You may have heard of the “school to prison” pipeline and calls to “defund the police” … but what does this mean?
How are our children and communities affected by the presence of police in schools?
How are our children’s mental, emotional and physical health affected when regular behavior is criminalized in the places that are supposed to educate and nurture them?
In this episode, Diana speaks to Beatriz Beckford, the National Director of Youth and Education Justice at MomsRising. In this important and necessary conversation, Beatriz breaks down what the school to prison pipeline is, how Black and Brown communities are being affected by the presence of police in schools, and more importantly, she breaks down why it makes sense- not only morally, but empirically- to invest in what actually works – instead of increasing budgets for police presence in schools, we should be investing our tax dollars in social emotional learning, nurses and counselors.
LISTEN TO BEA AND DIANA’S CONVERSATION ON REIMAGINING SCHOOLS WITHOUT POLICE HERE (OR WHEREVER YOU LISTEN TO YOUR PODCASTS!)
DYK? October is Juvenile Justice Month! Make sure you follow @MomsRising and @4KidsRising for more information!
TRANSCRIPT
00:07 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Welcome to Parenting and Politics, a podcast for parents who want to make a difference, where we look at parenting through a political lens. I’m Diana Limongi. Today, my guest is Beatrice Beckford. Beatrice is an organizer mom and currently she is a national director of youth and education justice at Moms Rising. Beatrice has an MA in women and gender studies from Loyola University and she’s the co-founder of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. And that’s just some of what Beatrice has done. I’m not going to tell you her whole bio, but welcome, beatrice. Thank you, can I call you bea?
00:41 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yes, absolutely, please do, and thank you for having me, diana. I’m a huge fan of you and all the work you do, so it’s a pleasure to sit here and chat with you.
00:49 – DIana Limongi (Host)
I am so excited to talk about a really important topic, but before we get into the topic, I always start the podcast with a question parenting and politics. When I say those words, what comes to your mind?
01:01 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I feel like those two words are so clear in and of themselves.
01:04
I mean, parenting is inherently political, like everything, and I think there’s something deeply nuanced about the way in which parents carry their politics.
01:16
Because we’re caring for, you know, our families and our children, we’re forced to practice our politics in really intentional ways and our stories that come out of that journey and that politicizing is one that’s oftentimes relatable to other people in ways that others don’t have to think of.
01:35
I oftentimes have conversations with people about charter schools and making decisions about where to send your children to schools and just all the stuff that comes along with that, and I remember before I had children, I was like, no, I support public education, down with charter schools, and I understand all the kind of things that are problematic about having private entities or public private entities that pull resources from the public sector, particularly our public schools. But I’ve also sat with parents that have had to make really difficult decisions and who want their children to thrive and who have found charter schools that are really good fits for their children, and so I think you know like it, politics is one thing and that’s like politics with a big P, but I think there’s an even bigger P that parents hold in the politics that force us to practice them in ways that are like a living politic.
02:25
I think it’s easy to be like I’m anti capitalist and I’m, you know, like a Marxist or I’m, you know, like an abolitionist. But I think that when you have to practice that as a parent, making you know, everyday decisions, not just about your own life but the lives of children who are dependent on you, it’s a different dynamic altogether. And so I think parents are some of the most dynamically political people, and I think that there more, more space needs to be created to hear and learn how parents practice politics, and I suspect that’s a lot of what you do on your show.
02:57 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I created it, because I felt like we’re always talking about politics and a lot of parents would say, well, you know, I don’t want to be political and this is before our we’re living in now. But even like the example you gave about schooling, parents don’t realize how much power politicians and elected officials have in that. In schooling, choices right, anything from like food we’ve done food justice work anything from like what our kids are eating in school to the curriculum, to you know the topic that we’re talking about today cops, you know, police in schools. There is so much. I’m like a paper clip can’t be bought in a school without it having been approved by someone that was appointed by an elected official or you know, etc. Etc. So, yes, that’s why I thought we need the space, because I really want parents to understand those links and yeah, absolutely, it’s an important space.
03:58
Yeah, definitely. Okay, so today we’re going to talk about police in schools and what defunding the police really means, because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions when we say that big phrase. Right? So statistics show that racial disparities in our education and juvenile justice systems are there. They cannot be overlooked. We have seen disparities in funding, the way our youth is treated and incarceration rates. The school to prison pipeline in many communities is real, but many people don’t know what that is. So for someone who’s never heard of it, can you explain to us a little bit what is a school to prison pipeline?
04:39 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yeah, I mean simply put the school to prison pipeline is can contrive all the practices that ultimately push children from as early as preschool out of the classroom and into interactions with the juvenile and criminal justice systems. That includes policing, that includes probation and surveillance, it includes youth prisons and incarceration. And I think too often we don’t realize that there is a trajectory that young people get placed on, and it starts with things as simple as suspensions, right or expulsions for behaviors that would otherwise be age appropriate but get too often attached to black and brown children, to students with disabilities, who are three times more likely to be suspended than their peers. And these are students that oftentimes need additional supports but instead of giving those those supports for criminalizing and applying punitive measures to their behaviors that are oftentimes age appropriate and or in alignment with their diagnosis or the reason why they’re students with disabilities in the first place, and so ultimately, the school to prison pipeline is a deeply alarming trend that moves children out of the classroom and out of the supports of an educational system and into one that criminalizes them and pushes them further and further closer to incarceration.
05:59
And the reality is that there’s a whole host of things that go into this. There’s, you know, racial bias in schools, there’s inadequate teacher training, there’s an over dependence on policing and testing. Like even you know, this over dependence on standardized testing is deeply linked to the ways in which students get tracked in schools for success and or tracked into continued discipline and punitive application of their, of their educational experience, and so, ultimately, it’s how we push kids out, when really the schools, as community institutions, are places that should be supporting the whole child, and that includes the curriculum that we teach and the informal curriculum as well. And there’s so much informal curriculum that happens in schools, in the classroom, you know, in the lunch room. You know we’re teaching kids so much informally in schools, and too often those spaces are spaces for criminalization.
06:58 – DIana Limongi (Host)
And to me when I started learning about this, there were two things that really struck me. Number one the fact that we’re expelling kids for things, like you said, that are age-appropriate. Right that if you ask any like child development expert about why is my kid biting when he’s three and you know, having to learn for the first time to share his toys, yeah, like anybody that is knowledgeable in like how your child is developing, will tell you that’s normal behavior.
07:30 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Absolutely. I mean you can read everything from you know CDC developmental standards to Dr Spock and Everything in there. If you look at toddler behavior will reference biting. I mean it’s not uncommon and but we’re seeing kids get suspended and expelled from facilities for that.
07:50
I had a conversation with a mom’s rising member recently who needed support and is based in Dayton, ohio, and she was sharing her experience.
08:00
Her son is a young black boy in a preschool.
08:03
He is one of the few black children in the school and was engaged in you know, some backpack flinging during the kind of free time with another Non-black child.
08:13
The non-black child was kind of told to stop and and her son had been it was forced to sit outside of the classroom and there were phone calls that were made home and so just like a perfect example of just like disproportionate application of punishment that’s purely racially motivated and unfortunately we see that too often and parents oftentimes are Sidel, siloed in to this kind of like cycle of shame, thinking that they’re the only ones that are experiencing that, when parents you know who have black and brown children, parents who have students With disabilities, parents who are low-income working class, less affluent, are struggling with these issues and this kind of disproportionate application of punishment towards their children each and every day. There are thousands of preschoolers who are suspended in this country every day and I think that, like I said, parents are too often made to feel shame and siloed, when really it’s part of a larger system of criminalizing criminalizing our kids and doing it earlier and earlier.
09:18 – DIana Limongi (Host)
And many times, like you said, like these are the kids that need the most support, right, definitely in a situation where we have students with disabilities.
09:26 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
These are students that you should be getting more supports in that we have systems in place like IEPs and other programs like that that can Be applied to to give them the supports that they need. And sometimes it’s students that just need to be seen as kids, right Like we’re talking, black and brown kids who just should be able to be children, who, you know, go through the same Developmental stages that their peers go through, without the added attitude of being criminalized or punished excessively for it. We’re seeing a growing number of trends, a growing trend with black girls in particular, who are, in some states, being suspended five to seven, sometimes upwards of eight times more than their white peers, and it has, you know, we’re seeing families reporting that it’s for un-ladylike behavior or for being in Insubordinate, which can be any number.
10:17 – DIana Limongi (Host)
What do you do not, and so I mean what she answered back like yeah, and what does it mean to be lady who hasn’t answered back.
10:24 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
What does it mean to be lady like?
10:25 – DIana Limongi (Host)
what is lady like exactly?
10:27 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
And what does it mean to me? I’m sure that there are lots of people who you know would say that I’ve been on lady.
10:38 – DIana Limongi (Host)
She said that her, I think her mother Talk said that she had to be a lady and that meant she had to be independent. So you know, there you go.
10:46 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yeah, we can take that in a whole host of ways, like I think that too often we see students that Are doing what we want them to do in schools right, which is to be critical thinkers and to not just, you know, like any educator that goes through you know, a dynamic education program to prepare them to be teachers Learns about Paulo, for rare they learn about the failures of a banking system of education. And what that type of Educational system that affirms that type of education philosophy says is that we do want students to be critical of the world around them and to apply that critical thinking into ways that make our societies better. Right, that they’re able to be thriving, participatory people in our society. But when we punit, when we punish them for being critical right instead of engaging them, or when we Create a dependence on policing that type of behavior, we’re doing a disservice not just to the kids that we’re punishing but to the education system as a whole. We don’t need robots. We don’t.
11:47
I remember, you know, I’m an 80s baby, so I grew up with that. We don’t need, no, you know all the videos with the kids kind of going over the conveyor belt and we don’t need that. We’ve known for a long time. That ain’t it? But unfortunately we have too many school districts that have become dependent on Policing that innovation and that creative thinking in our children and who are applying punishment Disproportionately to the kids that that need to be seen as whole, thriving and capable of fully dynamic childhoods. We’re seeing them be punished too often.
12:21 – DIana Limongi (Host)
You recently released a video where you brilliantly put forth what’s happening in our schools. We’re black and brown students who are more likely to get arrested, and schools that are predominantly black and brown Are more likely to have more cops than nurses. So we’re gonna listen to that clip. It’s short Because it really puts things in perspective.
12:43 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
My name is Beatrice. I’m an organizer, a mom, a godmama, an auntie, a caregiver and, like many other parents and caregivers across the country, I want our schools to be safe, but too often we assume that the regular presence of police in schools is synonymous with safety, when it’s not. As a country, we’ve become dependent on police in deeply concerning ways, and this is true in our schools, too. The reality is, there’s no evidence that shows that police in schools improve school safety. Instead, what we find is police do what they’re trained to do, which is detain, handcuffs and arrest, and more police leads to more arrests, naturally. From 2013 to 2018, 300,000 children in the us under the age of 12 were arrested. That’s a six-year-old handcuffed for having a temper tantrum. High school students body slam down to the ground after asking if he could call his grandmother. The same racial bias that we see in communities of color is the same racial bias that we’re seeing in schools. Black, latinx and low-income students are arrested at significantly higher rates, and students with disabilities are three times more likely to be arrested than their peers. This criminalization of our kids is unacceptable, and the kicker is that we’re paying for it with our tax dollars.
13:59
We’ve become so used to schools having to make these draconian cuts While hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into police in schools. This amounts to 14 million students who are in the same school, 14 million students being in schools where there’s a cop but no counselor, no social worker and no nurse. This is the question of values and how we fund our future, and not our fears. School budgets, like all budgets, are moral documents. When we choose police and armed guards over counselors, nurses and what students really need, we’re sending a clear message where our values lie. The school districts across the country are hearing the call from parents and teachers and community members To stop rubber stamping police contracts into our school budgets. You can help influence how your elected representatives distribute and redistribute public school funds into what students truly need. Join us in creating the type of school environment where all children can learn, grow and flourish. Join us in demanding the removal of all law enforcement from our schools and instead investing those resources into nurses, counselors, social workers and student supports that help all students thrive.
15:19 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Six-year-old in handcuffs, teens thrown to the floor, which we’ve seen on television. You know, you haven’t seen it you can google it and you’ll see it. Students with disabilities are three times more likely to be arrested, like you mentioned, and 14 million students go to school where there are cops but no counselors or nurses. And all of that is being funded by our tax dollars. Yeah, we’re paying for it.
15:43 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
We’re paying for them to punish our kids, which is crazy, and I don’t think that that’s intentional. I think parents are. They think that their tax laws are going to educating their kids, but that’s not the experience. That’s why we are having this discussion.
15:57 – DIana Limongi (Host)
So, yes, so, as a parent and as a mom and as a taxpayer, like I’m horrified by these statistics, right, I don’t, if you ask any parent you don’t want, and no parent is going to tell you that they want their tax dollars to go to. You know, preschoolers being expelled and not paying for nurses in schools, right? Like those, we want nurses in schools, so. So there’s no reason why we should be funded up some schools when we don’t have counselors. You know we’re not going to be funded up some schools where we don’t have counselors, or why we should be handcuffing children for acting like children, right, which is what we talked about earlier. So how do we end up here? Like, if you can give us like a, do we still use the cliff notes? Can you give us a cliff note?
16:39 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I can give the cliff notes versions of a version of police in schools and I think it’s important to name. Like, even prior to the onset of police in schools, policing in this country was derived of slave patrols and so it was a way to kind of quote unquote, protect the property of those that were enslaving people right to work as part of the chattel slavery and chattel plantation system. And so you know, I think too often we negate the importance of what that means in American policing and what it means now to live in the wake of chattel slavery but to still see this kind of plantation culture play out in our lives and in our communities and in our schools. And so we start to see police in schools kind of entering around the 1950s. It really comes. In some states it comes as part of the integration movement, but in other situations it comes as part of this emerging youth civil rights movement where people are pushing, and many of them young people. Right, we think about the civil rights leaders that we teach children about in schools.
17:42
They were young, they were 17, 18, you know, 19 years old, 16 years old, and so, in many ways, like while this is not often times explicitly stated, police were deployed to schools to really stymie youth movements, right, that were emerging and challenging what we have come to like affirm in this nation, unfortunately, as the American dream. And then, you know, there wasn’t this dramatic increase in the number of police in schools until we saw Columbine, right, columbine, while it happened in a rural community, created a lot of fear around what was happening in our nation and that it touched white America, white rural America. And it was also happening at a time when we were seeing, you know, the crime bill, where we’re seeing this increased dependence on incarceration, the one strike, you’re out, type of policies that were deeply, deeply criminalizing black and brown communities and creating fear and hysteria around crime, right. So any politician that didn’t appear to be tough on crime was almost guaranteed not to win, right. So we see this, this is not, you know, a Republican issue, it’s not a Democratic issue. It’s any politician that didn’t appear. And you think about the crime bill, we’re talking about the Joe Bidens, we’re talking about the Bill Clinton’s, you know, and a whole host of segregationist Republicans that were pushing for things that further criminalized things that would have been better dealt with, investing in communities, thinking about, you know, drug crises that were and drug ambedevists that were happening at the time, but instead were met with policies that further criminalized and created excessive policing in communities that really didn’t need that and that were struggling.
19:26
And so at that point we see this boom of policing, of police being placed in schools, but we also see a whole host of other safety. So quote unquote, safety measures. We’re seeing metal detectors right. We’re seeing video surveillance being added to school, the school repertoire, like I said, the SROs. So all this is kind of happening at a time when it’s like crime is crazy and we need to go, you know, criminalize all these like other people, before it starts to touch, all the while not really addressing what happened at Columbine as young people who oftentimes are dealing with a lot during a very difficult developmental period in their lives that do need a lot of emotional and psychological support to manage. I don’t know if I’ve ever met somebody that looks back on their high school career and it’s just like it was a easy peasy lemon squeezy. It’s a very difficult from middle school on through high school. It’s a very difficult time in a young person’s life and instead of like providing them the things that would support them in their development and make them not feel isolated and alone and ashamed, we decided as a nation that we were going to invest our dollars in criminalizing them. And so from that point, we see, you know, like I said, in a lot of urban areas we’re talking Chicago, we’re talking New York, you know a lot of these urban metropolis get inundated and get funding at the federal level right, not just city budgets expanding their police forces and including money for police in schools, but we’re seeing federal dollars that are coming out of these federal policies paying for us to have more police in our schools and in our communities, and we know the devastating effects of that right. I think Michelle Alexander talks about this really beautifully in her book the New Jim Crow, and just like the boom of mass incarceration in our country, and while it doesn’t deep dive too much into the schools, schools are very much a part of that, because they in many ways end up being a microcosm of the larger society. And so, you know, we start to see this kind of increase in school shootings. You know you have Sandy Hook, although there isn’t an immediate response. And then we have Parkland. Right, parkland happens and then this takes things in a whole other level.
21:34
And one other thing to say as part of Columbine that we saw specifically in schools is zero tolerance policies. And you know people love to just say, oh, it’s the zero tolerance policy and if we just, but oftentimes they don’t know what’s included in zero, it’s not just like don’t bring a gun to school, don’t bring any weapons to school, don’t bring any drugs to school. In some places like Louisiana, they were applying dress codes, right. So because there were such a so many assumptions that were made around, like gangs and gang violence and the role of young people in gangs, if somebody wore something that was considered to be gang affiliated, they could be expelled from school, pushing that student out of the school and into the criminal and juvenile justice system, right. And I think you know now we’re seeing this kind of push to increase police in schools and then these other added caveats that are really problematic in use technology in really harmful ways. We’re seeing the gang databases right, like we’ve had lots of, I mean people organizing to get rid of gang databases, which is really glorified social media monitoring, right. So some officer sits in a room somewhere watching people’s social media and using deeply biased, racially biased algorithms to say, well, this person is six times removed from this gang member, so we gotta watch them. And so we’re seeing students surveilled in ways that we’ve never seen before.
22:57
We’re seeing policymakers not take action on things that really would help prevent gun violence, right, like banning automatic assault weapons at the federal level, but instead we’re seeing them say let’s give teachers guns, even though the vast majority of teachers are saying no, we don’t want guns. And then they say, okay, well, if the teachers don’t want, we’ll just call this like a really nice person that’s willing to have a gun in the school building, so they’re willing to arm anybody. And we’re seeing an insurgence of police in our schools across the country under these kind of fears around shootings which, as I’ve said you know many other times before, and I will continue to say our tragic events that happen but are also becoming increasingly rare, and unfortunately, our response to school shootings is not to really understand what is at the root cause of why young people, or people in general, you know take up arms and enter into school buildings to kill huge swaths of students. Our response to that has been deeply reactionary, not rooted in any data, and to both like four students into active shooter drills where anybody can be the bad guy, right, and deep, deep fear. And we’re seeing studies like the one that was just released showing the long-term negative impacts on students that are having to engage in these traumatic active shooter drills, you know. And we’re seeing increased policing, we’re seeing the surveillance, we’re seeing all this stuff happen at a time when, if we actually looked at the data and at what evidence shows us keeps schools safe, it’s, first and foremost, teacher-student relationships, right, it’s, you know, bias training in the school. It’s restorative justice programs. It’s, you know, counselors and social workers, school nurses and psychologists that can support students who may be experiencing traumatic experiences in their lives or who may have experienced trauma in their lives, and so the data on it is clear.
24:56
Right, it’s not police, but we’ve come so used to school boards or mayors rubber stamping police into our budget because we have become so far removed from the school budget as communities across the country. And, in addition to that, we oftentimes don’t realize that resources in our school budgets which we’ve become used to like every year, if a parent hears like, oh, the school’s having to make huge cuts, we’re just like, oh, that’s normal, like we’re used to that, and we shouldn’t be right, we shouldn’t be used to, you know, our schools being underfunded, and some of that, yes, has to do with the way that schools are funded through property taxes. It’s deeply problematic and inequitable. But, in the same vein, because our schools are so sorely underfunded, we should not be so quick to let people rubber stamp things that are not evidence-based, like police and schools, over things that we know are proven to keep students safe and provide students the supports they need to thrive. And so that’s the quasi-Cliffnilts version of like police in our schools. But, yeah, policing we should be interrogating policing in our nation for a whole host of reasons.
26:08
In the same way, you know, defund is not a new narrative.
26:11
It has always existed.
26:13
And I think that, while people can get uncomfortable with the semantics of defund, really what we’re saying is we, as people who vote and live in this nation, have a say in how our elected officials make decisions about our tax dollars.
26:30
Right, if you know, we vote and we see a referendum that says we want to add a 1% tax to pay for paved roads.
26:39
Like. You have a decision, you have the ability to make a decision on that behalf and you have the capacity to say I’m voting for this person and I’m going to ensure that this person is voting in my best interest. And too often we kind of we vote and then we leave the rest of the work at the ballot box, and we have to stop doing that. We’re paying for our schools to be underfunded when we don’t say anything about resources millions and millions of dollars being invested in police in our schools instead of student supports and that can be broadly. You know school districts can be really innovative alongside parents and young people and educators, and you know broad stakeholders who are invested in quality education for our kids to say you know what our school district actually needs better after school efforts. Right, because our parents are working long hours, our nation does not have a comprehensive childcare policy, and so something that would be really dynamic for our families is to offer really innovative after school STEM programs.
27:44
We can say all these things as people who are providing the money that our tax dollars are making decisions on, and we have to do it because the time to do it is now. We’ve sat too long. We’ve sat too long.
27:59 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Yeah, so we’re paying for the leaders who are making the decisions about where to cut, and it’s always the music program, the arts program.
28:09 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
We’re paying for all of it.
28:11 – DIana Limongi (Host)
I wrote down SCL social emotional learning smaller classes right.
28:16 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
What if they could sit in a STEM program? Or what if they could learn to code in the same school building safely after school? And what if you knew that that funding was not there because it was going to the salary of a school resource officer who sat at a desk waiting for something to happen. You know like, come on, we can do better. We got to do better by our kids.
28:42 – DIana Limongi (Host)
And we are going to start a revolution. So, so deep on the police. So you know, earlier we talked about you know the way things are packaged, like you said in one of our previous conversations that juvenile detention centers they call it a school right and it’s a lot of. It is about like how you spin it so that it doesn’t sound as bad as it is right. Right, when we say to fund the police. I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of people who don’t know they just hear that phrase and they think, oh my God, well, that does that mean we’re not going to have people who you know stuff the bank robbers or whatever. So is it a question of like do we need to change that word? Because it’s not defunding? We’re not saying we’re going to take the five bajillion dollars and, you know, close the police departments everywhere.
29:35 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I mean, in a lot of ways we are, and I think this is, you know, we could get wrapped in semantics, right. Or we could say well, what does this really mean, you know? Like you could say we could have a whole conversation right now about the synonyms for defund, right, it could be reinvest, redirect, reallocate, like there’s so many, there’s so many adjectives, right, but we don’t need to do all that Like I worry about folks that spend time on semantics. Sometimes semantics is important because language is important, but I don’t think this is the case for that. And I think, in the simplest sense, if we say, as families, we have budgets, right, Some of us budget better than others.
30:16
And when we look at our budget every month as a family, we say, okay, we spent a little too much on takeout this month, so let’s move some money from the grocery part to this section. Or we say, you know, next month we’re going to have to have that, that tooth pulled, so we’re going to have less takeout and we’re going to put that money towards. You know the co-pays for the dental, you know the dental procedure. We make these decisions in our lives all the time and they’re technical, right, they’re transactional decisions that we’re making for our lives, for the lives of our children. School districts are no different, I think, in many ways, and one of the things I say in the video is that budgets are moral documents, right, like, if we don’t value the dental work, maybe we’re going to have a larger ice cream line item in our family budget or a candy line item.
31:09 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Anyone listening? Please don’t do that.
31:12 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I wouldn’t do that. But if that’s your thing, like, live your best life, but that’s a moral decision that you’re making, you know like. You’re making that decision to live your best life and not have good teeth, you know, and I think we have to take the same approaches and the same care, because I do think that families put a lot of care to how they manage their finances, whether they’re million dollar families or whether they’re families that are, you know, struggling to bring income, and I think families are really intentional about how they manage funds, and I think that that’s why it’s so important to me that parents and caregivers be particularly involved in school budgets and how funds are allocated, because we’re not talking about, you know, taking money away from the police and just throwing it up and having a dollar bill party. We’re talking about really thinking about what our kids need, what our kids are telling us that they need, what our educators are telling us they need, so that they can do the things that we want them to do with our children in schools, which is to educate them, to develop them as critical thinkers, to help them build a life that is joyful and abundant right, and the way to do that is to do it the same way we’re doing in our homes, right, like if we want to go on that trip, we have to save. In this way, if we want to save for our kids to go to college, we have to do these types of investments right. We have to do the same thing in schools.
32:36
And if we’re looking at our school budgets and we’re saying, you know, our schools are oftentimes having to make upwards of a million dollar cut here, or they’re operating with a two million dollar deficit, but we’re spending five million on police in our schools, there’s something seriously wrong and what we can say is well, you know, we really don’t need that, because there are other mechanisms in place that keep police in close proximity to schools if we need them right, and that when we look at the data, it does not show that police have ever been effective at preventing school shootings or keeping schools safe more broadly. And it actually shows that these other things do that. These other things don’t just keep school safe counselors, nurses, you know, school psychologists, guidance counselors, students, supported services, like it doesn’t just show that it keeps schools safe. It shows that attendance is improved, students perform better overall, they go further academically, they develop emotional intelligence that is part of their social, emotional and academic learning. They build better bonds with their peers, they have better repertoire with their teachers, they develop confidence. I mean it’s a lopsided debate, right, because we know that these things do more for school safety, first and foremost because people are concerned with safety, right, but they are all these other added benefits you know for we’re seeing.
34:03
You know, in the past two to three years we’ve seen some of the largest teacher union walkouts and protests, right Like strikes, and teachers are severely underpaid and have been for years, for decades. Why are we spending money on something that is not shown to help our kids thrive and underfunding teachers that show up each and every day for our kids? You know some better than others. I will say that you know I was an educator myself, though it’s real, but who are often, they’re, deeply committed. I genuinely believe you know, and get disenfranchised by the disproportionate value that’s attached to teaching as a profession and what it provides to students. Over policing as a profession. I wish we had an over dependence on teachers as opposed to an over dependence on police. I think our communities would look different, I think our schools would look different and I think that our children would benefit from a shift in that, in that dependency, for sure.
35:10 – DIana Limongi (Host)
I think all parents will agree that we want more of everything you just said more social, emotional learning, more after school programs, more you know, better paid teachers, less standardized testing. Though some parents might like that, I personally do not, and we have the research to back that up. Right, we have the research to show all the things that you just mentioned. So then is it a question of, like, a narrative shift, like, are we not talking about, are we talking about the wrong things? And uplifting, because all the things we just talked about I don’t hear a big media push to actually you know what I mean. Like we’re just talking, we’re talking about oh, some people are rioting because they want to defund the police, like that. That is what we see in the news, yeah, and it doesn’t tell the whole story at all, because the whole story is like what you’re seeing in schools, what the research shows, what the children respond to. How do we make that narrative shift?
36:11 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, you know, some of what we’ve been trying to do right, it’s there’s a narrative shift that needs to happen for sure, and, you know, I don’t think we can depend on the media to do that. I think we have to be creating our own. I think what’s really interesting about social media and the access that social media provides is we’re able to see the realities of this. Here in Chicago, there were some young people at some of the largest, most elite high schools here in Chicago that were having horrific experiences of racial bias, right, and so they took to Instagram and you have students, some of our, our brightest students sharing their experiences in schools, like you know, jones Academy and Whitney Young, and these, like elite I mean, michelle Obama went to Whitney Young, you know and so we can’t depend on or wait for the media to tell our stories. We have to tell our stories on our own, and that means young people like the ones I just mentioned here in Chicago, who started the Instagram pages which ultimately led to the Tribune, like they pushed the Tribune to do an article about the racial bias and inequities that were happening at some of Chicago’s elite high schools, even in a time where schools are remote, right, and we have to make sure that we’re telling our stories and amplifying those stories broadly. I have seen too many videos of students harmed by police officers. One of our partner organizations, and one who I deeply, deeply respect, the work of advancement project created a report called we Came to Learn that literally highlighted assaults that students have experienced at the hands of police in schools, and if you read some of these it’s it’s heartbreaking, and the quant, the number of them is even more heartbreaking. We have to tell our own stories and we have to do the work to make sure that those stories get amplified well beyond the traditional narrative of just like fear mongering.
38:07
That happens oftentimes in traditional media but also in our lives, right, we get pushed with so much content of that tells us we should be scared of each other and that person next to you could be a rapist or an active shooter, and this you know. These are very real fears, right, but too often they get sensationalized in ways that people put into policy and there are ramifications for that, and the ramifications are the architecting of a school to prison pipeline that pushes our kids into prisons and pushes our kids into handcuffs at the ages of six and seven years old. How dare you put a six year old in handcuffs like? That should have been the narrative, as opposed to the six year old had a temper tantrum. Like we have to flip the blame here because a child who is six having a temper tantrum, or a high schooler that wants to call his grandmother because he really just wants to go home, it’s just not his day is are being criminalized in ways that they shouldn’t be and the media and the public broadly kind of sensationalize them in ways that create these super predators which comes out of, you know, the crime bill and the policies that we’ve created, to say that this particular group of people are predisposed to be violent or criminals or predators, when there’s actually no data that shows that.
39:30
There’s no evidence that black and brown children or students with disabilities or LGBTQ students or indigenous students are committing higher you know acts of insubordination or higher acts of crime or are being, you know, or misbehaving at higher rates.
39:48
There’s no evidence of that.
39:50
What the data does show us is that for the same types of offenses, they are punished more harshly, and so I think we absolutely have to tell our stories and we have to make our stories heard to those that we’re putting an office to represent us, and that means not just the mayors or the governors, it means the school boards, right, which are sometimes represented by people who are our neighbors, you know, who have taken up this particular leadership position, and we have to be engaged in conversations with them because they’re making decisions about our babies, you know, they’re making decisions about our kids, and sometimes they’ll just those decisions are being derived from a false fear as opposed to, you know, the focus and mission of our schools, which is supposed to develop our kids into thriving adults.
40:32
And so I think, yes, we have to be louder and we have to be present and we have to be participating and we have to push because narratives don’t shift because you just, you know, you say Shift. They shift because we push and we organize and we engage in conversation and dialogue and we, you know, we support the efforts that exist, like the moms rising efforts and the school, you know, like black organizing project in Oakland and the young people that organized in Minneapolis and the award winning educators that are organizing in Maryland. Right to introduce proposals to shift funding, for if you don’t want to use the fund, go ahead. Don’t use the fund who want to shift resources out of the hands of People who are there to detain, handcuff and arrest into the hands of people who are there to ensure that our children have wholesome, healthy, thriving childhoods and can grow into adults who are able to accomplish their dreams and contribute meaningfully to society.
41:30 – DIana Limongi (Host)
So we need to organize and be louder.
41:33 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
We gotta be loud, and we’re mamas, we know how to be loud.
41:39 – DIana Limongi (Host)
This is true and I do have to say I’ve been following a lot of the young, like these kids who are now in high school, and it’s great, it’s so it’s. It’s been really, really great to follow them, like I follow them a lot on Instagram, yeah.
41:54 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I mean so much of like. What’s been beautiful about movement in this country, like in America, is that it has been led by the dynamic leadership of young people. I mean everything from civil rights. So I mean you even lifted up Ruth Bader Ginsburg, right, like the way that even she talked about her journey to fighting for equal rights for women was one that started as a as with her as a young person, right and then entering into the legal profession, and so, yeah, young people have been the backbone of movements in this country and, yes, they are supported oftentimes by parents who have shaped them into critical thinkers. And we need the schools to be a part of that too, and the way they can do that is by removing all law enforcement from the building, and that includes armed guards, ice agents and police.
42:44 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Oh, we have to have a whole another discussion about ice in schools. Okay, I want to read this quote that is from your clip. That I think is really powerful. School budgets, like all budgets, are moral documents. When we are choosing police, armed guards and law enforcement over counselors, nurses and student supports, we’re sending a clear message where our values lie. So tell us, to wrap up, what can parents do? Like? If you want parents to take an action as soon as they finish listening to the podcast, where do they go? What do you want them to do? Action?
43:28 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. I would absolutely say I wholeheartedly believe that budgets, in particular school budgets, are moral documents and, like I said before, when we make decisions about where to put our money, those decisions are loaded and they’re rooted in our values, right, what we believe we should be investing in, and that our school budgets are no different. And so, first and foremost, obviously, like you know, mom’s rising and we’re doing a ton of work to push mayors across the country to be supporting efforts that shift those resources into what students really need right the school counselors, the student supports, the nurses, all these things that are evidence-based and shown to prove that, you know, they don’t just keep school safe, they actually help students thrive and be successful and whole. And so we have petitions, join us, sign petitions, join our text to call. We are supporting efforts all across the country, from Maryland to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, illinois, california, to push school districts to really think differently about how they rubber-stamp police into our school budgets and instead to really invest in student supports.
44:40
And even further, in your own communities, I would recommend that people think about the role that police are playing in their lives and the role that police are playing in the lives of their children, and that means asking questions about whether your school has an SRO, what the role of the SRO is. Is there a job description that outlines what jurisdiction the officer has in school? Is the officer just you know sitting at the front door? Is the officer giving late passes? Is the officer who students get sent to when they’re having a difficulty in the classroom? And what training does the officer have to do that? Who’s paying for it? And too often we find that who’s paying for it is us and that we’re paying for it with our tax dollars. That goes to the school districts and too often pulls away from critical student supports to pay for a police officer in school, something we know does not keep our school safe and doesn’t help students thrive, and so I implore parents to really think about the role that police pay in their schools. Ask questions, find out when your school board meetings are, especially the ones in which they’re looking at the budgets. You should have a say in how many laptops I mean.
45:55
We’re living in a pandemic and the vast majority of schools are online, and we know that there’s a disproportionate access to technology for a whole host of communities, both urban and rural. Right Parents need their kids to be able to access laptops to continue their education and not have educational gaps. They also need access to high quality Wi-Fi, and so, if we can look at budgets and say, well, no, actually we don’t need to spend $5 million on police in our schools, particularly at a time when our schools are remote, but what we could do is spend time on technology, teachers and time funding. You know innovative ways to partner with internet providers to ensure that families have the access they need during this time. Why would we not do that?
46:40
And so I’m encouraging parents to both get involved with the efforts that we’re working on at Moms Rising. Reach out to us if we can support when you start to ask those questions and you’re in a place where you’re wanting to support efforts to redistribute those funds into what students’ needs are. I remember hearing stories about not having books or having old books that are falling apart, and it’s like, well, we can address that when we look at the budget, and the only way that we can address that together is if you’re in it with us, and so get involved in the school budget. Get involved, and getting involved can be asking questions and pushing for the decision makers to follow the data and to do what the data shows us helps our kids be their best. And that supports, not punishment.
47:28 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Follow. The data is so important as well.
47:31 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
Yeah.
47:31 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Because I feel like so many decisions are just like let’s just do this, but the data?
47:36 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
there is no data right, yeah, and we’re living in a different time. Like if we said, if your school district said a million dollars to police in school last semester, why so many things have changed since then? Like, why would we do that again? If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is the same and the approaches that we’ve taken to navigating life are long gone, and so we have to be thinking differently if we want to build a type of beloved societies that we all want to live in, and budgets are a part of that.
48:14 – DIana Limongi (Host)
This is an opportunity, right? The silver lining is it’s an opportunity to rethink the schooling and how our children are educated. For sure, yeah. So the last thing I always ask my guest is what keeps you hopeful? Because a lot of times, by this point in the conversation, we’ve talked about six-year-olds and handcuffs and et cetera, et cetera. So let’s leave it on a hopeful note. I appreciate that.
48:42 – Beatriz Beckford (Guest)
I appreciate that because I definitely can be a Debbie Downer.
48:45
When you’re in it all the time, you definitely can sink into that.
48:49
But what is keeping me hopeful, particularly in this work at this time, is a lot of the conversations I’m having with parents and young people who are curious and who are asking questions and wanting to learn about this new opportunity.
49:06
We have to invest in student supports and what students need, as opposed to continuing with the status quo, which clearly has not served us up until this point.
49:18
And so I’m deeply inspired by the willingness of people to not get caught up in semantics and not get caught up in what mainstream media is saying around defund or any of these efforts, but really willing to just say, okay, well, what is this and how can I learn more and how can my children and my family benefit from this shift in funding to things that will help them be their best?
49:42
And so I’m deeply inspired by parents and young people who are jumping into this conversation, wanting to learn and participate and be together in it, and I’m also deeply inspired by the young people and the parents and educators across the country who are successfully introducing proposals into school boards that are both severing police contracts with their school district and really thinking about this as an opportunity as you said so beautifully, diana to innovate and to rethink education in our country in a time when everything is kind of up and turned on its head. The time in which you and I, and many parents and caregivers, went to school is vastly different. Our children are not learning in the same educational group that we were in, and so we have an opportunity to be part of both hearing and listening and sharing those experiences and funding it fully in a way that helps us ensure that our kids have what they need, and so, yeah, I’m finding a lot of inspiration from parents and young people these days.
50:46 – DIana Limongi (Host)
Okay, thank you so much, b. This was a great conversation. Everyone. Make sure to follow B’s great work at Moms Rising and at Kids Rising as well yeah, kids Rising and make sure to tune in all of October because they’re doing great series for Juvenile Justice Month. Yep, absolutely. Thank you everyone for tuning into this episode. Make sure to subscribe and share and follow B and Moms Rising’s work. Follow us on Instagram at Parenting and Politics. Until next time, don’t forget hope is our superpower.
