Rep. Ayanna Pressley is looking for to deal with the “school-to-confinement pipeline” that has resulted in Black women being jailed for merely sporting hair extensions to high school.
The Massachusetts Democrat lately reintroduced the Ending Punitive, Unfair, College-based Hurt that’s Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma Act or the Ending PUSHOUT Act in an effort to fight the over-policing practiced in many colleges throughout the nation, WBUR studies.
Pressley’s transfer to get the invoice handed comes amid new analysis from the Nationwide Ladies’s Legislation Heart that discovered Black women typically obtain harsher self-discipline at college than their white friends over minor issues like costume code violations and hairstyles.
“Our colleges have gotten to be locations and areas for studying and development,” Pressley stated. “However for too many Black and Brown women, interactions with racist costume code insurance policies, hair insurance policies [and] legislation enforcement in our colleges has actually outlined their expertise, and we haven’t seen these disparate punitive impacts wane in the course of the pandemic.”
She famous how a lot worse the difficulty has gotten in the course of the pandemic whereas referencing the ProRepublica report a couple of 15-year-old woman who was despatched to jail for not finishing her homework.
“Fortunately, we have been finally in a position to see her launched, however her story is an element of a bigger sample of the criminalization of Black women for minor misbehavior at college,” Pressley stated.
The invoice, first launched in 2019, would work with colleges in offering various assets for his or her college students. As an alternative of calling the police on their students, the invoice would require colleges to supply psychological well being companies, counseling, and care packages as a substitute of the controversial pushout ways. The invoice would additionally collect knowledge underneath the Civil Rights Information Assortment, enhance the Division of Training’s Workplace for Civil Rights, and type a federal job power geared toward addressing the pushout disaster.
Collaborating districts would even be incentivized by the invoice’s $2.5 billion in grant funding in the event that they decide to banning unfair disciplinary college insurance policies.
“This isn’t a one-and-done scenario. Now we have to undo centuries of damage and hurt that have been legislated, which have been codified in statutes,” Pressley stated. “So that is going to take a multi-legislative method, and it’s going to take political will and braveness.”
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