 It's like, wow, allow me to reintroduce myself. So thank you all for coming. I'm excited to be the first speaker and thank you to everyone who's here. We have been working really hard. So I hope you enjoy the presentation from start to finish, all of them. And yeah, all right. So in a second, I actually want you to picture yourself as a young child. So close your eyes. Picture yourself as a young child. Not the innocent you. I want you to picture yourself when you're doing the worst, worst thing you ever did to act out at that age. Painting on a wall, letting out your inner Picasso, a WWE impression, biting someone here, kicking someone there. Picture it well. And now I want you to picture what happened when you got caught. How did the adults punish you? And on a count of three, I want you to turn to your neighbor, open your eyes, and tell them what the punishment was and what you did. One, two, three. Go ahead. Don't be shy. If you can hear my voice clap once, if you can hear my voice clap twice, if you can hear my voice clap three times. All right, can I have three brave, misbehaving people from the audience willing to share what you did and what the punishment was? Just three. One, two, three. OK, all right, so bit someone and did a wall sit. All right, so forging signatures and getting physical punishment. Yep, gender equality at a young age. All right, so very good. All right, so on three, can we give a big clap to all of our misbehaviors? One, two, one, two, three. All right, awesome. So I think we can all agree that these are pretty age-appropriate misbehaviors. Biting is a little bit different, but these are pretty age-appropriate behaviors and these are pretty age-appropriate punishments. OK, so the point of that is that we have expectations about how children behave. What we think we expect of our child to do, we will normalize. We'll make it OK, so you'll hear parents say, oh, it's OK, she just gets a little hungry. Or they'll say, oh, they just get a little confrontational sometimes. But the point is that what we normalize as a behavior or what we expect as a behavior actually reduces the severity of punishments and how adults treat children. And so the next activity I have for you is picture yourself as a kindergarten teacher. And what could be more normal in the classroom of a kindergarten teacher than a kindergartner having a tantrum? All right, OK, so picture it well. What would you do to punish them? All right, raise your hand if you would yell at them. All right, be honest now, school board's not here. All right, how many of you raise your hand would ground them of some sort? Keep them in from recess. All right, good, good. How many of you would take away their belongings, take away something they have, a toy, something like that? All right, good, make sure. How many of you would run far, far away, never come back, never return until scar is taken over? All right, so very good. All right, realistically, whether we want to be honest about these or not, these are kind of our instincts about how we will respond to, well, I'm gesturing to you all are looking at it there, about how we respond to children. So now, how many of you will call the police as a kindergarten teacher? No takers? OK, really important, because there are some teachers who do, OK? So for example, on May 2nd, 2006 in Naples, Florida, Takovia Allen, a young black girl with a mental disability, was arrested at six years old and charged with battery assault of a public education employee for kicking her teacher's aide in the ankle, OK? For kicking her teacher's aide in the ankle, the police arrived to the school, three police officers. They picked Takovia up off of the ground because they couldn't wrestle her to the floor, handcuffed her arms behind her back, took her to a cop car, transported her to the police station. She was booked into juvenile jail for four hours, OK? Charged with battery assault. And then on top of that, her school suspended her for two days, OK? So two-day suspension, a juvenile term of four hours at six years old, three-foot, nine-inch child, 50 pounds, OK? And is arrested, charged with battery assault, and suspended from school. No matter how many times I repeated it to myself, right? This didn't make any sense. Something was wrong with this picture because I know I kicked 10 people in the ankle when I ride the bus at 5 PM, all right, from Blake Transit Center. And nobody calls the cops on me. And I didn't know kicking someone in the ankle was a crime. So under what circumstances, what's going on when we arrest a six-year-old, right, for this kind of crime? So my point is that Takovia's case actually isn't the only one. It's not ridiculous. It's not extreme. Between 2000 and 2014, actually, in one recent case, the police have actually been arresting young black girls in preschool and kindergarten for a while, right? And it's troubling, right, that not only how many of you have ever heard of this, OK, right? So it isn't reported. Often it isn't talked about in the media either. So tonight, really what I want to talk to you about is fighting the hidden fees, right, on the school-to-prison pipeline that young black girls, in particular, pay above any other demographic in the school, OK, any other gender and any other race of child combined. And this is talking about unraveling the disciplinary disparities in K through 12, but also preschool and kindergarten where we aren't looking disciplinary disparities. So at the end of this, the goal is that you have an analogy to actually be able to talk about what you are learning here. That's my goal by the end of this presentation, so I hope that we can get there. So how many of you have been to an ATM in the past week? Raise your hand, OK? And you went to your own bank ATM, right? How many of you went to an ATM that was not your bank, right, and you had to pay a fee, right, for that, OK? So in bank accounts, you have an account in a bank and you make deposits, the balance increases, and you make withdrawals, and the balance decreases, right? And sometimes withdrawals don't actually make your bank account decrease. So in one case, you have $1, you get $5, you go to a Wendy's and get a 4 for 4, and you're back at $1, OK? Laugh, right? In the other case, right, like you make a charge and you get either a waiver from your bank or you get a refund, right? But the point is that it's a reversal of the charge that you didn't actually account for. So some banks, like my bank, however, they go above and beyond, right? Non-bank ATMs can charge anywhere between $150, $350, $10, right? So if you want to withdraw $10 and you have to pay $350, the total that comes out of your account is $1350, right? Some non-banks allow you to do it free of charge. But my bank, US Bank, for example, it allows me to still use a non-US Bank ATM. I still accept the fee, but it gives me my money back. So they say, it's OK that you were not loyal, right? We still got your back. And we'll actually pay you for being loyal to us anyway. And so as a customer, I don't have to be worried about using any ATM in the city, because I know I'll always get my money and I'll always never have to pay the extra charge. So we can think about how schools discipline children in the same way, right? Every child has an account at the school. Their positive behavior increases their balance. Their negative behavior decreases their balance, OK? And the point is that parents consent to every child in the classroom, to their child in particular, paying the same fee as every other child at the same time every time, right? No parent would agree to something like arresting their child if that was the cost of using their school's resources, OK? So the point is this is a hidden fee, but it's also a steep fee that young black girls are paying for same misconduct, all right? And so what's important is they don't get a reversal. And that's important because other children are getting reversals. They are not only getting deficits, but they're going back to their same balance before. And so one part of the story is that black girls and other children are not starting at the same balance, but they're also having deficits and withdrawals from their account more frequently than other populations and at a faster rate and no one is talking about it, OK? So some teachers go above and beyond, right, when they're punishing black girls unconsciously or consciously, but they endanger them actually by introducing police into the classroom in order to remove them from misconduct that they wouldn't call the police for another child. Right, this is a psychological form of trauma, but this is also a physical form, right, of trauma, right? Takovia was three feet, nine inches, and 50 pounds. Some people lift that in the gym, right? And three police officers subdued her, lifted her off of the ground and forced her onto her stomach and put her arms behind her back, OK? All right, so this has consequences for them in the short term, physically on their bodies, on their memory, on their experience, but it also has educational disparities as well for them. So what this looks like when you arrest a kindergartener, it's called, you may have heard of them, a ZTP or a Zero Tolerance Policy. And what this means in the analogy is that teachers are deciding to send black girls more often to an ATM that charges them a higher fee and send other children to one that charges no fee, OK? That's what a Zero Tolerance Policy is, removing them from the classroom and in a violent manner in particular. And so this has gender and racial disparities that we already see. First evidence already shows that ZTPs have no, they have no benefit on behavior or misconduct in the future. So it's really a policy net of zero, but it's costing black girls when teachers decide to punish them with this alternative set of rules in the classroom, all right? And so it holds them back in the short term, not only in preschool and K through 12, so they're more likely to repeat a grade, right? Retention in a grade, black girls are more likely than any other race or gender. Second, they're also less likely to graduate high school and college on time, right? More than any population and this also affects them economically, right? Black girls between the ages of 18 and 26 are more underemployed and unemployed than any other population and they're more likely to report mental illness and a lack of social-emotional engagement and interaction and this comes from data by the civil rights data collection database on those particular years. So what does it look like in the numbers, right? This is the sort of rules, but what does it look like in the numbers? Where black girls in this study done by the National Women's Law Center survey, excuse me, found that black girls describe themselves as leaders who have a future orientation to a desire to learn and change their community more than any other race or gender, right? But in that same study, they found that in preschool, black girls make up 20% of those enrolled but 54% of out-of-school suspension, okay? They are 10 times more likely because of ZTPs because of paying higher fees than white girls committing similar offenses to not only face retention, recidivism and juvenile detention but also in courts and incarceration later in life. So this has consequences educationally but also economically for them as a population. And then another survey was trying to find out why. So that's what's going on, but why is this happening? Why would a teacher send black girls and other children to different ATMs? Why would they do this? Is it unconscious or subconsciously? Right, and so this first ever report, data on education and discipline has been around since the 1960s and the first data that's emerging on black girls is as early as 2014. Okay, so already there are decades of us not looking at black girls in particular but in the age of, for example, no child left behind, they were still under research and really invisible that this was going on to them. And what they found in this study was that adults, this was a representative study, not just school teachers but people in society. So school bus drivers and shopkeepers, right? So they found that adults actually starting at age five, when Takovia is arrested and other girls like her, we start to see young black girls not as children. We actually see them as adults. We see them older than they are. They're more likely than white girls to be perceived as older, as having more carnal knowledge of the body, as being more aggressive in their behavior. They're really interpreted as more sexualized than any other child in the classroom. And it's, as a result, it causes them to think that they do not have or experience as much pain as other children because they have a more malicious intent, right? They're more aware, so they're more responsible and this affects the kind of protection that they deserve. So we see black girls as non-members of children and we see them as adults and so we actually treat and punish them as a result as adults, okay? So I went back to what does this look like actually in a classroom, right? What would cause her teacher to actually call the, what would cause them to call the police and not just one but three officers, right? And it's that this is what the kind of images are being socialized in schools and education, right? So on the left side, right? The notion of young white girls as misbehaving. It's help me be good. I need help. I have one intention but I'm doing something else but my actions are at war with each other. Whereas for black girls, it's an antique, right? Like if I'm doing something bad, it's because I wanted to do something bad and I should be held accountable for doing something bad, right? Similarly, this whining nature, this is very subdued. She is upright, right? She's whining but she's crying but her body is in control, right? Versus throwing a tantrum as a young black girl, her body is emitting steam, okay? Steam. She's so angry. She is so hot. She is so loud actually with her body, right? You could imagine her scream. Her mouth is wide open, right? And similarly the rude rabbit versus the tantrum in tears, right? Young white girls are able to still maintain a childhood innocence of being a princess and well behaved who has manners and deserves a type of treatment whereas young black girls are animalistic and rude, okay? Who can only be, there's no way a school teacher could control a rude animalistic young child, right? A princess, yes, of course, but the police have to be involved, right? With young black girls. And this is not only, again, physical trauma. It's psychological trauma but this results in them having a criminal record, right? So it's not just about their actions but it's also about the images that young children are able to feel, are taught to feel, right? Draw the face that belongs on each of the children and on the left side, a young white girl is, what, happy? Young white boy is proud, okay? You could imagine what their face is what their mouths are doing on the right side. The young black boy is sad and the young black girl is what? Angry. Angry. Okay, so not just about what the actions are but how they're feeling as well. Angry and loud and aggressive, right? So we have these same stereotypes operating in society for grown women, grown black women, which we know has consequences on their educational and economic outcomes. And so what's important about this is that it's not just short-term costs that young black girls are paying. These charge interest over time, okay? And also it's actually a violation of their federal rights, okay? To arrest a young black girl at six years old is actually to contribute to, one, a violation of any equality guaranteed by the law for any disparity against race, ethnicity, or place of origin. Also as a woman for Title IX and what's important for Takovia's case, again, is that she had a mental disability. So this is also a violation, right, of the Disabilities Act. So on multiple planes is there a violation of their bodies but also their life course. And no other, six years old, okay? And so hopefully my goal for you to take away today is that racially gendered stereotypes unconscious, whether you are or not, operate in a way that conduct black girls misconduct as more malicious, as more dangerous, more pervasive, and more adult than it is for any other demographic at the time. And this drastically increases in the analogy how much and how often they pay for the same exact behaviors. So think about it, throwing a tantrum, something toddlers are expected to do, right? A teacher felt as though police intervention in order to remove her was necessary, okay? And it's from images and media that are circulated. So when we ask, what can we do? Okay, the most important thing is we have to normalize black girls as children, and not just black girls. It also, that's coming from data that supports that young black boys are adultified in the same way. They're seen as older than they are, okay? More than young white boys. But what's important is you have to normalize black children as children, first of all. Which means you have to actually think about yourself when you were biting someone or when you were running away, right? How you were held accountable, and then you have to ensure for your neighbor, for someone in your local community, because school disciplinary laws are set at the local level, right? Local citizens, whether you have a child or not, you're able to decide who is the superintendent. You're able to decide who is a principal. You're able to sit on committees. You are able to make sure you're volunteering. So normalizing black children as children in the same way you see your own children is important, but also acting on that knowledge is also important, intervening whether you have a child invested or not, just knowing that you are making sure that black girls aren't seen as animals and white girls are seen as princesses is really important, okay? Involving yourself and your own body to make sure that we build a better, safer school that's healthy for all children is really important, and that's my call to action and presentation, and thank you so much. Thank you.