 area women's foundation. Thank you so much. For those of you who may not be familiar with our work the Washington area women's foundation is the only public women's foundation in the region that is committed to improving outcomes and opportunities for low income women families and girls in the city. We have a recently launched our young women's initiative which is geared to or focused on all the issues that we care about including the one that we're going to be talking about today and we have a young women's advisory council and we were talking made up of 22 young women and girls of color from throughout the city and yesterday we were talking about the issues that are important to them and one of the issues that came up was this issue and so what I'm really excited about today is the opportunity to talk to some experts and some advocates about how we can really think about how to make sure that girls once they're in school can stay in school and that they have the social and emotional supports that they need in order to reach their full potential. So when we were thinking about this panel the title bad behavior or implicit bias I know that titles fire not kidding. I really I don't know if many of you are familiar but a couple of months ago there was a report that came out or I don't even want to call it a report but let's call it an expose where the official statistic on the books is that nine black and Latina girls are nine times more likely than to be suspended than other girls in the city. That's that's already bad right and turns out that those numbers might not be accurate because DCPS in an effort to drive down the numbers and reach their goals were not recording the numbers of suspension so they were recording the number when a girl or a student was put out of school they would say mark them present in some cases or say that they were still in the school but send a list out to teachers saying these students were not would not be allowed in the school and so what that means to me is that we actually don't know what's happening in schools related to suspension and we also don't know what's happening to girls and how we we don't have an accurate picture of how big the problem is and so what I'm hoping to do today is to really think about one how we can if we're going to talk about driving those numbers down how do we do it in a way that's respectful of girls and their families in their communities make sure that they're getting their emotional like I said emotional social and emotional needs met and then also holding when there are issues that are arising that we not only look at the girls but we also look at the systems and the teachers and the other actors and so when I was thinking about the title bad behavior or implicit bias one of the questions that came up for me which I hope we all continue to ask ourselves is are brown and black girls that much worse or bad behavior or doing things than other girls in the city enough that gets them kicked out of school at a rate nine times more than other girls if you ask me I would say maybe the answer is no there's something else more insidious at foot but what I'm hoping to do is to engage that conversation and really go deeper and think about not only strategies but also what's going on and what's at the root of all of this so with that I'm going to introduce Maheen Kaleem who is a director at right for rights for girls I just Maheen is just my friend so I just like Maheen that's it but she's going to chair and lead this wonderful panel and then she'll also introduce the panelists thanks so much. Hi so good afternoon everyone my name is Maheen Kaleem and I'm a staff attorney at rights for girls here in Washington DC and before I talk a little bit more about what we do I just wanted to introduce you to our amazing or allow our amazing panelists to introduce you and then I'm going to kind of offer some framing around the conversation I think Nicole's gotten us off to a really great start and then just let you hear from these experts about what they're seeing and what we can do and really engage in visioning I think the conversation today is really going to hopefully go beyond what's happening but also what we can do and what our vision is as we start to talk more about and center the experiences of girls particularly girls of color what kind of environments do we want to create for them so with that I'll turn it over to our panelists to introduce themselves. Hello everyone my name is Bledine Bartholis I am the director of school climate and SEL for DC public schools and so I'm really excited to be on this panel because there is a lot of I know that we have been in the post and there's a lot of conversation around suspensions and recording suspensions accurately and although there is some work to be done in that area I'm excited to report on a lot of the amazing proactive preventive approaches that we're taking in our districts and some of the benefits that we've seen as a result of that so really glad to be here with all of you. I'm Misha Cross the policy director and the director of external relations for the National Black Child Development Institute. The National Black Child Development Institute is a 47 year old organization very much centered around and focused around the progress of black families in education health as well as wellness and previously I was with the the noble network of charter schools the largest charter school network in the state of Illinois. By just giving you a story so that you can get to know me you can go on our website acy.org and learn all about my bio I'm on LinkedIn but I want to start with a story that is related to this topic my own experience as a young black girl and what implicit bias did to my education so I was always very academic I was I loved school growing up in the fourth grade I got all A's and one B I was so excited about you know awards day I was dressed I was ready to get all my awards and when the teacher when my teacher called out all the awards I sat there time and time again I never got any of the awards so when the award ceremony was over I went to my teacher and I said how come I didn't get any awards I have all A's and a B's and she said to me Shamala you didn't get any awards because you're too loud and you talk too much and that was really a culminating moment in my life I started to have no trust for the education system because here I was I did everything that I was supposed to do but I wasn't recognized because I was too loud and I talked too much but I saw you know my counterparts that were also loud and talk too much who they received their their recognition so I want to fast forward really quickly to college I'm graduating college I'm happy and you know first generation and I go to the career like end of the year you know you're graduating this is how you get your job and in the middle the presenter says well if you're black or any cultural identity don't wear braids to the interview right don't show any sign of you know cultural identity because what that does is it looks like you're radical or it's unprofessional so I sort of spent a lot of years saying hey I did it all I'm here why am I not accepted the way that I am so when you talk about implicit bias you have to look at it on much a larger scope because these biases really come in play but I did a lot of travel and soul searching long story short I am the education policy director now as I have the kids for children and youth I worked with a group of amazing phenomenal passionate individuals that want to change the lives of children for in Maryland so I'm happy to be here thank you Shimala for kind of really centering what we're talking about today I think when we start to talk about policies and statistics it feels a little less personal and less urgent right so I think I really appreciate you kind of centering us and saying that we're talking about children we're talking about girls we're talking about girls of color we're talking about black and brown right so usually when we start to have these conversations I think it's important to for even to ask the audience members like picture that girl that you're thinking about as we move through the conversation today because it will allow us to figure out what those responses are together so as I mentioned I'm a staff attorney at rights for girls rights for girls as a human rights organization based here in Washington DC and we work to end gender-based violence in the United States but we really look at it from an intersectional perspective we look at it in terms of how the ways that gender violence play out and push marginalized girls out of schools and into the justice system how systems respond to marginalized women and girls when they experience violence and how our systems can improve and our policies can improve to better uplift those girls so one of the reasons why I was excited to moderate today's panel is because while we don't work explicitly on school pushout issues we do work a lot on justice reform issues and it all starts with school so we have a lot of partners in the work to address the school to prison pipeline and one of the frustrations that we often have is we go into all of these spaces and we say what about the girls and people will say it's not happening to girls even the most you know youth led organizations parent led organizations will say this is not happening to girls and until a few years ago there really wasn't research for us to make the case that this is absolutely happening to girls that girls are being pushed out of school so I want to start by just giving a quick overview of what we're talking about when we talk about school push out so that I can hand it over to these amazing experts to tell you what that looks like on a day-to-day basis and and our policies and how we can address it so the term school push out is really a term that encapsulates the policies the practices the conditions that make our schools hostile and unsafe for children particularly children of color particularly black latina and indigenous children and in different communities that looks different right but the other piece of getting pushed out of school means that you're further marginalized in other ways in society right you're further likely to experience exploitation and violence right because you're not in school you're not in a place where people know where to find you you're more likely to become involved in the juvenile justice and ultimately criminal justice system and you're more likely to feel those things that shamaro was talking about in terms of feeling like things don't belong to you that society is not for you and that there are things about you as a person that that prevents you from accessing and achieving your goals right so I think you know Nicole did a very good job of kind of framing like what we're talking about these disparities when we talk about girls of color are horrific right nine times is a crazy disparity when we're talking nationally the national women's law center will say that nationally black girls are five times more likely five point five times more likely to be pushed out of school that american indian and alaskan native girls are suspended at three times the rate of their white counterparts and that latino girls are one point six times more likely to be suspended and one of the things when we talk about this is and part of the reason that or the justification that people have given us for why we're not talking about girls is also has to do with the way that girls are socialized right particularly girls of color are socialized to be fine to carry a lot of weight and so the ways that that different experiences are preventing them from accessing or achieving their goals and being in school are not necessarily manifesting in the ways that they might for boys or gender-conforming youth right and so the research tells us really that girls of color and gender non-conforming and trans youth of color are disciplined for subjective reasons that have a lot to do with them not comporting with traditional notions of how a lady should act right of those gendered notions so i just want us to frame that as we move into the conversation today i'm really looking forward to kind of getting into the nitty gritty in terms of policy but also remembering that to that question that we're really posed with today is it misbehavior is it that girls of color are misbehaving more frequently or is it that our attitudes about how they should be acting when it's not really delinquent behavior that's problematic for other students and how can we change and sort of check ourselves to address and create more supporting and affirming environments for that so i'm going to start by throwing it back to shamarla to just give us that information right let's start with that question of what is actually driving exclusionary discipline for girls and transgender and gender non-conforming youth of color and what ways are they disciplined maybe differently than boys okay so i put together sort of a really brief powerpoint because i want to sort of contextualize it and really talk about push out in general right when did it start how why are we pushing kids out of school so i have this powerpoint and i call it the black girl push out problem racialized school distance practices and the criminalization of girls of color so i want to give some sort of legal framework really quickly because this is not just a accident this is not an accident so we have legal framework around this and it starts with the idea of zero tolerance policies that's what i'm going to talk about the idea that you have mandatory days of suspension or expulsion because you did some acts right and this started with the gun free schools act and there's a long history on the gun free schools act but basically it was a response to some criminal behaviors and the government federal government wanted to make schools safe so the policies that came out of it were sort of mandatory sentencing without due process sort of thing so a zero tolerance policy really quickly it just mandates predetermined consequences or punishment for specific offenses and the no child left behind act of 2001 it expanded the gun free schools act and it required states to mandate expulsion for any student who possessed a firearm but what happened is the policies and the regulations that came out of that were you know sort of trivial if you were tardy you got an automatic suspension if you talk back if you had any weapon and that was abroad there was no it was really vague there was no real definition on what what was even a weapon so we had a lot of policies all across that sort of pushed kids of color specifically out of school in general and so i just wanted to i'm not going to go over these cases but these are some cases that have framework around students rights because you have to understand that in the school setting students rights are diminished right they don't have the same rights that they have when they're walking the streets so these are some cases that really stands out a specific one is supposed to be Lopez and it held that public students were entitled to due process for a 10 day suspension and so what's happening is that this law is not even being adhered to in most urban schools students are being pushed out with no due process no hearing and it's sort of brushed under the rug so let's just quickly shift gears and talk about implicit biases in general so implicit biases my teacher thinking that i'm not worthy i'm not smart enough i'm everything i do is is a problem even though i came to class with really no no problem but you have to look at it in terms of explicit bias and racism right that happens in school every single day and because our students are and when i say are i mean black and brown students are already marginalized they're coming to school and it's like a double m type of type of thing going on so again these these unconscious associations are driving the narrative of school push out this is just national data i'm not going to go over it but it's it's important to see some of this data and this data is even much lower than what the actual data is because we don't have all of the numbers schools have deference the school districts have deference meaning they are the authority so there's really not a lot of law over them that can sort of change this narrative they do self-reporting teachers write the referrals it's all self-reporting so even this is is much lower than what it probably really is and so we look at the southern states and i'm i advocate in maryland and you know vc we look at the rate of black females were over five times more likely than white females to receive one or more out of school suspension and we don't know why like you know we're trying to figure it out that's one part of my job we want the data we want to know what is happening in schools all of the schools and then these are just um some citations that i wanted to leave you guys with it's a general picture of what we're talking about um i now want to turn to amisha you know shamala started talking a little bit about bias um both implicit and explicit so i was wondering if you could just kind of expand upon that idea and the need to sort of center the experiences of children of color particularly black children in this conversation black girls what that looks like maybe go into a little bit more detail about what that biases is looking like and what the urgency is around addressing bias if we're trying to address exclusionary discipline absolutely so and you did a amazing job implicit bias in america dates back to the arrival of people of color in this country and it's extremely saddening today because what we're seeing is all of the offshoots of it from mass incarceration to the exclusionary practice that in many cases is pushing kids out specifically within my work at the national black child development institute we're looking at early childhood education early childhood care our kids are getting pushed out when they are in pre-k over 250 students a day are being sent home what can a child do at three years old at four years old that would result in you suspending and expelling them and we're looking at the framework specifically around black children because we know from research in the k-12 system what's happening to our black boys and our black girls we also know that because of stereotypes because of a lot of the a lot of the ideas of what it means to be black and what people think outside of the african-american culture of black youth there's already in many cases amongst teachers as well as administrators an idea that this child is more prone to be a problem even if that child is sitting there doing the exact things that children within that age group do so in the pre-k system what we're looking at is a lot of students who are really exemplifying the behavior of average children their age they are children who are playful they are children who are creative they are children who might not always sit down when you tell them to sit down but i guarantee you children of every race on every continent do the exact same thing the way a teacher reacts to that when an african-american student or latino student is being creative is being excited is very different than the way those two metrics are seen in children outside of those communities specifically because of the idea that what they're doing is obviously automatically wrong this will lead to a certain behavior it's not that these students are doing anything that will harm each other or harm the teacher or even the cultural society of that classroom it is more so an idea that this student by virtue of their color by virtue of what mass media has projected for you over and over again is going to be a problem we also have to look at the fact that implicit bias as many people think of as a dirty word bias in general everyone has it black white latino we all have implicit bias the way that we act upon that bias is what causes issues implicit bias derives from people being raised and cultured in communities that are not diverse in america the majority of people of color live amongst each other there should be no real expectation that in a system where the majority of our teachers are caucasian females who have only been cultured and raised in caucasian environments are going to understand explicitly the trials and tribulations of the black community the latino community what it means to be a black student a lot of the burdens that students come into the classroom with be it trauma informed specifically for our black and latino students who are coming out of environments in many cases where they are facing things that you simply do not face when you do not grow up in those communities we're looking at students who are coming from strongly impoverished backgrounds students who have incarcerated parents or parents that's not in the home students who may be coming to class with depression issues students who may be coming to class and to be honest they're just bright students but to harness the exceptionalism of minority students is something that a lot of our teachers just do not understand when we're talking about implicit bias we look at research such as walter gilliams that showed us that when you pair students together black students in one group white students in another group the student who is often chosen as the one who is going to be the problem child will always be the black even when doing the exact same behaviors the one who is going to be sequenced as going down this path of no return which you need to remove them will always be that child and when we're talking about girls which i'm extremely excited about the framework of this conversation because when we talk suspensions and expulsions the ideology is always around boys there is no cognition of the fact that this is really happening to girls at all another issue and it goes back to the data point a lot of it isn't disaggregated by the gender of the child it is often disaggregated by race but you never really see it really delved down into what it means for females and in the ec space most of the data isn't there at all early childhood education so for the earliest childhood education space that data is so disaggregated so willy-lily as they put it for certain areas that that 250 that was mentioned earlier 250 young people who are in early childhood ed suspended or expelled every day is only of those who are actually reported we know that there are several centers as well as school systems that house early childhood that do not report at all for years at a time or where teachers are classifying suspensions and expulsions as something that is not suspensions or expulsion so we're looking back and we're thinking about bias we often have to create a frame of reference for ourselves that showcases how what this trajectory means and how it works for these children as they get older if you're coming to the classroom at three and everything that you're doing is being seen as different when you're doing the exact same thing that other three-year-olds are doing that is a problem for parents who are already overburdened overworked concentrating on raising their families meanwhile having their children be criminalized at such a young age what does that mean for that child but what does that mean for that family and what does that mean for that community we know that in the african-american culture because there are so many projected images that aren't things that are positive for us it is not unheard of that a teacher will walk into a classroom even with some of the best training yell harvard and treat you in a way that projects exactly what they've heard for decades we know that it's important and that black lives matter it's a hashtag but it's actually more than a hashtag black lives should also matter in exclusionary practice when we think about early childhood education or education in general around school pushouts there has to be a conversation as to why not only why this is happening because they think that to a certain extent we are coaxing the why but what we can do to change those things we also have to look at the framework that have made them multiply over the years because as much as we're continuing the drumbeat right now there's an understanding that there are places in Louisiana in Florida that are suspending and spilling these children right now irrespective to the marches on the ground the conversation and in and the least k-12 has shown some progress granted there's a lot going to be done in early childhood education just because it's not a topic that many people are talking about at all these kids are getting lost and what happens when that kid is suspended or expelled or excluded what are those parents do what are their recourse there is no due process if there is no due process for many schools in k-12 there surely isn't an early childhood education where most people don't even see this as an issue or don't understand that it is happening thank you and so i before i turn to budin because i think then we'll start to move into some of the solutions conversation i just wanted to pull out a couple of things and maybe have you two respond one of them was um amisha you kind of talked about our school's not giving black youth and black girls the space to um exhibit their leadership and a couple of years ago there was a really beautiful report in my opinion done by national women's law center and NAACP ldf um about educational opportunity for black girls and one of the things that they pulled out was that um that the leadership that girls of color are exhibiting in their homes and in their communities right many young people are helping raise their families right their leaders in their church and that those don't translate into the kind of leadership opportunities that are available in like the traditional school setting um so i kind of wanted to throw that out there and have you guys respond to that and then the other piece around kind of delving deeper into what are the things that black girls and girls of color are being disciplined for that are subjective like dress code violations response to sexual violence things like that and so i don't know if you maybe want to start and then shamali can add things or absolutely so um part of what we're seeing here is an extension of respectability politics it has always existed particularly when it comes to black women and girls there is discrimination against body type there is discrimination against certain hairstyles there is the ideology that unless you conform to the white female standard you are somehow doing something wrong just by your very being for me i spent my entire seventh grade year in suspension the entire seventh grade year every single day that is why i'm extremely passionate about this work and i say that because i was a 4.0 student i was in gifted education programs the fact that i was the only black kid in my school meant that i was isolated and i was singled out in many ways my mom went to the superintendent with the NAACP lawyer in florida at the time to have the conversation about why this was happening she got a call every day because i was not being stimulated in my class it wasn't that i was doing anything incorrectly it wasn't that i was being disrespectful to teachers or disrespectful to adults at all it was that the creative mind that i had was not harnessed by the types of teachers in the programs that i was in at the time so when i say that i look at young people specifically elementary school and students who are um in early childhood education and see that there students every day who have these amazing skills and talents as was spoken previously there are responsibilities that a lot of african-american girls take on when they are very young which exemplifies in them that they should and they are taking leadership roles and those opportunities aren't necessarily available in their schools nor are there people who are being strategic in how they make sure that they are harnessing that that they are helping them to achieve their goals and their dreams that they are telling them and reinforcing that they do have these strong possibilities instead the idea is that we need to keep all of this in we need to contain it we need to control it when if you see those same creative geniuses and somebody who is not a young person of color your reaction is entirely different so i think that we have a problem in the sense that things that are seen as leadership roles in your schools in your churches things that a lot of young people take on very early even at the early childhood education stage because i can tell you i know kids who knew how to cook at three or four years old and i'm still struggling right now so there it is real that there are people who have an understanding these young people who just want to one need love need nurturing needs needs of support because we do have to understand and realize that there are some very hard facts about a lot of our minority communities that are passed down to our children but also that there has to be an understanding that to bring out the best in our kids not only academically but socially emotionally and otherwise we have to be structured in ourselves and have an understanding of how to work with children of different cultural backgrounds and understand what those backgrounds mean in terms of their interplay in the classroom yeah um i wanted to gauge the audience and i wanted to know there's any teachers in the rooms any teachers okay um so i am a former teacher i taught in Baltimore city public schools and private school i taught at i was a substitute teacher i worked with kids since forever um and one thing i did in my classroom which the kids loved was a teacher assistant program i realized that the kids that were in my class wanted to take leadership roles and so it was a rotating system it also helped me because let's just be honest teachers or swamps there was no way in there was no way i could do that job without them um it's it was just so much that you had to come into the classroom equipped with and i would look around the school and see you know a lot of you know new teachers teach for america teaching fellows and no disrespect to the program but my goodness how do you come out of college at 22 with zero teaching experience and knowledge and work with the most challenging population due to lack of funding no stability i know i taught with books in 2010 that were from 1972 um you know overcrowded classrooms it's just it's egregious when you really are in these schools and you see how they operate and so part of you has some sympathy for these teachers like i see why you snapped on that kid or i see why you weren't so necessarily professional in the way you approached education because guess what you can't do this job and no one can right no one can do it um you see this high levels of police presence it's almost like you are inside of a prison in a lot of these schools it's really it's fearful i as a teacher i was afraid not of my students but of the system you know i would get in trouble if i sent my students to the bathroom one too many times i would get you know sort of slapped on the wrist and memos when students weren't performing when they came to me on a second grade reading level and i'm teaching tenth grade right so i don't know what to do here and i need help so when you look at the the the system of sending the most inexperienced teachers to schools that need the most experienced teachers and resources that system will never sustain itself it just doesn't work right so i think if you are in schools you really need to get to know your students you need to know where they're coming from you can't have a one size fits all model you've got to get creative because like you said these students are home running households they they work they might not be in class on time but every last one of my students they were at work on time they made sure they got there right because they needed that money so you have to get to know the population that you're working with the challenges where they're we are there from who they are and my students i was overwhelmed i must admit and i left the classroom because i was the teacher that everybody loved everybody wanted to be in my class because i love them it wasn't that i was smarter or you know more engaging or anything it was because i cared about their lives i went to their basketball games i talked to their moms dads on the phone uh when they had a problem that they were all like my family but it got overwhelming for me it's like i can't i have 180 kids that are mine and i can't do this job anymore and then i have an oppressive system over me stopping me from really teaching what i want to teach uh doing what i want to do you know there's no funding you can never take it on the field trip you've got to raise the money or something it's so many factors um that go to this and i wanted to really quickly shift on the pedagogical push out that's what i call it i don't know if this is a term or not but you have students that are in classes that don't learn anything about themselves ever until there may be high school you get to take an african-american history class you can't wait for that right you only learn about slavery the civil rights jim crow you never learn about anything that's related to you and this for me was from k through law school right the chapter where we were talking about you know racial laws and injustice my law professor left that all out like we literally skipped it and i was like i'm in law school though like this is what i'm going to learn about the laws that discriminate against my people but it was like we're going to skip that chapter and so i had to go in and read that law my own and the assignments so there was a lot of ways that i was sort of pushed out pedagogically i ended up i still love school like i went all the way to the end and i would go back but it was because i had an inner burning to learn more and i think that some students they're going to give up they're going to say you know what i learned anything in class it's zero proficiency i'm getting in trouble all the time it's time to go i can go and i can work and i can you know do everything on my own so with the leadership and going back it's like students are being diminished in who they are are and and it's a real problem that we need to address thank you um so both of you basically just articulated how incredibly difficult ludein's job is so um but amisha said something about being strategic being strategic about creating safe affirming supportive environments and addressing school climate in very intentional ways so i was wondering if you could just talk in your role which we all i think can appreciate is a difficult one about what some of those initiatives at dc public schools are what what the vision for that is where you see promising things happening where you see kind of continued challenges yeah um i want to take a deep breath i encourage you to do the same um and we have to do that every now and then just take a deep breath as the the task is daunting the work is daunting and there is a lot riding on us getting it right um there are a lot of students where they only get one tenth grade they only get one pre-k experience you know and if we if we're not looking at ways to to shore up those experiences they miss out um but i am really excited about a lot of the preventive work and some of the proactive work that we're doing as a district about three years ago um our chief of schools which was at the time um chief davis um pulled a group of us into a room and we were looking at suspension data because we look at data all the time as a district um and he asked us um what do we do to start looking at this suspension issue in a different way and so how would it look if we weren't even suspending at all you know and so of course the conversation starts around well we have neighborhood issues we have gangs we have this we have that here are all the reasons why you know we have to leave something on the table and he was like yeah yeah i hear all the neighborhood issues i hear all of that but what do we need to do in the schools to change the approach that we're taking around discipline like what are the steps that need to happen before it even gets to an infraction you know where we're considering suspension um and so that year um we really as a team and we were the student discipline school climate team um at the time we really as a team began to look at what does the research say about school climate what are the components that we really need to begin to address to ensure that students have what they need and that adults have what they need so that we can actually move in the direction of having a fruitful conversation around is suspension really needed um so we spent about two months looking at research creating a document and we now have what's called a dcps school climate guide that focuses on six components and 16 16 dimensions um we look at leadership we look at accountability practices within that leadership we look at routines and procedures we look at the educational environment um and by educational environment we even look at the physical surroundings that the students are walking into we look at the bathrooms that they use while they're in in their schools we look at is their graffiti in the in the bathrooms like what does that tell a student when they walk into a bathroom and there's graffiti all over it um we look at the spaces that they inhabit every it's their home away from home how do we make that feel like a home away from home so we started looking at all of the aspects we look at the interpersonal relationships in that building we look at the relationships between the adults and the students between the adults and the adults we look at the relationships that the adults have with the families um we also look at how we recognize our students um one thing that we realized when we started looking at changing the way that we approach school climate we were starting with 20 of the schools that had some of the most significant challenges this isn't something we rolled out to all of our schools so if you go out and you ask the principal or ask a teacher hey do you know about the school climate initiative it's likely that they're not even in it yet because we didn't want to roll it out to the whole district we started off with 20 schools that represented 50 percent of all dcps suspensions um we have 115 schools so those 20 schools represented 50 percent of all of our suspensions we knew we had to work with structures systems routines common expectations and the way that we speak to students and we had to bring back the fact that students are doing amazing things at all times and we have to recognize them and not just wait for them to fail and recognize that so we really weren't started looking at student recognition and then we looked at the the type of learning environment that we were creating for our students is it a learning environment where students feel safe to take academic risks is it a learning environment where they cheer one another on when things get challenging and how do we evoke that from our students um so we really started looking at climate as a whole um and we've been at this proud this is our third year we've been at this for um probably two and a half years now we are now working with 73 schools so first year we had 20 first second year we added 24 more and the this year we have now 73 schools and what we're seeing is that there's still a lot of challenge with the work of school climate but we realize that we need to chunk work up one thing that you mentioned is that it's a lot for a teacher to walk into that classroom every single day and teach all varying levels you have to differentiate five different ten different ways ten different ways almost if you have ten students and rarely does a teacher have ten students right not only that there is pressure of value added there's pressure of impact there's pressure of lesson planning there's pressure of your own personal life and your own personal challenges so we realized we couldn't throw everything out of school at once so we actually chunked up the initiative and we focused in on three phases the first phase we looked at was systems structures routines procedures do we all know what's expected as a whole around this school and by systems and structures i'm not talking about schools looking like prisons i'm not talking about students transitioning single straight and silent hands on your lap like all of that we ask schools you're gonna have a transition is it timely and orderly you decide how that looks if students walk side by side having a small conversation that's fine but we don't tell schools to have it look a certain way so we focused in on systems routines procedures and we started looking at the adult language with students one of the pieces that we look at in phase one is the non-contingent attention that our students get meaning what attention do you get when you walk into that building just because of who you are not because you achieved an a on the last test not because your behavior was different today not because you got to school on time oh i see you got to school on time today no not that kind of attention but hey i'm really happy you're here how did that game go how did the tryouts go like what is it about that student that you want to recognize so that that student feels like they have a place in your classroom so that was one place that we started looking at adult behavior and another place that we started looking at adult behavior was in the specific positive feedback that adults give students oftentimes we say great job that's awesome that's wonderful but that doesn't give a student much to build from you know but if you say i really like how you stuck in there it looked like you were having a challenge but you persevered and i appreciated the effort that you put in there that student now knows the next time i get to a really hard problem i'm going to persevere again not only does that student know it but every other student in that classroom knows it without the teacher saying you all need to get on it life is going to be hard nobody's going to give you breaks when you get older like we don't need to say all that right if we give them the recognition if we give them the specificity we're outlining what they need so that they can take it and move with it that's all in phase one right in phase two we really hone in on the interactions that everyone has with one another in that building right so we look at the adult student interactions we look at how adults build rapport with their students we look at bringing empathy into the classroom we're starting to look at how does trauma play into the classroom that you teach there is trauma walking into your classroom at all times and we have to figure out ways to respond to our students in a way that doesn't re-trigger them in different ways that we may not even recognize okay so there's a lot of training that happens in phase two to build the capacity of our adult so that they can have meaningful and healthy relationships with students in phase three once they show capacity in these areas let me just say in phase two this is also where we focus in on student voice we have found that when you give students the platform they have a lot to say and they will keep you there for quite some time letting you know what they have to say so what we've incorporated within this initiative is two times a year we sit down with a random group of students in all of the schools that we work with and we ask them all sorts of questions we ask them questions like how do you know the adults in this building care about you what do you believe the adults in this building believe about you and the answers that we get is just amazing a lot of times we think because students are maybe eight grade levels behind that they don't want to feel challenged but they still want that challenge they want to know that teachers are coming to school with high expectations for them and that they're pushing them we had one student say i know an adult cares about me because they make sure i get to class teachers that don't care about you just tell you to get to class the teachers that do care about you make sure you actually get there you know we might think they think we're doing too much but they want us to do too much to some extent the right way right the other piece is we had a student tell us that one way that i know a teacher cares about me is that they give me extra assignments if they don't give you extra assignments when you're out you know they don't care if you succeed or not like that is out of the mouth of the students right and so they know where the challenges and they know when teachers have high expectations so we really pull in their voice and we put that out to the teachers and we put that out to the school leaders so that they know this is what your students are saying what can we do to change the student perception so it aligns with what you think should be happening at your school um in phase three and you've heard a lot about this with dcps we have really intentionally begun to focus on social emotional learning in phase three that is where it has always sat we have an amazing chancellor now whose vision is very big on equity and very big on making sure that we have explicit opportunities for social emotional learning not just for the students but for the adults as well but i want you to know that this work was already happening in dcps but in pockets right and you will see the equity lens when you see where the pockets are right the schools that could did the schools that couldn't did not right and they did it as much as they could if they didn't have the funding to do it right so now we're taking that away and we're making sure that every school has the opportunity to have a research-based sel curriculum in their building and not only that this year we're focusing on making sure that the adults are on the same page around what do we mean by social emotional learning and how do i develop my own self-awareness how do i develop my own self-management how do i make sure that i'm aware socially of the different contexts that live and rest in my classroom and the biases that i bring into my classroom that diminish success for some students so we are having those critical conversations that are not always easy to have i will tell you that even as we're diving into some of these conversations now with every pd day we start the beginning of a pd day with an sel session slash an equity session we've been talking about bias we've been talking about mitigating bias it is not an easy conversation to have and it's a conversation that we tell teachers and leaders all the time that it is a multi-year conversation it never ends right and as long as you're alive you have sel sel work to do right so those are the ways that we're looking at creating the kind of environment where we're not just talking about suspensions because we're doing the the before work to make sure that we're not going into all of these infractions that lead to suspensions if students have what they need if they feel like there's someone that they can reach out to if they have a need the likelihood that they will have as many infractions starts to diminish so we're really doing that proactive work before one thing that i want to throw out for a talk back to you is we've really honed in on the fact that learning is about relationships you can't teach students and students will not learn from you if they don't believe that you care about them so we're really bringing that scope back into the classroom environment i know we're we're very set in education on data on where's the growth what is the final metric but there is a lot that happens between a and b and if we're not taking time to pay attention to the processes that are happening in that classroom the conversations that are happening in that classroom how we bring in the family voice and empower them to be an educational partner then we're losing a lot of the space that we can actually gain ground on as far as relationships are concerned so lots more work to do we are seeing growth in a lot of our schools i know our data is not something that we're standing on 100 percent because we're still looking at those pieces but what i will say is as a director of school of school climate and fbl i never stand in front of a crowd and say we just look at suspension numbers like if i can't go into that school and say the climate has changed and their suspensions have gone down that i'm not even mentioning suspensions because you need both right so that's where that's kind of where we are as a district i love that the way that you phrase that because i think again this is about not just talking about um i mean you mentioned sort of the movement for black lives i think um and a lot of that conversation sort of what's the alternative vision of justice instead of this doesn't work in the school context what i'm hearing all of you say is this this goes beyond what's not working to really thinking about how what is that vision for that space that we create for young people to feel ready welcome affirmed and and then to be challenged right in those spaces so i think we did a great job of kind of giving us what some of those concrete things that you're thinking about and i do hope that you can also answer this question but i wanted to kind of throw it back to the both of you first to talk a little bit about what are those policies what are those concrete recommendations that folks can be advocating for on a regular basis i know here in dc council member grasso has been doing some work with a lot of advocates around um you know what that looks like in terms of what we're limiting people to not do right and looking at the data and looking at trying to get it to be disaggregated but kind of if you could expand upon both here and nationally what are the specific policy recommendations that you're working to push right now um that would get us closer to what we're we're moving towards well i at acy we are always advocating for just better lives for children so we expanded through education health child welfare everything because again we can't talk about issues in a box you know the kids who are foster kids are the ones being pushed out to right and who are sick or no poverty all of it um but some specific education initiatives um i serve on the commission to eradicate school to prison pipeline and restorative practices um we advocated for that bill we are now looking at the data the research figuring out how can we disrupt this pipeline because it's real and it's really happening kids are really leaving school and going to jail um and prison so that commission just started we will be presenting our recommendations to legislation the governor next year we also really push for a bill pre-k bill um to ban suspensions and expulsion from for pre-k to second grade just as a start so now it's law in maryland that you cannot suspend or expel uh a student that's pre-k to second grade um there are some challenges there though because it's an unfunded mandate right so the the the the cities that have the issues with suspensions they need the money to sort of implement these programs restorative practices and you know better school climate um but it's a start in the right direction um because we are looking at it like why why are you getting suspended at four or five why that that's ridiculous right so that's a and and right now we're at the stage where we're in schools now and this is the challenge we're sitting down with large school districts all across the state of maryland and saying hey you've got to implement this law you've got to put it in your regulations in your student uh code of conduct you have to you know will this out to the parents and you need to have strategies in place for teachers because now they can no longer suspend so it's a process that we're going through and we're working with the school districts trying to see what this new law is going to look like and you know hopefully school districts across maryland will really understand all the county that this is a step in the right direction um some school districts are pushing back hey we we want to still suspend well you know we don't care if they're five or six or seven or eight but we know that with our advocacy they're going to start to change their minds we're going to demand they change their minds um so sometimes it's difficult as an advocate because you want to be friends with everybody in the room you know you you want to be you know just nice with everyone but when it comes to the lives of children it we can't be nice like this is the law you have to implement it and you let us know how we can help you because we we will advocate for that too so those are some policy recommendations that we're working on now but there's so many that affect our children um so it's really important to work amongst the education you know right now we are preparing for tough on crime policies in maryland i know you guys all saw the news baltimore city is always in the news for juvenile offenses so we're ready we're ready because come session there's going to be all kinds of folks that are saying it's time to get tough on crime and what happens is when they get tough on crime zero tolerance policies expand in schools as well because they're looking at all the juveniles in our system as criminals so they want to get tough not just on the crime outside but the crime inside of the schools as well so we have some defensive work to do we follow you know when crimes are happening we follow all the bills that have to do with you know juvenile justice issues as well because again we can't talk about it in a vacuum two things to set level set for framing um we will address issues related to the school to prison pipeline and include the preschool to prison pipeline because people have to understand that this is happening to three and four year olds this is not just happening once you're in k-12 with that being said a mandate that does not have the money following it is no real mandate at all at the end of the day while we are working towards building our legislative advocacy and making sure that we are getting laws on the books that will actually stop and in many ways prevent before stopping but ultimately stopping suspensions and expulsions there has to be the recognition that unless the funding is there to support trauma-informed care to support paraprofessionals in schools to support wraparound services for families that are going through negative environmental changes on a daily basis the policy being on the books is not going to funnel down to the people that it matters to the most i come from chicago being there trauma-informed care is everything for a school system to pass k-12 suspension and expulsion regulations and me working in a school system in government affairs that i know continually suspended and expel kids after that was done was problematic as a matter of fact 85 percent of those students within that school system within that network were still suspended after the legislation was passed now illinois has passed as well the pre-k suspension and expulsion you can't do that anymore either but there are some very strategic people and that's why culture matters and i appreciate the fact that you talked about that so eloquently because it's one thing to have it on the book that's another thing to have administrators to have directors of centers to have school districts superintendents understand that it is not just the proposed legislation or the legislation after it is enacted it is you knowing that this is going on in your classrooms bias exists you need to have that consistent and relevant training there needs to be wraparound services and supports that are available to parents as well as schools there needs to be someone there when this student has experienced trauma in their community when this student has lost a parent when this student is going home to food deserts or food insecurity when you don't have those things the expectation that your school is great because it's big and shiny and students are progressing is a problem when we talk about school culture we also have to talk about all of the elements that impact that and it's not just school testing and for early childhood education because testing isn't a part of that the conversation as long as there are students in the room people are happy how those students are being treated is very different and unlike k-12 where many cases older children can advocate for themselves they know there's a problem they're going to tell their parents they're going to have conversations and then there's the the parents who jump on board and those advocates who will also support them and push it along the way in early childhood education these are three and four year olds there is no cognition of how i should be treated i am a child who is there for them so when we're talking about advocates and developing advocacy around it specifically for early childhood education it is leveraging a lot of the work that's done in the k-12 space but also having an understanding that there is this whole body of educators over here that don't have the resources and even though a lot of the k-12 resources are diminishing today this group never had them to begin with so if we're arguing for we're pushing for and trying to make change and make sure that these kids aren't experiencing suspensions and expulsions at more than double the rate of k-12 there also has to be the understanding that we are developing these resources that will help teachers sustain but also help the families and the students who are in these schools be able to educate but also be able to explore be able to do these things and help bring out the best in these young people without overburdening themselves and without resorting to harsh disciplinary practices that are really unnecessary so for the national black child development institute one of the things that we are launching is the delivering on the promise campaign the delivering on the promise campaign is designed to eradicate suspensions and expulsions in early childhood education but goes a step beyond that by being inclusive and having an understanding of what trauma informed practices mean so that the teacher's first reaction isn't to suspend or expel a student because this student came in they're having a bad day they're not necessarily being responsive this student doesn't want to do naps on this is not these are not things that students should be suspended or expelled for having an understanding that our kids experience trauma every day and that in many of these classrooms there is no one there to support that there is no one there who has received the education or the training to be able to guide them along that pathway and if you consistently tell the students that they are not good enough or that they are underperforming or that everything they do is wrong those things get reinforced as they get older so if they're starting at three and this is all that they're seeing and they're getting dinged for every little thing the expectation that they're going to be successful later on it's completely erroneous thank you i mean i'm really glad before i turn to you that you both talked about sort of something that goes beyond just the school building and the school environment i think the school building particularly is very important and i mean in the context of our work we put out a report a couple years ago called the sexual abuse to prison pipeline which really talks about how what is driving girls into the juvenile justice system particularly and disproportionately girls of color is the experience of childhood sexual abuse at rates that are 70 80 and 90 percent right prior to any justice involvement so when you talk about trauma and this context of girls all of it matters right the i think we say trauma informed we throw it around folks don't always know what it means when we're talking about the trauma that girls are experiencing before outside of school in school sometimes it is sexual abuse and violence right and so i'm really glad that you are raising the context of trauma how that links to justice involvement what that marginalization means and to everything that blue dean was describing again what does it look like for a young person who has experienced that level of violence or trauma to walk into a school and have people see them and affirm them when they're going through such extreme kind of experiences but i'd love to kind of let you i don't know how much you're allowed to say about sort of policy and recommendations but if there are things that you want to add so one thing that we are beginning to look at we have something called the dc mr chapter 25 it's the law that pretty much dictates how we're supposed to handle how we handle discipline in in dc public schools and really even the charter schools there's dc mr chapter 25 dc mr chapter 25 and so and if you go on our website and i don't think we have the most user friendly website but if you click around or put it in the search engine you should be able to find the actual law one thing we are looking at beginning to do is change the language of chapter 25 to infuse restorative practices as well we are we are a district that is a huge advocate of restorative justice one thing that you have to understand about the restorative work is that if you begin this work in a school where individuals are not trained if only a group a small group of individuals are trained in running restorative circles and they're running those circles with any student who has an infraction what begins to happen is that it begins to break down the adult community within that school because teachers do not feel supported there's a circle that happens there's a huge incident that happened in that teacher's classroom and the student goes and has a circle right or is a part of a circle and i i've i've been trained in restorative justice i know how powerful that process can be but for an individual or a teacher who's in that classroom where that entire space was just harmed and violated and the student comes back and she does not or he does not understand that process and how powerful it can be um he or she feels unsupported and so it continues to compound the problem of educators who have lots of work put upon them and then the level of non support that tends to happen and so we end up proliferating this problem that we want to stop so i think with the policies that we're looking at i'm you have stated that an unfunded mandate is no mandate at all not only that when you put a mandate out there and you don't give the training you don't give the funding you force people to begin to do things that they would not do otherwise you know so we really need to look at the fact that if we are going to put those policies out where are the where's the practice building pieces that need to happen those should be in the policy as well in addition to what funds will be in place to make sure that people are trained so that they can follow through with those policies so restorative justice is something that we have begun to infuse into our schools for the schools that have had many of their staff trained we have seen significant declines in suspensions but not just in suspensions we have to take a step back in infractions because there is a space for us to have community circles where we build engagement between adults and students where students can have engagement with one another and they can deal with those issues or decide that they're not going to bring neighborhood issues into the school so when we create that space there's room for change to occur but with you if you just put a mandate out there it sounds nice we're not going to suspend any students pre-k through two or we're not going to suspend we're going to take it all down no long-term suspensions no expulsions yes we're done and then you go back into the classroom the challenges still remain so we have to be very realistic about what we say one other thing that I'm going to throw out there I had a conversation with a principal recently who wanted to create a discipline policy around when this happens this is what we do when a student does this this is what we do now we know the best way to support a student with learning new behaviors is to deal with it in the moment you can't say if you do this we're always going to do this that's not logical you know but the reason why this principal wanted to go that route is because the adult community the family community wanted to know if a student in your building does this I want to know are they going to get suspended so I think there's a village question here right I think there's a community question here as we're beginning to integrate more of our schools and there's out of boundary kids coming in with inboundary kids like you know how that looks here in dcps right we need to be very clear on the fact that sometimes there's pressure from the community to suspend and as a community we need to start looking at the fact that we have to look out for more than just our own right I have a son he's 12 years old if he comes home and there's an incident in his school and he is hurt I'm going to go into mom mode I am right I'm probably going to go into mom mode first right make sure that my child is fine and that when he goes to school the next day that that doesn't happen again but I think as a community we have to start to think in terms of what is best for our community right like what can we do what measures can we put in place to really address the needs of all of our students instead of just let's make the problem go away right because the problem has it didn't go away just shifted right so it's important that we have that kind of conversation that's very difficult because principals school leaders feel that pressure of the community of I have to I have to have a response and if I don't have that extreme response people feel like I'm not doing anything about the problem so that's another conversation I'm just so glad that you said that I a couple years ago was doing some school to prison work in the outskirts of Philadelphia and one of the school districts principals came to me and said I don't want to call the police for all of these dumb things but the sheriff came to my office and said that I would be in violation of certain laws if I didn't call the police for things that were very subjective right and so I think your point about community education is such a critical one we have a little under 10 minutes and I have a lot of questions but I want folks to be able to ask questions so I'm going to start with Nicole and then throw it out to the rest of the audience before we wrap up conversation I think communities want accountability I don't think they necessarily want people to kids to be put out of school or end up in prison or the juvenile justice system and what I find so interesting especially in DC or in communities I guess across the country is that you know my kids attend a predominantly white school in northwest DC there are no suspensions the one suspension that we did have this year is when we opened up a special ed class and a black kid hit another white kid and was suspended my child is a brown boy got hit in the eye by another student we talked it out nobody was suspended there's there's a double standard and so I think we we have to be really careful about talking about the ways in which we treat what accountability looks like in different communities because it's not true across the board and it's not true even in the schools that are in in in DC and the other thing I wanted to bring up is this idea about the climate survey and put that in and convert the results that came out that said black and brown girls are less satisfied in the schools in relationship to this conversation about suspension so I think that there's a larger conversation to be had that is connected to this you know push out but also what are we doing to make sure that the schools are an environment where girls feel safe they feel welcome and they feel valued because your own survey says that that that they do not yeah so let me respond to that we do know um and we were just looking at this survey today um we conduct something called the student satisfaction survey we'll continue to do that um out of all of the different student populations that we have our our girls of color are the ones who appear to be the least satisfied with their school experience primarily on the middle school level so we are actually looking at what are those reasons why our girls of color feel the way that they feel so we we definitely have work to do there and we also are looking at programming that meets the specific needs of our girls of color one thing that we we heard from a student cabinet recently that was held is that some girls feel like a lot of the boys get much more of the funding and a lot more of the attention and a lot more of the programming as it relates to initiatives that are in place and for the most part they're right you know so we are looking at some of those gaps that are in place and making sure that we actually cover those I also want to address the issue of accountability I think you're you're right in saying that people want accountability um how we help people to understand which elements lead to accountability is where is where that issue kind of comes in a family that does not understand that's where you need that practice you need the training you need families to be involved when a family does not understand restorative justice if that is what we do and it holds students accountable if you know the restorative justice process it has accountability baked into it but if a family does not know that and if they don't understand that process and that is what the school is doing for an incident that occurred they don't feel like that accountability has actually been put in place right so for that family the only go-to for them is the only thing that they know is suspension and that's what they equate with accountability and that's what they're going to push so there's a lot of education that needs to happen when you are talking about yourself as a district that does RJ there's a lot of education that has to happen for it to be successful and to that final point when we think about community and community education there also has to be a realization that even within the african-american community um there isn't necessarily always the understanding of long-term consequences when we look back at what happened with the clinton crime bill a lot of the people who were advocating for that in their communities were black people they were people who were ready for the issues of drugs and gangs to end and not necessarily looking at the fact that this is going to warehouse a lot of our people in prisons right now that is also happening around in many communities when you talk about suspensions and expulsions because we have come out of decades of where that was the treatment for everything it takes a long time to have those conversations and to build it up in communities that this should not be the go-to this is there are alternatives there are things that there are stop gaps here there are things that students need in terms of resources and support that will prevent a lot of this and to be honest a lot more teacher training there are a lot of questions and we have time for maybe one more um but i think i just wanted to point out a resource that washington and women's foundation recently put out that also points to girls feeling safe nicole race safety and nationally we know that one in seven girls doesn't come to school because they feel unsafe either walking to and from school or in the school environment so i was your i've seen your hand up for a while so i'm going to throw it to you for the last question and then i'm sure some of the panelists maybe can stick around afterwards to answer some of your individual questions thank you um i hope that you guys would talk a little bit more if you could about the way that dress code policies are both gendered and racialized in terms of girls of color and discipline that and the way that it gets interpreted well i mean it goes back to the whole implicit bias thing you see me coming in with braids i see you with your african prince or your hair is in an afro you have locks just cultural you know how you are who you are a cultural cultural expression um it's sort of demonized and criminalized and your opinions and your input are invalidated and this just comes from us not being the the melting pot that we claim to be you know we have a lot of xenophobia we we're just afraid of different and that pans out in schools so much you know it's it's so much emphasis on do you have a belt i remember as a teacher it's like i don't have time to focus on whether he has a belt i need to teach i don't have time for this level of scrutiny on my students i don't care if you're like i was that's why all my students love me because i never wrote anybody up because i truly did not care if you were in drug school violations but the other teachers did so the minute they left it was like pull your pants up put a belt on take your time get like all day long that's what you heard so you know that comes people just need to change their perceptions their ideology they need to have more diverse communities in their networks and friends and they need to learn another language i mean i there's so many things that need to happen for people to just stop having judgment on outer appearances and i come out of a school system myself growing up where we had a very strict dress code meaning that when you stand up if your skirt pay a third anything else does not meet the bottom of your fingertips you are out and girls got punished a lot black girls got punished a lot more than anybody else if you had a shirt they didn't meet the forefinger rule you were out that was it there's no due process no comments that's if your shirt has to come from here to your pinky or you are going home that was the situation and they had zero tolerance and that was how they pushed a lot of black kids out of that particularly black girls because you could wear the exact same thing an exact same age with a white girl and the majority of cases and i'm not the best example because curves miss me and the majority of cases that it was seen as a violation because your body type is different that's a real problem that our black girls face every day and i think you know to that point i was talking to some young folks in a dc public school setting where girls were talking about how they felt like the more developed girls felt like some of the male teachers and administrators were paying more attention to how clothes fit their body so i think when we talk about hypersexualization and all of these things you're not only your body is different and clothes fit you differently but people are paying attention to your body for reasons that date back to slavery so we have to wrap up i just want to kind of thank first of all thank our panelists who i think really centralize a lot of their work and and i know we have we're over time but i just want one sentence if that's okay in terms of uh recently girls for gender equity out of new york put out this report called schools girls deserve where they asked girls to articulate what is their vision for the schools that they want so very quickly one sentence i dream of a world where girls in schools have x or i dream of a world where schools are this for girls i dream of a world where particularly african-american girls can just wear braids and be themselves without being you know invalidated by by society little black girls have the same opportunities as little white girls across the country i dream of a world where girls of color are empowered by what they bring to the table and not by affirmations of other people i think that's a great note to end on so thank you so much for joining us today and i think some of y'all can stick around maybe a little bit because i know there were a lot of questions thank you