 Good afternoon. So delighted to have you all here. I'm Cecilia Clark. I am president and CEO of the Brooklyn Community Foundation. I want to welcome you all to States of Denial, the illegal incarceration of women, children, and people of color. On behalf of Elizabeth Sackler, who unfortunately had to go out west to be with a friend, so she could not be here at the last minute. Thank you, Elizabeth, and the team at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the Sackler Foundation for including Brooklyn Community Foundation in another exciting States of Denial event. Children, not criminals, rethinking school discipline. Thank you to Novo Foundation for their ongoing support of the States of Denial series here at the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the Sills Family Foundation and the new press who helped make Fania Davis and Monique Morris' participation in the event possible. I also want to thank the Mary J. Hutchins Foundation, the Morrison-Almas Shapiro Fund, and Brooklyn Community Foundation's Youth Justice Funders, collaborative members, J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Pinkerton Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, the Weisberg Foundation, as well as all in Brooklyn, Andrew Kimball and Sarah Williams, the Silverman Family Fund, and the Fishman Family Fund. And I would also like to thank my staff, and especially Leanne Stegmeyer, for helping to make today's event a success. And lastly, thank all of you for being here today. I know there are great many nonprofit leaders, educators, and advocates in the room, and I really look forward to inviting you into the conversation later on in the program. Right now, I'm going to channel our host, Elizabeth Sackler. And while she couldn't be here, she did send along a few remarks. So Elizabeth. Last spring, it became clear that after two years of states of denial, Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow, Piper Kerman's and Netflix's Orange is the New Black, and Just Mercy by the extraordinary Brian Stevenson and his organization Equal Justice Initiative, we reached a critical mass. The state sanctioned violence against Black people was finally on the front pages, and outrage was at its peak. Solutions are key. Change is essential. Continued vigilance and outrage must be front and center. And enough of statistics. We want change. And then I read Minor Threats by Hannah Leventova in the September-October edition of Mother and Jones. I'm going to insert into Elizabeth's words here that I did take a look at that article. Ron don't walk to see this article on Mother Jones. There are incredibly tragic examples of 12-year-olds who are jailed for not making their bed, and that is not hyperbole. So this is the state of America, and these kinds of stories are important to tell. Like Michelle, Piper, and Brian, this article reveals a whole swath of horror that hadn't come to my attention on the unjust incarceration of young people in this country for minor infractions, particularly young women of color. Which is why I decided this fall to focus on states of denial and children. The title of today's program, Children Not Criminals, is a hint to me of where we are off track. School should not be thinking about discipline. It should be engage in education and engaging children in their education. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, said it straight out. School is not about education in its neighborhood. It's about staying off the streets and out of jail. And as we know, that hasn't stopped our educational and penal system from invading schools, as we now have what we all know a school-to-prison pipeline. Solutions are up at bat dismantling the penal and public school education system, re-educating our police forces, and demanding of a government to stop the systematic disenfranchisement of Americans of color. Outrage and welcome. Once again, thank you, Elizabeth. And before we get started, just a few words about Brooklyn Community Foundation. As many of you know, but some may not, Brooklyn Community Foundation is the first and only public foundation dedicated to the people and communities of Brooklyn. We're on a mission to spark lasting social change, mobilizing people, like all of you, capital and expertise for a fair and just Brooklyn. Last year, following an extensive six-month community engagement project called Brooklyn Insights in 2014, we relaunched the foundation's strategic programs with an eye towards systemic change and racial equity. Our cornerstone initiative under this new strategy is Invest in Youth, through which we've committed $25 million over 10 years to increasing opportunities and outcomes for young people of color in Brooklyn. Our strategy for Invest in Youth is a three-legged school. Youth Development Leadership, Immigrant Youth and Families, and Youth Justice. It's our focus on youth justice that brings us here today to examine the crisis around punitive discipline in our schools and its unjust impact on students of color. We're also here to highlight solutions, particularly drawing attention to the promise of restorative justice, a philosophy in practice we fully support. Last year, we lodged an initiative with the DOE. We actually invited the DOE and the mayor's leadership team on school discipline to partner with us on a groundbreaking pilot program called the Brooklyn Restorative Justice Project, which I'll describe further later on. There's so much to dig into, but first we wanted to start with the voices of young people, particularly young women, who will frame many of the issues we're going to tackle. Many thanks to our grantee, Girls for Gender Equity, and its leader, Joanne Smith, for producing this video and allowing us to feature it here today. The schools that we attend and the people around us, like going to a predominantly white school where you have predominantly white teachers, it also plays a part in it, because it's like you're in a different class than them, and they always have the chance and opportunity to have a higher education, and we've had less than them. So now that you want to get your education, it's like, why do you want to have an education? I joined Girls for Gender Equity because I feel like I lack a voice in my community, not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm black. And I felt like I lacked a lot of opportunities, and I didn't have a lot of education as to who I am, and my history and my background. So I joined so that I can gain knowledge and pass it on to my younger sister. I was recently suspended from school because I decided to speak back to my dean, because I felt like a situation I was going through wasn't right, I felt like I was being disrespected by multiple teachers on multiple occasions, and I decided to voice my opinion about it and how I felt, and I was told that I was talking back, and it wasn't necessary. I felt like my voice was almost being pushed aside, and I just had to follow their rules, and I didn't like it, so therefore I spoke about it, and that caused me to have a suspension for a whole week from school. For me, it wasn't, I'm not covering up a lot, it's because I'm covering up too much. Like sometimes I get these looks, it's like, oh, this girl, she's all covered up. They don't exactly outright say it, but it's there, I see the looks, I've seen it from myself, and I've seen it from my other covered friends as well. So it's like what you said, Brittany, how we have to fit into this white, feminine way of dressing and everything like that. So it kind of takes away our right to express ourselves the way we want to. My name is Dana Abtimula. I'm an assistant strength youth organizer at Girls with Gender Equity. I've been suspended four times, and currently the school I'm in, I've been suspended three times, and since the first time I've been suspended, my grades has dropped, and I was near honors before and now I'm like failing. So it's just since those weeks that I'm suspended, I just get behind. So last time I got suspended, it was for breaking my teacher sharpener. And in my school, we have mediations where we can have one-on-one conversations to fix a conflict, and he did not request one with me. He just automatically suspended me, and then I hate when I get suspended because I get put back, and it's usually always for a week or more. So I get behind in school, and I don't know, when I get back into school, I never know what's going on because the work they give me is not, it's very vague, so it's just like, I'm lost. This one teacher, she told me that I walk around, like I'm better than everyone, and like I don't care about anything, and I was just like, you don't know me. But she have said that if I wasn't a woman of color, that just ties into the stereotypes that people have of women of color. I think with being a black girl is an automatic assumption that you're gonna be louder in the classroom and you're gonna be the problem child, and teachers find, as soon as you walk into the classroom, teachers get an idea of who you are, not just based on your character, but just how you look and how you present yourself. And then from that, they say like, oh, I should make sure I set an example of this girl to make sure everybody else behaves accordingly. In my school, right, we have to go through metal detectors to come to high school, and I had my hair wrapped, and I went through the machine, and like it went off, because the metal, and the hair pins, and it was like, oh, we gotta take it off. But I was like, why I take my hair pins out of the way of my hair? Like, what's the point? And she said how I couldn't go in because it was disturbing metal detectors. And I refused to take it out, and then they called my house and I got in trouble. How are my hair pins harming anybody around me? Like, it didn't make sense to me, but it happened. I'm in school to learn not to be disrespected. Like, I feel like there should be respect, but I feel like I shouldn't be disrespected, or I shouldn't feel uncomfortable within a school. So it causes me to lack learning because I'm focused on what my teachers said to me, not what's going on in class. I'm focused on how my teacher makes me feel, not the positive energy around me. It causes me to really shut down and not wanna be there. It makes me feel misunderstood, and I'm very cautious now of what I do in school because I know if I say something, then it will be taken to the extreme, or if I just act the way I usually do, just be free and careless and just happy, and it would just something I would do, even though it can be an accident, it will be taken to extreme, too. Society has these stereotypes, and it's gonna be hard to make the stereotypes go away. I think that as the people that are being affected by care enough and really wanna see it change and push for it, I feel like it could be done. I'm hoping that the voices of me and my other sisters in the strength inspires other females and other genders and races to speak out against harsh discipline because I feel like our stories can actually move a different movement within schools. It can actually change voices. It just takes one person to stand up and say something. This pretty much makes my ear being on stage with you. So I'm just gonna do brief bios, and then we'll really just start a conversation, and a little bit later on we're gonna be joined by the restorative justice coordinator from one of our schools in Brooklyn and two of her students from that school. So we're excited about the conversation and also the Q&A later, and I encourage you to participate in that. So Dr. Fania Davis, welcome, is a leading national voice on restorative justice, a quickly emerging field which invites a fundamental shift in the way we think about and do justice. She's been active in the civil rights, black liberation, women's prisoners, peace, anti-racial violence, and anti-apartheid movements. She was a civil rights trial lawyer for almost three decades. Since receiving her PhD in 2003, Fania has taught restorative justice at San Francisco's New College Law School and indigenous peacemaking at Eastern and at Knight University Center for Justice and Peace Building. The search for a healing justice also led Fania to bring restorative justice to Oakland. A founder and currently director of restorative justice of Oakland youth, Arjoy, Fania served as counsel to the International Council of 13 indigenous grandmothers. Dr. Monique Morris, welcome, is an author and social justice scholar with more than 20 years of professional and volunteer experience in the areas of education, civil rights, juvenile, and social justice. She's the author of Black Stats, African Americans by the numbers in the 21st century and push out the criminalization of black girls in schools which was published earlier this year by the new press. Monique is also the co-founder and president of the National Black Women's Justice Institute and a 2012 Soros Justice Fellow. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. Last week, so I'm gonna throw some stats at you and I'll try to do it so you can understand them. Last week on his last day as police commissioner, Bill Bratton announced that 2015 to 16 was the safest year we've had since 1998. The year the police department began tracking data on major crimes in public schools. Crimes dropped 13% from the year before and 35% from the 11 and 12 school year. This decline which began in 12 and 13 has coincided with a decrease in suspensions in school arrests and summonses. The police department also released data that showed a 10% decrease in arrests and a 37% decrease in summonses issued by the school safety division from January to June in 2016 compared with the same period in 2015. So almost a 40% decrease from last year. The education department has previously said that the number of suspensions in public schools also declined in the first half of the 15, 16 school year down 32% from the same period in 14 and 15. You know there's a butt coming. However, black students make up 53% of school arrests despite representing just 27% of the school students according to Chuck B. White students who make up nearly 15% of the city's students accounted for just 6.3% of the arrests. Black students also represented almost 60% of those restrained and I just actually want us to pause a little bit on that word because we live in a country where somehow it's okay to restrain children in a place they should be safe. And I mean it really almost, it breaks my heart to even see that word. So 60% restrained compared with Hispanic students at 30% and white students at 4%. Roughly 250 summonses were issued to students. More than half of them were black. So we're gonna talk first a little bit about school climate, this concept of school climate. Fania, can you illuminate these statistics for us? What's the story here and how do these grossly disproportionate stats reveal what's at stake for black and brown students? Well I'd like to respond to those stats with an African greeting with something from the heart. Kasady and Injeity, that is a Maasai greeting. Whenever the Maasai pass one another at the market on a dusty road, they ask this question. Kasady and Injeity, and that means how are the children? These fabled, mighty, strong, fierce warriors are always asking that question. It is always in the air. And we consider that a primitive culture. I can say our children are not well, not because something inside of them, but because we have a society that does not ask that question, a culture that does not value our children. It's good to hear that suspension rates have been going down, school-based arrests have been going down, and we see this all over the country and in large parts because of mass movements, because of Black Lives Matter movement, because of movements against mass incarceration, because of fixed school discipline movements. But it does highlight the problem of racial disparities and the fact that we are not hanging up attention to those in our efforts to reduce suspensions and reduce incarceration. And that's a huge, I think, task of the restorative justice movement. Right, so pay attention. You know, it's interesting you're saying that because actually, in addition to really phenomenal movements that have really been building momentum recently, in general though, if you look over the past generation, crime has gone down, but the prison population has gone up. So schools have also gotten less violent, but arrests and suspensions have gone up for students in those schools, for Black and Brown students in there. So you have the same conflicting graph for both of those things happening in this country, right? And it's illogical at best and it's pretty nightmarish at worst. So talk a little bit about that, thinking about the school-to-prison pipeline, what are the parallels in the era of mass incarceration and what are the effects of bringing police into schools? First of all, let me just say something personal here. For almost 30 years, I was a civil rights trial warrior fighting against racism in the courts. I come from Birmingham, Alabama, raised on dynamite hill. So I came out of the experience of the segregated south with this fierce passion to be an agent for social change. And so I was involved in many movements, as you mentioned earlier, and I became a civil rights trial lawyer. But after about 25 or so years of that, I started saying I'm at the law school because I wanted to be an effective agent of social change. And I don't feel like I'm on the front lines. I need to be there with our children. I need to be out there with our youth. I shut down my law practices. I saw what was happening with our youth. The leading cause of death is homicide. 21 times more likely to die of homicide by police. And we see evidence of that every day. That's very painful than their white counterparts. Six times more likely to be incarcerated. Nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent. And just to see our kids lose so many of their friends. By the time they're 17, they may have lost 17 friends as many as we will have lost by the time that we're nine, 70. And seeing that, just getting to school, seeing stabbings, seeing drugs being used. I came up, as I said, in Birmingham, Alabama, and it was a time of terrible racial terror and violence for us. As I said, I lived on Dynamite Hill. There were bombs that went out off around us. We were very lucky that we were not targeted. But neighbors were. Our church was. The lawyer who represented the youth who were integrating the schools, his home was. So it was a time of great terror and difficulty. But in some ways, what our youth have to go through today pales were that pales in comparison to what our youth have to go through today. And that's why I'm doing this work. And just very briefly, yes, in the last 40 years, there's been a 500% increase in incarceration. We are 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prison population. We're the largest jailer in the world. The largest jailer in the world. We're at the top of the list when it comes to jailing. We're at the bottom of the list when it comes to educating. And parallel with that rise in incarceration involving increased surveillance, increased policing, increased imprisonment, we see the increase in zero tolerance policies in punitive discipline. And the last two decades, suspensions out of school suspensions, exclusionary school discipline has increased by 300%. And of course we see the same disparities in race. And what about putting, what does it say to put police in a school? Do you think that the presence of police has contributed or do you think that the presence of police was just a tool in order to incarcerate? It's again, it's an expression of the increased surveillance, increased policing that has impacted our whole. It's the prisonization of our landscape, of our culture. As many people have noted. And it's just crazy because all of the studies show that the number one factor, the strongest predictor of academic and social success is having a feeling of connectedness with your school environment, having a positive school climate, having at least one adult that you feel strongly connected to, and having a school where you feel a sense of belonging. If you've got police in there, if you've got mental detectors in there, if you've got school-based arrests, if you've got high rates of suspension, your school is not gonna be safe, it's not gonna be smart, and it's certainly not gonna be a place where students feel a sense of belonging. And what is society saying about you? About what your identity is, right? We feel there's something about you that deserves a metal detector. We feel there's something about you that deserves a policeman. You're a failure. Yeah, so we've already put you in a box. Monique, in Push Out, you describe the school to confinement pathways rather than school to prison. Can you talk about the difference there for black girls? You share a story of a young woman in Brooklyn, we chatted about this earlier, because if I see Brooklyn, I gotta go for a story about Brooklyn. Juanita, here in Bed-Stuy, so maybe talk a little about that story, and also why you say school to confinement, and just elaborate. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here and honored to be on this panel with you, Fania. I always have to start with that. So in many ways, much of what Fania was describing is precisely why I captured this phenomenon as school to confinement pathways. I don't tend to talk about school to prison, because when we talk about prison, I see prison and incarceration as a symptom of something much more dangerous, pervasive, and problematic. And that's the prevailing consciousness of criminalization, this assignment of culpability, this idea that children that are black and brown are innately problematic. And so when I talk about school to confinement pathways, much of what I'm describing are this set of policies, practices, and the prevailing consciousness that facilitates the criminalization of children in schools, and the way in which it primes them for future contact with the juvenile legal system or the criminal legal system. For girls, it can happen a number of ways. In the work with girls who are most at risk of school push out and who are really at risk of being in contact with the juvenile and criminal legal systems, we see tremendous amounts of trauma and a failure to respond to that trauma. Sexual victimization, obviously the institutional and state sanctioned trauma, that all of us are vicariously experiencing and personally experiencing in some ways. But really this rendering of invisibility is also traumatic, particularly if kids are in communication or contact with multiple systems. So Juanita was a girl from Brooklyn that was working with what was the iteration around the Blossom Program for Girls, which was founded by ISIS SAP grant. And she was a girl who was really deemed by the school as problematic. And she had sort of multiple issues really assigned to her or attributable to her mental illness that had gone undiagnosed and to a set of traumatic experiences that were also undiagnosed and the adults in her life had failed to respond to until she was able to connect with this program and it took them four years to stabilize her. But there's another issue that I wanna highlight too of a Brooklyn girl who appears earlier in the book where she's talking about going to a school where there were zero tolerance policies. And when we talk about zero tolerance policies and we talk about the removal of the discretionary decision-making ability of a principal and where they're just these assigned responses to problematic student behavior that are typically about getting kids out of the school. In this particular case this girl had gotten into a conflict with a boy in her class and he was spitting spitballs at her and so she responded the way that people might respond if they're having spitballs spit in their face. And so she went up to him in his face, she told him to stop it, she was loud, she was trying to prove her point to say stop demeaning me in this way, he punched her in her face. And so she was shocked and the girls rallied around and all she remembered from that experience was being taken to the nurse and trying to figure out like why, what was happening and she had told him to stop and he hit her and she came out to realize that she too had been suspended that he had been suspended and she was suspended. And she couldn't make sense of that, she couldn't make meaning of that. She said, I was a victim in this case and I was trying to stand up for myself and now I'm out of school just like he's out of school and then part of the problem in this whole narrative was one, in the way that we've prioritized the pain of boys and men in the conversations about school to prison pipeline and practices, we would render her part in that invisible, that there would be a discussion about what he needed to be whole, why he reacted this way, what was happening with him, how he might invest resources and all of that is necessary except in this conversation about school to prison pipeline there has been an erasure of the experiences of black girls who are sometimes in the same incident as in the case that I just described but certainly in the same school environment that is filled with the instruments of surveillance, that's what I call them, instruments of surveillance, the police, the metal detectors, the cameras and the overall punitive climate that has not been co-constructed with the young people who are on the receiving end of this. You know, a couple of things you said, thank you so much for that sad illustration. One thing that when there are policies with zero or no or war on, it renders people unable to act and so you think about principals who just have to do something because of a policy and it makes me think of judges who also say on like a three strikes, I don't wanna put this person away and I literally have no choice because of the policy that's been given to me so again it's kind of creating this, that there are no more actors who can use discretion and use compassion to make decisions if there are these kinds of policies and I'm also struck when we think about the movie up there that about this sense of invisibility because in some ways what those young women were also talking about is the moment that they become visible, they get in trouble, right? So you're also supposed to maintain that level of invisibility and then thirdly, you mentioned trauma so it's pretty traumatic to be punched in the face, right? And then I know you also were talking about sexual trauma and history of trauma but if that's, there's been a failure to respond to those kinds of traumas, there's obviously a failure to respond to her trauma of being punched in the face too, right? And so I would just ask, where is the healing? Where is the compassion here? And so much could be avoided if we were thinking differently, maybe thinking with our hearts. Yeah, no question. And that's what the girls will tell you, right? I mean, much of my work is participatory and so it centers the ideas, narratives of those who are affected and I have not come across a girl yet who says what we need is more punishment, right? They always talk about opportunities to heal and connect with an adult and who's there for me? Do my teachers care? Is this school designed for me? Are people going to see me? And especially girls, I was in Kansas City recently and this ninth grade girl wrote this very powerful poem called Dark Girl where she starts this poem by saying, you don't see me, don't look at me, right? And then at the end she's saying, you know, look at me and see me, don't see your stereotype, right? See me. Which is what she said. Right, this is what my age just said, this is what Zaynab said. All the girls in that video. Right. I can just jump in please with another African reading this time from South Africa, Zulu, Salubana. And that means I see you, not just the externals, I see who you truly are. I see your spirit, I see the gift that you are to the world. So much of our work in restorative justice is creating spaces and creating relationships where our children can be seen. And very often we may see them before they really see themselves but we keep seeing them even though they may be cursing us out until they begin to see themselves. And Cameron is a very good example of that. Cameron was suspended at the age of four, preschool for the first time. His mother would drop him off at preschool and give him some skittles because of his separation anxiety. Skittles, Trayvon Martin, right? That's what you think about? Did you know that Trayvon was on suspension at the time that he was killed? He had been suspended for 10 days for having a plastic bag with some residue of marijuana. That's why he was not in Miami with his mother. His mother was working hard so she could support her family. She sent him to Sanborn to be with his dad. So he was on suspension at the time. But anyway, back to Cameron. Cameron had the skittles in his hand when the principal spied him with him and grabbed them and opened up his office and took the skittles and put them in the bottom drawer of his desk. Cameron was very resourceful even then so his eyes were glued on the principal. He says, I'm not gonna be able to get in the office because the office is locked. But there's a window. Maybe I can get into that. And Cameron was this little, the window was this high. He saw a chair, pulled the chair up to the window, climbed up on the chair, went through the window and he retrieved his skittles. As he shared? As he shared? Yes, skittles. But when the principal saw him again, he scolded him, he grabbed him and he grabbed the skittles and he suspended him for theft. For theft of his own skittles for four days. And that was the first suspension. Cameron ended up getting ensnared in exclusionary school discipline and was suspended 150 times and expelled four times and arrested multiple times. War hoodie, by the 11th grade he was gang banging, he was homeless and all of his friends or many of his friends had already been arrested or killed and he found a restorative justice program and that's what interrupted the school to prison pipeline for him. And he felt seen for the first time. Once he felt seen beyond the hoodie, beyond the sagging pants, he excelled. 3.7 GPA when he graduated. That's the issue with exclusionary discipline. Sorry. The issue with exclusionary discipline is it's absolutely telling the child we don't want to see you. In fact, we don't want to see you so much get off our campus, right? We don't want you to be connected. You are not a part of this community leave. And there are a host of reasons why and it's not always, and I think the examples around taking candy or the examples around even the fights, right? They're all symptoms of something else that we fail to interrogate as a broader community. And we know that restorative practice is, you know, part of this recognition that these are whole people that we're interacting with and that we've got to tap into that wholeness. So I just want to point that out because when we talk about exclusionary discipline and we talk about suspensions and expulsions, we talk about them as if they really don't have, I mean, we know that they have an impact on risk for contact with the juvenile and criminal legal system. Academically, we know that. And emotionally, though, we sort of see it as, well, what did they do, right? Well, what did they do to deserve this? And it becomes a question of, you know, sort of deserving of punishment. And how are we going to teach these kids a lesson as opposed to really thinking about the opportunities to heal by recognizing their whole being? So two things. First of all, thank you, ladies, you did that perfectly because that was the segue into the next section so we're going to talk about that. But I was struck, I was at a different, it might have been Brian Stevenson, I don't know, but the United States is the only place where a child can be suspended from school for having not been in school, right? And that is truly the folly of a system like this where they're just all of these illogical points. So you both brought up restorative justice and let's really talk about that. What is your vision for schools in a way that can really successfully serve students, particularly black girls and boys? How do you envision changing the ways resources are spent in schools? And then speak a little bit about restorative justice. So how many of you have heard the term restorative justice? Wow, that's amazing. If I had asked that question just a year ago and certainly two or three years ago, there would have been a fraction of the hands that are up today. And that gives me, that's an indication of how rapidly restorative justice is growing. So restorative justice is a worldview that is rooted in indigenous insights, especially insights about healing, insights recognizing that we are one, we are interrelated, we all participate in this vast luminous web of wholeness. We as human beings and all living beings on this planet are all connected. So that's sort of the basic value. It's restorative justice is a set of values in a worldview. Many people think of restorative justice simply as a conflict resolution method. It's something that we do after harm has occurred, after conflict has occurred. We bring together the person responsible for the harm with the person who's been harmed and we work it out. Well, that is an application of restorative justice, but much broader than that, it's a set of values and principles. And in the school setting, we use restorative justice to both create cultures of connectivity and trust, to build strong communities, to build values-based communities, as well as use it to intervene once harm has occurred. But the idea is we want to do more circles because that's the main model that we're using in school, the peacemaking circle model. We want to do more circles proactively to develop a strong community and to develop spaces where our youth can feel seen and feel heard and feel a sense of belonging. It's important to have those kinds of spaces, create those kinds of spaces in school, as well as use restorative processes when harm has occurred. So we basically are looking at three tiers in restorative justice schools. The first tier would be the circles that you do to create community, to create trust. Second tier would be the circles that you do to address conflict and harm once it has occurred. The third tier is to address how you reintegrate a person who has been absent from school due to incarceration or for some other reason. Sifanya, actually, money, do you like it? Oh, please, I'm sorry. So we have a pilot educational reentry program in Alameda County that is about providing a healing space and to use that as an opportunity to really explore what might work for girls who have been involved with the justice system and who are coming really out of a condition of confinement. And there are a couple of things I just want to add. One thing that's really important to acknowledge is that when we're talking about racial disparities, we're also talking about historical trauma. And so when we look at the data that show that black boys are disproportionately overrepresented along the discipline continuum, that black girls are disproportionately represented along the discipline continuum. And they're the only group of girls to be disproportionately involved along the discipline continuum at every decision point. We've got to ask other kinds of questions as well around what might be facilitating this, right? What might be leading to the corporal punishment? What might be leading to the suspensions, the expulsions, the arrest on campus, the referrals to law enforcement, all of those things. And so when they're coming back into community and we're looking at restoring and we're looking at repairing relationship, we're also talking about transitioning in how a person is able to represent in the context of these great structures of oppression that they are living with, the poverty, the racialized gender bias, all of these things. So we talk about restorative practice largely in the modality of the circle. But what we're discovering is that there are also other ways to prepare a young person to recover from those multiple structures of oppression that having career and college pathways available to them so they can connect their education with what they wanna do in their life is important. Having the de-biased learning and being able to address the curriculum aspects that might be triggering the historical trauma among young people is important. And having the healing informed emphasis on how we respond to problematic student behavior and how we co-construct what a safe environment is in schools is important. We tend to do that on the back end. The kids in trouble, let's co-construct a response as opposed to saying let's start with a co-construction of what it means to be safe in schools. Let's talk about what you need to feel whole. Let's talk about how you manifest that wholeness. And sometimes that manifesting means that you talk up, you speak up, you speak out. So you see something that's not feeling right to you, you need to call it out. That's a part of manifesting your wholeness. And so it's important to make those norms part of the discussion at the very beginning in order for us to respond adequately. What we're finding is that sometimes for a girl to start to feel even to prepare to be in circle, she has to deal with some things that she's internalized, that are not yet about the circle. She can't build community if she doesn't see her whole self yet. And so allowing for that space to really reflect on what her process is, what the structures of oppression are, how she can overcome those structures of oppression, how she's articulating her own being, if it comes out in dance fine, if it comes out in art fine or visual art or a spoken word or other forms fine. But it's just important, I think, to acknowledge the continuum of responses around restoring and repairing, especially if we're talking about it in relation to addressing some of those racial disparities that we see along the discipline continuum. Right. It reminds me, Fania, I think you said yesterday that if you don't think of it as holistically, then what are you actually restoring, right? That you have to start with the positive, right? Because then otherwise, what are you restoring? Where's the positive baseline for how we should be as a community? And that's what we're trying to restore back to, right? Exactly. Yeah. I thought that was... Me too. There's a lot of... Wait, what did you say? She said that to me. So part of the beginning of Push Out were a series of conversations that I used to have in my apartment. And Fania was one of the people that I would invite over to just start to brainstorm. How can we talk about restorative practice in the context of black girls? Like what are we missing? And it came from the acknowledgement that among the very problematic findings around school discipline was that black girls were not being referred to restorative justice programming. And that there was some disqualifying issues happening or just a lack of consciousness about black girls that I noticed in a data point that said, okay, well, we have to come together in community. And you said that then too. So it's a technology that this has been part of a process of trying to discover how we as practitioners and educators and folks in community see girls and then how we seek to restore our knowledge that they are sacred and our reflection of their sacred being in our communities. Right. So I just... Yeah, so if I could just say that. I'm going back and forth. No. It's been too long since we've talked about that. We have to come to New York and have this conversation. Yeah, exactly. But I just wanted to say that a study that came out January 2015, implementation impacts, which study restorative justice schools with non-restorative justice schools did show, Amoni, God, I don't know if you saw that, that more girls participating in restorative justice than boys. Yeah, now. Interesting. It's great now. I, before I was at the foundation, I had started and I ran a leadership program for young women and so I'm obsessed with girls. And so I really want to just put gender out there for just a second in terms of why, I had a meeting with the head of ACS, the administration for child services here in New York and she said one of the biggest issues around young women is that young women and young men are being treated the same way as if their histories are the same and so that the criminal justice system basically renders the experience of girls invisible. And it's partly numbers. So that the numbers for black and brown men are just so much bigger. But in fact, the rate of incarceration for girls is much higher than it is for boys. So this is an alarming statistic and she just says, you know, we're not even seeing young women in the way we should. So of course my, you know, the red flag there is this is sexism, this is gendered ways of seeing things. And so I guess I would just love to hear your comment on that. You know, I mean, there's a lot of discussion about black men and black boys and I'm just curious if that's kind of monopolized attention away from young women. And that's definitely something to be answered by this woman who's been talking about black girls since long before. Now, you know, it's become more popular. And you see lots of women. Even the White House just came out with a study about suspensions, but even the White House, yeah. Do you want to just, but she's been talking and raising this issue just really fiercely for as long as I've known her for many years. I appreciate that. So here's the thing. The investment that was made in men and boys was an important investment. And there were many of us from the very beginning who felt that it needed to occur, but never to the exclusion of the women and girls. And there has been a very strong effort, especially in New York, around developing participatory processes, the Young Women's Initiative, all responding to some of these issues and at least elevating a certain consciousness about what's happening in New York that I hope other cities are paying attention to and there are a couple of other processes underway, none of which look as comprehensive as the New York based initiative, but that certainly are a part of elevating this narrative. I've long said that to be ignored is traumatic. And so when we talk about girls and we talk about women, both cis and transgender, it's really important to acknowledge that for those who, or as we talk about these issues, important to float along the gender continuum and that these experiences are informed by our identities, our intersectional identities. And in academic circles, we tend to talk about this in theory, but really in practice, it just means that we have to understand that though policies may appear to be race and gender neutral, that that's really a facial race and gender neutrality. And that in practice, we're talking about really deep seated ideas about what constitutes proper feminine identity or what behaviors align most with what we deem to be acceptable, how tone shapes what we think about someone's attitude. All these assessments that we make that are based upon our own implicit and explicit biases that favor our own in group and that reflect decades, centuries. Millennia, right, of oppression, right. And it's important to raise that now because when we start to talk about state sanctioned violence and how we come to define violence, that level of trauma of impacts, how young people are engaging with these complex issues, whether or not they have language for it. So the ability to understand that racism and racialized gender oppression are really manifesting in institutions, they're manifesting individually, they're manifesting culturally, and they are internalized. So when we see these kids are acting out or these kids behave in a certain way, that's their fault, blah, blah, blah. We tend to assign guilt and assign company that with punishment as opposed to really thinking about these as responses to trauma, responses to structural oppression, responses to individual oppression, transgenerational oppression that is harder for us to wrap our heads around, but it's something that we have to wrap our heads around because we're seeing the effects daily, we're living with the trauma daily, and we have to develop conversations, healing conversations and modalities that respond to that and that allow us to really be the whole people that we're intended to be. Yeah, that sounded fantastic. I want to see that later on video and have it played frequently in my life. That's totally a great thought. Did you want to say something before we go on? Yeah. Just add on to that. How this might look, these trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive responses might look. This is a case of a young man who is in the hallway yelling at his teacher, calling her names, using profanity. What had happened a little bit earlier was that he was in the classroom, his head was down on the desk, his teacher had asked him to sit up straight, he ignored her, asked a second time, he ignored her, a third time she's yelling at the top of her lungs, and that third time he jumps up in a very combative stance and starts yelling at her and it goes out into the hallway, the principal gets wind of it comes, the restorative justice coordinator gets wind of it and comes, and then when the principal hears the boy cursing out the teacher, he says, I'm calling security, you are suspended. So the zero-tolerance approach would be to say, what rule are you breaking? In this case he was breaking the rule against cursing out teachers. And what punishment is deserved? The punishment is suspension. So that was his kind of knee-jerk response. Restorative justice coordinator comes up and says, but can I try something else? Can I try something else? And actually the kid punched the restorative justice coordinator and he was so angry. And then the principal said, we're gonna call your mother, call my mother, I don't care, do it. And he's just at a rage. And it's not until the restorative justice coordinator says, are you okay? Not what you're doing wrong, but are you okay? That simple shift produced a significant shift in the boy's energy. He settled down a little bit. And then the restorative justice coordinator was able to take him into the restorative justice room. Where after a little more relationship building, which is what this work is about, connection, the restorative justice coordinator was able to find out that this young man's mom had been on drugs. She had fell off the wagon. She had fallen off the wagon and had disappeared for the last three days. He had two siblings, younger. He was getting them dressed, getting them dinner and breakfast and getting them off to school. He was getting himself to school even though he hadn't been sleeping. And that's why his head was on the desk. That's why he was tired. That's why he was anxious. That addresses structural generational, transgenerational traumas. And it was only through a restorative justice approach that we were able to get the backstory. And then after the restorative justice coordinator talked to the young man and then talked to the teacher, they did a circle where the teacher was able to hear the story of the young man. The young man learned that the teacher had been assaulted the year before and she had been retraumatized by his behavior and thought she was about to be assaulted again. She was ready to quit as much as she loved teaching. So they heard one another, they saw one another, they connected with one another. And then they talked about what could be done to repair the damage. Instead of responding to harm with more harm, responding to the harm of the cursing out with suspending him where his likelihood of being incarcerated triples with that one suspension in ninth grade. And the likelihood of dropping out doubles, adding harm onto harm, we interrupt those cycles of harm. We heal the harm, restorative justice is a healing justice. And so they decided that the young man, the teacher asked if he could help with chores for the next few weeks. And the teacher said that she would take responsibility as well and in the future she wouldn't just assume that a student was disrespecting her personally if they are defiant in some way. That she would discreetly sort of tell the young man let's go into the hallway, let's have a talk. Basically the healing informed question. So the takeaway is the trauma informed, healing informed question is not what did you do, it's what happened, are you okay? Right, how are you, are you okay? So that's again, I love having psychic panelists. Just the perfect segue into the third part of this and I hope I think a really enriching part which is to really take it to the practical. So I want to welcome to the conversation Ashley Ellis who's one of the foundation's restorative justice program directors and two students from the, thanks Monique. Richelle Greenich and Deja Tyson. So welcome Ashley Ellis and Richelle and Deja. So delighted to have you here. So just a little bit, I'm just gonna do a little background on the Brooklyn restorative justice project. The School for Democracy and Leadership is one of our four partners in this Brooklyn project and about two years ago the foundation approached the Department of Education and the mayor's office on school discipline with the idea to fund a racially just model for school discipline reform in Brooklyn. Together we launched the Brooklyn restorative justice project in fall 2015 with the foundation funding comprehensive restorative justice implementation and full-time coordinators in four different Brooklyn schools. The School for Democracy and Leadership, the Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies, Science Skills Center for High School and the Abbots Field Middle Schools, three high schools and one middle school. Each school's restorative justice coordinators are also working together in a learning cohort to share their progress, their challenges and their advice and support. We were so fortunate to have had Fania meet with them earlier this week, yesterday, right? Was it, oh no, I guess two days ago and then you went to Abbots Field yesterday, right? We're on the Fania Davis tour, it's awesome. Ashley, Richelle and Deja are here today to share with you all of their own experiences and helping to change the way our schools do discipline. Is there a way I can get another mic on? Am I doing something wrong? Because I want to hear from Monique too. I'm loud, you take the mic. Oh yeah, you take the mic. Well, we're breaking it. Can we give these two young women a round of applause? Yes. You're being raised with social, I'm a lot of love. Yes. Am I, I was thinking there's a, no, okay. Oh, there it goes, bye. I'll be loud, okay. Ashley, tell us what it was like when you started at STL a year ago and how was discipline handled in the school and what tactics were relied on? And what's different today? Okay, so when I started at STL, it was back in November. So we came in during the middle of the school year. And if you know anything about entering into the school year, it's a lot harder when you don't start from a jump than when you just jump in the middle, right? And we were expected to kind of, to implement RJ, like our school already had a foundation and understanding of restorative justice. Majority of the staff had been trained through circles, but they were looking for a way to really push for the whole school approach. Like how do we really implement this in a way because a lot of disciplinary issues and practices were still punitive. And so when I came in, we were doing a lot of firefighting. So we were doing a lot of responding to conflict. There were no proactive things in place to help eliminate that. And one of the questions that I always thought about is, a lot of times we dealt with the students. So when the conflict happened in the classroom or amongst the students, it was always the students who came to the peace room first and foremost. But there was really no way or nothing in place to have adults be accountable, right? So they didn't have to go through RJ process. If a student didn't wanna be suspended, they had to go through the RJ process. If they got into it with the teacher, we would go have a conversation, but it wasn't anything mandatory for adults to be held accountable or anything like that. And one of the things I used to question is, how do we repair or restore something that was broken from the start, right? So if there is no community in place or not a strong community, we're expected to repair these relationships with students and teachers, but they never had a relationship with them just. And so, what needs to shift so that we can create community? And we spent a lot of time over the summer creating these processes and creating these different avenues where we would start from the beginning of the school year doing a community building. And we did circles last year during first period, but we had an issue with that because kids don't come to first period, especially when it's circles and they don't get a credit for it. You know, you got the 9th and 10th graders who gonna show up cause they knew to the school, but the 11th and 12th graders who like, I'll show up second, third. And so this year we was like, we don't get them, right? We changed it to second period, but this year, where we're trying to build community from the jump during second period, everything stops and all teachers engage in the restorative circle process. So all students have circles that they go to during second period. That's great. Yeah, yeah. Processes that we're create, like how do we create community first? And most of the students, we try to be strategic and it's not perfect, you know, but we really try to be strategic about who we play students with. And so like a lot of students are in circles with teachers or parents that they have existing relationships with, with friends that they have relationships with because if they are connected to the person, they're more than likely to show up until we can continue to build those relationships. And so right now we're just in the place of like trying to build that community first and foremost while instilling those processes that we build from the jump, which is, you know, when things happen, teachers now have an understanding that our students are not like automatic suspension. It's not the option. We're not even gonna have a conversation about that. You know, like understand that they have to go through this restorative justice process first and foremost. Great. So, Rachelle and Deja, what has been your experience with the way discipline is handled in the school and how has restorative justice changed your experience of school? How does it help you handle conflict and has it changed your relationships with other students and teachers? I know. How about, how's it going at school with restorative justice? Yeah. At SDL, but first I'd like to say I'm relatively new to the school. I'm there for approximately eight months, transferred in from the Caribbean. So firstly, the environment was really different. I remember my first day of school, I had to go through a metal detector. So I was like, okay, maybe. Then they were like, oh, you're ringing, so you have to go get wanded. I was like, why am I ringing? I don't even have. So they pat you down, then they send you upstairs. After being pat down, you're already depressed because you're like, oh, they keeping me back. I'm already late. So you start the day pretty depressed. You're not in the mood for class, nothing. When I came in, circles were at first period. In my circle, there were approximately 15 girls. If six students showed up, it was a lot. It would be the same six kids every morning. So basically only six kids had a relationship with each other and with the teacher. However, I must say, since they changed their approach with circles to second period, it has been a bit more successful because there's a lot more students, however. Participation-wise, we're still struggling a bit there. Right. So I'm just curious, do you divide by gender when you do? Is that a typical, who's idea was that? Last year, the school had already, they were in circles and they were divided by gender and grade, so it was like 10th grade boys and 10th grade girls. But this year, we decided, and we asked the students over the summer, when they came and picked up for their report cards, what is it that you wanna see in circles, and of course, they was like, I want some boys in the circle. The boys were like, girls in the circle of emo females, miss. It's like I write her. Excellent. Deja, do you wanna talk a little about your experience at school? Okay, so my experience at SDL, like Rochelle said, like, scanning in the morning, that's too much because it's like, it's already stressful in the morning. I gotta wake up early, I gotta like, hurry up and hustle to get out the house. First period is like an actual class, no longer circle, I can't be late. So it's like, when I get to school and I am early, I end up being late because scanning and it's like so frustrating because I have to get wandered, I have to wait, people still have belts, jewelry and all of that on, so that holds up the line. With circles, participation wise, I wasn't really like a big fan of circles, so I wasn't really participating. But now, because I have a circle leader that I like, we have history, a connection, I like my circle and I like the kids that's in my circle, so I just start participating and it's nice to actually get to know the other students in the school, different grades, all of that, make some friends, even though that's not what I'm in school for. You know, it's good. Fanyin Monique, do you wanna ask? Yeah, so you're using the circles in more as a preventative community building strategy, not only in response to a conflict. Yeah. Okay, I think that's important to share because so often we talk about recircles as a way to resolve conflict, many of the schools that are using it will use it in terms of that, as opposed to the other things. So here's a question for the girls, I think, that I have, if I might. Okay. When I talk to girls around the country about the scanning or about the metal detectors and about the possibility of building community, what do you feel sort of keeps the, like you talked about the tension already that it leaves you with as you're walking through school, right, having to go through this, but when you're in circle and you're having conversations and you're building community, do you feel like you're able to heal from some of that tension? Do you ever process some of that in your circle? And is there like, what does it leave you with? Like how are you feeling in your body? Well, in my circle, that's like being like, I never liked it. Now I just look forward to circle because it's like, everybody in my circle, they have a different personality and they're all funny in their own way. So it's like, I like to laugh and I like to make people laugh. So going to a circle where it's just a laughter, good times and all that. It's like all that stress from earlier is like just gone. In my opinion, circle, it does help you relieve the stress of scanning because I know in my circle we do something called a fist to five where a fist of five, yeah. Well, that's fine then. Okay, so firstly, your circle keeper would know the type of mood you're in by the talking piece you pick. So in my circle, there's a shoe if you're feeling a little feisty. There's a little squishy ball if you're feeling a little calm. There's a mic if you know, you just wanna talk about current events or something. So by the talking piece you pick up, she would know, all right, circle today is gonna be a bit more serious or a bit more relaxed. The fist of five, when you come in, you're like, oh, so what are you today? The fist of five. Zero, you're at your worst. Three in between, five, you're off the charts. And then in the end, it would be like, well, do you have something to leave in your circle to ensure that the rest of your day is going or going to be productive? And you would just throw in, okay, I'm throwing in the stress of the metal detector. I'm throwing in sleepless nights. I'm throwing in, my parents had an argument this morning. Everything you throw in and what you throw into your circle stays there. Yeah, so that's great. Yeah. Yeah, that I think illustrates really clearly how a lot of social-emotional learning occurs in these circles, that by being able to sit in a circle and process what they just went through with coming in with a metal detector and a whining and scanning, helps them to regulate their own emotions for the rest of the day. We see that a lot. That's an impact, a really positive impact. For example, I have a friend who works at a high school who starts all over classes in the morning with a 10-minute circle. And sometimes teachers will say, I can't do it. I've got to teach tests. I've got to teach curriculum. I don't have time to do circles in my classroom. But many of them that are now doing circles find they don't have time not to do it because this is the kind of thing that happens. They spend 10 minutes and the question might be is there something that we need to know about how you're feeling today? And one child may say, my cousin was just shot or my brother was just incarcerated. And I'm really sad. And when they express this in their own way, of course, they'll get validated. They'll get feedback. They'll get comfort. They'll get solace from the teacher as well as from their classmates. Another child may say there was a shootout outside of my house last night and I'm still shaking from it. And they'll be able to again get some love. And that allows them to move from their back brain, the fight, flight or freeze brain state into their frontal cortex where they can access judgment or reason thinking and they're able to be more fully present to learn. Just from that 10 minute circle, that can happen. So that's a deep social emotional learning can happen in these circles that allow students to learn how to regulate their own emotions, that allow them to develop healthier relationships with their peers and connect more deeply with their peers as well as with adults. And the thing is, I do this with my graduate students and I often say that we shouldn't have to wait until someone's in grad school to have a chance to center themselves before they start the class, right? This is something that can happen in the moment that they start school. So I guess I would just, you've got these two wonderful experts here and I would love to know if you have questions for these two women or you have questions for these wonderful women in terms of really what is the practice of restorative justice and advice you could give or questions you might have just, you know. I just wanted to make a statement more so that I can ask some questions. I love statements, that's great. Because I think sometimes I don't want to paint the picture that like, because we implement circles that everything is like peachy and going real breezy with RJ in our school. Because it's not, right? Understood. And part of the hard part about this is that we're trying to use restorative practices. A lot of schools, I think I'm fortunate enough to be in a school where through the organization I work for, Good Shepherd Services, they see me in the school, but a team, right? So it's three, it's four of us together, right? So I'm the director, we have restorative justice, counselor, coordinator, and we have a social worker. How many students are at your school? We have about 250 to 300. And we're one school in the campus of four schools. And part of that, a lot of RJ coordinators throughout the city are going into schools as a one-man team, right? So it's just them. And we're trying to use restorative practices to combat a system that is like rooted in decades and hundreds of years of oppression and racism, right? And so, and if we're to move forward and to really create a culture shift, we have to be honest about what it is, right? And part of that honesty means that in our schools we have to have conversations with our staff about racism, right? Why supremacy? We have to have conversations about what trauma is. We did a trauma-informed training before schools started doing a teacher orientation. And the first question that was asked by our social worker left the training, the first question that she asked was who's ever heard of trauma-informed care or practices? And this is all the teachers and staff in one room. It was only two people who raised and I was one of them. And so you have to understand that you have teachers who, as staff and administrators, who work with young people who don't understand trauma. And it's hard to work with young people who come from traumatic places because they are like born into trauma, right? Whether they are ever see a drug, ever see a shootout in front of their house, but merely because of the color of their skin, they are born into a traumatic state. And when you have people who don't understand that, and most importantly who don't understand that they carry trauma, but themselves have trauma, so I can't see you if I can't see myself. That's truth to power, I think we should do it. It's hard, right, to be in this position, one, as a woman of color, to have to have conversations about seeing my girls and my kids with staff who sometimes aren't willing to see themselves first, right? Because I can't understand your trauma if I'm not willing to go into mine, right? I can't treat you or have compassion for what's going on with you if I'm not willing to understand my own story, but it's hard because we have to create space as an institution, as an educational system to help staff take care of themselves and understand trauma, right? And even understand that before teachers get into administrators coming to this space in higher education, how are you able to lead this institution and not understand how trauma works with young people, right? Because when it comes, one of the things that we teach, one of the things that we learn in DC is that when it comes to ACEs, the adverse childhood experiences, Black and Brown youth, they have at least four ACEs, but we all have at least one, right? We all have at least one adverse childhood experience, and if we're not able to tap into that and see that, how can we heal that? Because it's not just about healing them where it's really important, but like if we're talking about holistic shifts and healing, like we gotta be able to heal ourselves. Is everybody familiar with the ACEs tool, the adverse childhood? Yeah, I just thought that we should probably talk a little bit about that. The adverse childhood experiences tool, the ACEs, it's an assessment that allows for adults and others to determine the type of incidents or experiences that happen to children that place them at risk of behavioral, I guess, exhibitions of trauma. In school settings, yeah, and other physical illness, yes. So it's a way to measure how trauma is showing up in behaviors in other health indicators and really taking this conversation away from it being just about a kid who's problematic or someone who's at risk and sort of risk being very loosely defined to really being able to pinpoint the specific adverse childhood, the problematic things that happen in childhood in a person's experience that might inform that behavior. Yeah, I just wanna say something. I was at a round table about a year ago reviewing a study by Vera, and they estimated as high as 90% of young women in both the foster and criminal justice systems probably had, it was a 90% rate of adverse childhood experience. So you really are talking about a very direct connection between traumatic events in childhood and being systematized. And right, but I also just wanna say one thing about ACE, which I also found kind of upsetting is it also has a slight euphemistic feel to it, which is that we're talking about sexual assault. Exactly. And rape and sexual abuse. So adverse is a pretty mild term for really, really significant trauma. And then when you think about that and you think about the 90%, you really are talking about people who are really just trying to survive. The other thing also, yeah, and when you call it ACEs, ACEs is the tops, right? That's supposed to be great. But you're talking about the worst kinds of things that can happen. The other thing to consider is that, particularly given our current state of affairs, that there is tremendous violence that and death that goes viral. That our children are exposed to, that our communities are exposed to, that presents an additional risk. And that is a shared trauma that we often don't talk about. And there are educators who are trying to think about better ways to process some of these current events. Circle is obviously one great way to enter a conversation. But knowing that you're gonna get five or six stories in your social media feed that talk about state sanctioned violence against people from your community is a routine exposure to a very real terror that we have to come to terms with because it does affect social functioning. It does affect how I'm gonna interact with that system and structure in my school. It matters to me that I now have to then be wanted. It matters to me that my backpack is under an increased level of surveillance because this is a part of my lived experience in this country. When I know that there are other schools that don't do this, there are children being educated in other schools where they are not wanted, where there is not a dominant presence of law enforcement, where there is not an assumption that these kids are gonna get in trouble. And so when we think about that and we think about the way that we internalize these ideas and the messages that we're sending to our young people, we are countering the narrative that school is a location for the healing to take place, that school is a location for the learning. There are kids are learning something for sure. And it's about what we want our young people to learn and how we facilitate this healing process. I find what you're doing super admirable and I know we're doing similar things around constructing a space where we have to talk through these issues and provide a location. And it's okay, I just wanna communicate, it's okay that you felt that, sometimes you don't wanna do this, right? And I love and appreciate you so much for being honest about that in this space because often we'll have conversations about this practice and everybody's like, it's so wonderful, it's so great. And we all believe that but the rigor comes in when we can interrogate the things that may not be working so much. Or that initially are bumpy and that we figure out a way to break through and not to give up. So many spaces will say it didn't work, see the girls don't go, see the girls don't talk, oh, they won't participate. And then they drop it as opposed to really thinking, what healing needed to take place with them internally? What structure needed to be in place for them to feel safe in that circle? How can we continue to hold that space for them? Because this is sort of a symbolic way of holding the space for our young people who are really needing to learn these skills to be their most successful selves. So I just wanna share that appreciation for you too. So I think we should, if people have questions, I think we should maybe get that going. I would also just love to say to Deja and Richel, we'll first thank you so much for being here. But is there anything else you would just like to add or tell the audience about your experience of restorative justice and your school? Me? Okay. So I feel like since they started this whole restorative justice thing in my school, I've gotten into less trouble because I used to get in trouble for a lot of things. I'm the type of person, if I go through something, I need somebody to talk to and I don't really live with my mother so, it's like I don't have my mother to speak to when I go home or if I'm feeling the type of way I can't call her like, you know, to make me feel better. So since they started it, I've gotten into less trouble, less suspensions, you know, pointless suspensions for stuff that could have been avoided. And well, now that they have it, it's like I feel more connected with Ashley and all the rest of the other members. I feel like I have more of a connection with my teachers now because they have circles with the students and the teachers. The teachers are not gonna be able to understand what they went wrong and what we as students are going through and what we can't really talk to them about. So, I mean, it builds the community, like our school community, it brings everybody closer, especially what they're doing now with their circles. They're, you know, mixing everybody of grades and all that, like, instead of everybody being separate in their own little clique, everybody's like together and they, you know, care about each other now. It's not like before, you know. That's a good one. I agree with Deja 110% because since they started implementing restorative justice systems at our school, you have been able to see a shift in school behavior. I mean, that's what, three weeks in school and we have not seen a fight. There, you have been able to see a better teacher-student relationship since these circles have started. Teachers now take the time to talk to a student instead of talking down to a student. They tend to see them more as an equal. They come off the pedestal of, I'm an adult, you're a child, you have to listen to what I have to say and they're more open to other ideas or the strategies of how to approach a problem. At SDL, we're a relatively small school. I'm being honest when I started. I talked to like two people and since they started mixing circles, I have seen students I have never seen before. You've been in the school all this time, where have you been? It's a really good practice, I enjoy it a lot. It's opened my eyes to a lot of different things that I thought because it did not affect me directly, I did not need to pay attention to it, but now I view everything as how it would affect myself. That's good, great. Thank you. Questions, where's Lauren? The mic's on the side. Oh yeah, mics are on the side. Line up at the mic, please. Duke. Do you have questions on the mic? Yes, so if you have a question, line up at the mic. Please. And while you're walking, I just want to say this, that part of what we do to in circles, and I forgot the niche in this year, is that we have student ambassadors. So each circle is now co-led with not just adult, but also with a student. Yes. Thank you. Yes. First off, thank you all so much, all of you for coming to speak to us. This has been enlightening, to say the least. And I have so many questions, but I'm gonna try to keep it down to just two. My first one is... So I work in an all girls school here in Brooklyn, and I wanted to know, do the statistics look different in all girls schools as opposed to co-educational schools? The discipline disparity? Yes. You know, I haven't seen a study that teases it out that way. And but you know, the data when it's presented, actually that's a good question. So yeah, I think that's a new study. Okay. Great. Thank you. Well we know that black girls are I was gonna say, six times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. Our boys are only three times more likely. Yeah. The racial disparities are greater among girls. But again, that's nationwide. And that's when you look across schools, not necessarily when you isolate in the same gender learning environments. Also just quickly, we've hired an evaluator for our restorative justice project, and her name is Anne Gregory. She's a professor at Rutgers. And she, her life's work is really looking kind of at a meta level about all the different studies, statistics around restorative justice. So you could just Google Anne Gregory, Dr. Anne Gregory at Rutgers, and you know, it's very possible she might be able to point you in the direction of a study about girls. Great. Thank you. And then also, you talked a lot about surveillance manifesting in the forms of metal detectors and police in schools. But have you done any research or come across any research about the more nuanced methods of surveillance and the effects that those have on students? You know, whether it is like invasive monitoring enacted by teachers and other administrators in schools? That came out in my work as I was researching push out to an extent. It wasn't an isolated portion of the study. But anecdotally, there were comments about some of the invasive ways in which surveillance impact young people is partly why I framed the School to Confinement Pathways as a prevailing consciousness because much of how we engage and interact as adults with young people is often through a lens of, well certainly through a lens of power that we sometimes believe gives us an authority to engage with them and in their life experiences in ways that are not always appropriate. And that often can reflect our own biases about what we discover. And so I think, again, it's important to think through from the girl's perspectives about what that means to them and how it's impacting their well-being. I did discover that many of the girls felt that it was problematic, but many of the girls also felt that, again, when that type of engagement is done with someone that they have a preexisting relationship with, it's seen as an act of love and it's usually an act of love, as opposed to someone who is just trying to figure out what they might be able to pinpoint a negative behavior to to remove them from an environment. Thank you. She said it. Do we go back and forth to North New Jersey? Hi, my name is Partia Porter from North New Jersey. I have your book Push Out, Read It, and I love them, Huge Fan. Thank you. One of the things that I was reading and research has found troubling is when you talked about Claudette Colvin. I think her name ring bells because it also makes me think about the new civil rights movement that's going on on my generation now with the Black Lives Matter movement that's both going on here and even when we see the girls in South Africa. And one thing that worries me is that I worry about the hyper-masculization of the movements where women of color or women in general are the forefront of these movements leading them, but then they're pushed to the wayside. So I guess my question is, especially with this movement that's going on today and also talk about the criminalization of women of color, are you still seeing those effects now? Are you still seeing that even with women leading this new civil rights movement, women are on the forefront when it comes to equality and trying to really push to get master incarceration, you're still seeing their voices kind of pushed to wayside or not giving the respected audience they deserve and what ways that, I guess us as a community can really ensure that it doesn't happen a second time where the movement is mostly a forefront of just men that's just right there while the women are once again not being, while their voices are being used, but they're not being heard or seen. Well, I think racialized gender violence and racialized gender bias are still very prevalent in our communities. The movement for black lives tends to become most rigorous when it surrounds and involves the death of a black male body. And part of I think the rigor that we need to add to our discussion about the movement for black lives is really about the multiple ways that we can define violence and to understand that while much of the violence that is enacted against black women's bodies may not be public although sometimes it is and still not really at the center of this discussion that a lot of that violence happens behind closed doors and a lot of that violence happens when they are girls. And so we have to be mindful about that in our discussions. I do think there's an opportunity though for us to really build on the very loud and heard voices of women who have been at the forefront of this work and who have been leading a lot of really encouraging national discussions about this. I think just five years ago I was in a room with folks and I would be like, what about the girls? What about the women? And people would look at me like I were crazy. And now we have convenings in Congress and convenings at the White House and not that that's a measure of true success but we also have a series of organizing efforts happening in communities that the mothers that have always been there are now being seen and heard in ways that they weren't necessarily being seen and heard before. And so is there work to be done? Absolutely and we need more people to be engaged in uplift of those voices and engaged in the process of not being dismissive of the voices of girls who are also affected. That's what I'm seeing most now is just that the conversations about gender equality and gender justice as they are presented in the movement for black lives is often around women and not girls. So once again, we're still marginalizing the girls like Claudette who was 15 and sort of rendering them is not capable of participating in this conversation the way that these young women just demonstrated they absolutely can. So it's just really, I think we still got some work to do but I feel like we're moving in the right direction for sure. Thank you so much. So you were referring to Claudette Colvin from the Civil Rights Movement the first? Yes, exactly. So I don't know if you know who she is but we all think of Rosa Parks as being the first to sit in a bus and stay in the front of the bus and be arrested. Actually it was a 15 year old and we see this in movements in the South and movements all over the world. It's a youth usually who are the ones who are making the big difference. But yeah, Claudette Colvin was 15, she was pregnant and that was also a reason why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Movement at the time didn't think that she would be a great test case. And if I could also- Great impact, she was perfect. She would be, yes. And she today though is getting a lot of recognition. She is asked to speak, she travels all over the country. But if I could just briefly add to what you said. When I was coming up and SNCC and the Black Panther Times, Stokely Carmichael bless his soul, said that the only position of a woman in the movement is prone. So we've come a long way since then. I hear people like Dr. Cornel West and Reverend Sekou and many other male leaders in the black community now saying I take my orders from black women, from queer women, from transgender women in this era. We should also just note that the three founders of Black Lives Matter are women. They're the founders. I was just gonna say real simple, when it happens, like don't participate in it. And when it does happen, show up and stop it and check your brother when it happens. Cause I think that can eliminate some of it. When you see them put it like nah, bro, stop it. You're doing it wrong right now. You're going to behind the story, you can tell you that little story about what happened when it happened. Like nah, bro, you was wrong. So I think it gotta start from that place cause like when things have happened to me, it was always the sisters that showed up for me, but rarely did brother show up. And so like part of that is show up. This can be real simple. Show up, step back and check your brother and hold him accountable. And so yeah. Yes. Yeah. Two questions. Ashley, I was wondering, it sounds like you have a lot of buy-in in the school for the project from staff. I'm wondering how it is with the school safety officers or NYPD in the school. And then question number two. I don't know. Question number two, maybe for Cecilia and Ashley. In New York, are we anywhere near a movement to get police out of schools? Are there any schools that don't have police? And what do you think it would take? So I'll start with the presence in school safety. NYPD police officers, all right. There is no buy-in just yet. And part of that reason is because of how they view our schools, so I thought we were one in four schools. A year and a half, two years ago, we had one of the highest suspension rates and so we were in the paper and all that stuff or whatever, a lot of fights. But when fights and stuff happen, they break out like, and even to this day, when we're recruiting like eighth graders and stuff to come to our school or when parents come through the front door to come up to STL, you have school safety officers like, why you taking your child up there? Right? When last year, when a fight will break out, school safety will respond and come upstairs. You know, instead of trying to contain or figure out what's going on, how, you know, check on the kids, we got school safety officers walking through the hallways like, this is just Rikers. All these, they just criminals up here. Like this is coming out of their mouths, right? So imagine if that's your view of the school before you even have to respond to conflict when you really do have to engage in it, your first thing is you're gonna treat them as criminals, even without knowing the story, right? And so when we say, you know, if something happens and a kid, the first thing they want is what's gonna happen to the kid? They wanna get suspended. We be like, no, no, that's not what we're doing, right? They're like, well, something needs to be done. And it's like, well, we're gonna have this circle and you can come sit in there if you so choose. Until it is necessary and mandated for you to show up because that's the place that I'm giving to. Well, like, no, I'm gonna sit down and have a conversation with level three and the department of probation and how do we have conversations about making it mandated that they have RJ practice training so that they understand not just what's happening in the school, we can be able to respond differently, but so that they can have other options, right? Because they only respond that way because they don't know no other way. They would train this police, you know, to protect. But if we can give you an alternative way, one of the things that Dr. Gregory Ellison said, he said, once you know, you can't unknown. So once you'll experience this work and the power of it and the magic of it, you can't deny it. But they haven't felt that magic yet, but they don't give a damn. But I just briefly have a little quick answer. I don't actually have an answer. One thing is it's kind of a bureaucratic nightmare because, and this kind of says it all, which is that how this ended up happening. I don't know. So the DOE, the school safety officers actually come off the DOE budget. The DOE is paying for the school safety officers, but they are trained by the police department. So you've got one agency paying and another agency training. So you've already got a conflict there. I do want to say that when we were planning this project, we thought it was a huge coup, and it is a coup that we negotiated to make sure that the school safety officers of our four pilot schools would also go through the required DOE, not required optional, DOE restorative justice training. So that was a huge coup for us because it certainly isn't happening anywhere else. And we're like, we gotta try to get everybody in the building and whether or not it sunk in is another thing, but it was a step. So we have two more questions. Thank you. Two more questions. I guess I should go to this side to be fair. Thanks. So I just again want to commend you guys for doing this work because it does, it sounds easy when you say, oh, well, we have conversations and everybody leaves their stress at the door and then you can go on the rest of your way through your day, but making that happen and really making it part of the institutional practice is incredibly difficult and really takes a lot of intentionality. And so you being part of it is such a huge and important piece that you're participating and enjoying and all of those things. So when we talk about restorative justice, I feel like I usually hear and see young people in middle schools and high schools, but I feel like I don't know what restorative justice looks like in the elementary context when we might catch kids before they become really dysregulated and there's so many adverse experiences that happen in very early childhood as well. So I'm wondering if you have models of restorative justice in the earlier elementary school context as well and what those look like. Okay, I'll address that. In Oakland, we started in a middle school, that was our first pilot project in 2006, and then it expanded to high schools and then it became public policy, the policy of the school district that restorative justice is the way we do business, not just school discipline, but this is the way we build a culture of connectivity and a culture of caring and a culture of healing in the schools. That was 2010. Today we have the work going on in 40 schools and a number of those are now elementary schools. And I think that's really, really important obviously. Thank you just quickly before, I know you have the last question. Some of us will be hanging around so we are open to hearing your questions and then also I just wanna make sure that everyone is aware too that Monique's phenomenal book Push Out is for Sale at the back, not the back of the room, but like behind that wall, what? Outside, outside. So in case also maybe you have questions for Monique, that probably could be answered in her book too, so. All right, please. So I am the chapter co-chair for BYP 100. I don't know if people know of that organization, but. And so I really appreciate the conversations of racial disparities in like just in the push out and then also like just in the movement of Black Lives Two and thinking about how Black girls are part of this movement, women part of this movement, queer people part of this movement. But in addition to working for Black Youth Project 100, I also am a program manager for the Center for Anti-Violence Education and in designing programs for LGBT youth who are particularly homeless and of color, thinking about the circles that you spoke about that are divided by gender. And I'm thinking about where do the youth fall who are gender non-conforming and who are trans. And so just thinking about where would they go in terms of the circle because they're also pushed out as well in addition to racism, in addition to all of the isms that they face. So just wondering where they fit in that. We got rid of gender. And so they're no longer separated by gender or by grade. And that was one of the underlying conversations that we had is because like, how do we deal with that, right? How do we deal with a young woman who even may identify as a young woman and just don't feel comfortable around girls, right? And so we just like, that was part of the reason why we broke it up. We said, how about we just like, it doesn't matter like the person who, this is about seeing each other's humanity, right? Teaching our young people how to see each other's humanity, right, without being stopped at like, who the person is, what color they are, whether they're male or female, what grade they are, like none of that matters, right? When we show up to this space, like we all on this platform together and we're here to recognize one another and see one another and learn how to see one another. And so I was just saying, it doesn't have to be focused on gender, but if you do create gender specific circles, so one of the things that I do is I run a girls program that is centered around circles. It's called Breathe Circles for My Sisters in the Bronx. And it's open to anybody who identifies, right? So you can show up, transgender woman, those who don't identify, you can show up and have that space be open because that's what community is about, right? And how do you teach each other to love? Because at the end of the day, like, I'm gonna see you and I'm gonna love you regardless of how you show up. And so creating that type of space where people feel safe in that, you know, and that's part of building a foundation on values and guidelines and things like that. So I hope that answers. I just think it's kind of amazing that we started this conversation with the word restraining and we ended with the word love. And I think that that's the direction we need to head. And I think it's because these incredibly courageous and brilliant women to my right, you're all to my right, who are working towards that direction. So I think they really deserve a round of applause. Thank you. Before we go, I'm sorry. I just want to take the time and I really publicly want to acknowledge Richelle and Deja from somebody new. And this is really just the time to tell you that, like, I love you and I appreciate you. We love you too, Ms. Ashley. And I see there's so much greatness inside of both of you. You are both gifts, not only to my life but to the community at SDL. And to everybody here, your voices are the voices that shift at this space. If nobody walks away with anything, they'll walk away with your stories and who you are and all that you brought to this space. So I just wanted to say, gratitude, thank you. I see you and I love you. Woo!