascinating because here we are, here we are done, right? 50 years later, demanding answers to the same questions that King asked our country more than 50 years ago. King had faith in the future. And I do too. I see the anger that followed George Floyd, so much more awareness. We've grown as a society in so many ways. I see it in my students. I see it in the fact that you all invited me to this conference. I mean, amazing, we're having this conversation right now. And even if it's unsettling for some who listen to it, we're having it, right? It's incredible. I see it in the King 12 students. My daughter is going to go and march with her teachers on Tuesday if the school strikes. Like kids are really standing up for things and demanding things. I see it. Her school, they changed the name of her school from somebody who had oppressed people to somebody who's lifted up people in society. And yeah, as I said, I see it in the courageous conversations we're having right now. So I'm hopeful. There's much work today to change the hearts and minds and lives and lives that continue to do significant damage to our society. So I hope that these words will leave us feeling hopeful and ready to engage. And I'm grateful for you to listen to me. I'm listening to Philip's story. So questions, comments. Yes. I'm glad you asked. So this, as I mentioned, they were both incarcerated when Bridget was in my class. And Philip left, came back into normal society fairly shortly after he shared his story with me. So he started, we started inviting him into the classrooms, our classrooms pretty immediately. Bridget took a job teaching in China. So it really left me working with Philip. And Philip, over the two, three years that we worked together just became, he was transformed by this work. He ended up taking a position at HSRA, which Joe, my partner, got him a job there. And he was one of those advisors that would speed dial his students. He had like 17 advisees. And he would talk, I mean, these were kids that were fairly hanging in there. And he would tell them his story and how he would try to guide them to not make the same mistakes. And then Jordan was released from prison a couple of years later. And he began the same trajectory. He started teaching students with us. He started doing conferences with us. And he ended up taking a position at a Christian after school program, also trying to help kids that don't have a lot of adult guidance. And he's still doing that work. He did, he was on the news like a year ago highlighting what his work was. Philip was involved in a relationship with a woman. And he was killed because there's no reason for his killing. But he was coming to see her in her apartment building. And he walked into her apartment. And another man was in the room. And he had a gun. And he claimed it was an intruder. There's a lot of wondering about that. And he was shot and killed. So that is what happened to Philip. But both young men were doing really, they were really empowered by this work. And it really shifted their life trajectory. Are these skills for the educators being taught in students now that are going to education? I'm so glad you asked that question too. We train our teachers in restorative practices. We do lots of, you know, how do you take small conferences? How do you take large classroom circles and teach these types of skills to kids? We do a lot of trauma talk too. Yeah, we need to be, I don't know what other programs are doing. My daughter is an education agent here. Okay. But we don't always discuss like class. Yeah, that seems so vital that they have the skills to recognize that I gave you this. I think also the schools have to be on board with that too. Like you can imagine a brand new teacher coming in and they were like, I learned all these great things. I want to do this. And the school being like, well, you know, we do things this way. I'm not a teacher. I guess that kind of your school needs to be on board through. And, you know, what happens in a lot of our elementary schools is there's no one, one teacher may handle behavior one way and the other teacher totally, and they, so there's no, there's no routine there. So the kids are yo-yoed around and how teachers respond to things. And that's another thing I would tell your daughter to look for is a school that has a program in place, you know, responsive classroom or whatever that program is to help kids know their consistent patterns. Yeah. So you mentioned that the number of violent incidents has decreased over the years. Like, how can that be like with the number of like school shootings and like all that fun stuff? And like as compared to what? As compared to the violent incidents that were occurring in schools, like fights, you know, bringing knives, things like that, that dramatically decreased. The school shootings is a, it's, that's sort of in another territory. I think if you, you know, that, that kind of mass, that kind of mass shooting has definitely impacted our numbers. But if you take, if you look at schools as microcosms without those school shootings, which we've had a handful of, right, over the last five years especially, they've become safer places, schools. So that's where the metal detectors have come into play. That's where the, you know, locked doors have come into play. But we were, schools were more violent, rougher places in decades prior. Research, have you ever, have you explored, or I'm interested to hear, if you have made any determinations on what they used to call hazard pay or incentive pay to teachers says to work in more highly school. I, you know, am down in Houston, ISE, and I used to be something that the school district could afford, was to pay teachers more to work in, you know, more difficult schools that were generally led by people who really believe in a lot of these principles, but that just budget-wise has been taken away. Is there research to prove that that's effective, or are we just in such a teaching shortage that it doesn't really matter? I mean, research shows that effective teachers in classrooms is perhaps the most important impact on a kid that anyone can have. And we don't have that incentive. In fact, I mean, as that Normandy Clayton example showed you, Minneapolis teachers, if they stay in Minneapolis for 30-year career, I don't know how familiar you are with Minnetonka public schools by like Minnetonka, they will lose almost $400,000 of salary by staying in Minneapolis versus Minnetonka. So, you know, you do that math, right? And as a teacher, you're already not being paid very much. So you look at your starting salary of $40,000 in Minneapolis, and you look at it as $55,000 in Minnetonka. I'm going to go to Minnetonka. So no, we are not doing that. We are not incentivizing teachers to work in higher poverty areas. In fact, we're doing the opposite. And then what's interesting right now is 40% of my teacher candidates will end up in charter schools. That's the, we've had a blow of pretty large expansion of charter schools around the country, but in Minnesota too, it's even worse there. Like you'll, at St. Paul Public Schools, you might start with $40,000 at a charter school without any kind of teacher union, you're likely to be starting at significantly less. And then every year you negotiate your salary. And often it's just a revolving door. Teachers stay two to three years, realize the income disparity leave and try to find a public school, traditional public school opportunity. So that's why, and you have in the Twin Cities, a lot of our charter schools are pretty high poverty populations. That's why you have so many long-term subs in these schools, because they can't find, and our greater society is not aware of that, right? We are not aware of how significant the disparity in the income is, and how quickly these schools, with the exception of a few, there's a few really strong charter schools, but it's pretty revolving door of teachers. So you have like the statistics of like, just like teachers who don't have like basic education degree, and then like some experience in the field, like how does that happen? Like how are these people allowed to become teachers? Like your question. I mean, we're desperate. We're desperate right now. We're living in a society that teaching is not, it's not praised. It's demonized in a lot of, in a lot of our media, right? People are, teachers are being blamed for a lot, right? And their role is not just to teach content anymore. It's to be a counselor and a social worker and to support kids who are really vulnerable right now, because there aren't those resources around them. So we don't have, we don't have anyone wanting to go into it. Our numbers at Hamlin for Teacher Ed have gone down like, like by a hundred each year. So the Department of Ed in Minnesota has said, we're desperate. Right now there are some schools you don't even have to have a college degree. You can be working towards your college degree and become a long-term substitute teacher. So imagine that. Imagine you've just graduated from high school and you're teaching people who have just, we're just, you know, a year or two away from you in school. So we've designed the Department of Ed and across the country. So this is the case. We have these different tiered license options. And so, you know, you're, you've got the highest tier that are, you know, they have a credential. They have, if they're teaching chemistry, they've studied chemistry. But then you have all these different levels that if the school is desperate, they can make a case. And then if they can't find anyone else higher tiered, they have to hire somebody. So they hire the recent high school graduate. As, as, you know, in some, in some cases, as temporary, you have to be working towards your license. You have to be working toward qualification. But you can imagine the problems with that, right? And our state, not in the worst situation of others, there are other states that are in more significant dire, dire straits. So I mean, I would just leave you, I know our time is almost up, but I would leave you thinking hard about how we can support teachers, how we can support more funding to our schools so that our teachers can be paid better. So that we can encourage that's teach schools that need the, that need the most exceptional teachers have the opportunity to pay for, for that recruitment. Thank you for coming today. If you're interested in reading more, I've got lots of books that you can kind of come up and look at about the school to prison pipeline, you know, about stories of, of people who've written about their family. And Bridget published a chapter with me in this, in this book. So