“The eleventh grade at Francis W. Parker School, Community Connections’ curriculum is connected to U.S. History and American Literature classes. It provides students with the opportunity to explore a single issue over the course of a year through research, discussion, action and reflection. Students learn about a chosen social issue in issue-based groups led by their teachers, then connect with organizations and groups advocating for change relative to that issue.”

I spent the morning with one of these Community Connection groups. The students had been researching the school to prison pipeline and wanted to impact the rest of the school community by creating a bulletin board that would visually document the School To Prison Pipeline.

The following images are from the preplanning sessions with Jeanne Polk Barr, the teacher who is the sponsor of this community connection group:

The following are the preliminary sketches, created by the students:

 

The best place to start and/or continue your personal education of the School To Prison Pipeline and its place  in the systemic policies of our world is at, Project Nia.

[container]Launched in 2009, Project NIA is an advocacy, organizing, popular education, research, and capacity-building center with the long-term goal of ending youth incarceration. We believe that several simultaneous approaches are necessary in order to develop and sustain community-based alternatives to the system of policing and incarceration. Our mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based alternatives. [/container]