A youth-led rally will protest tonight’s Milwaukee Public Schools board meeting on the heels of a report that shows massive minority disproportionalities in the Milwaukee public school system.
Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT), in conjunction with high school students from around Milwaukee have taken issue with the school-to-jail pipeline that has existed in the city for years.
A recent school safety report revealed that 80 percent of the suspensions in the MPS were of black children, who only comprise just over half the student population of the system. That same report indicated that black children were also expelled at an alarming rate for infractions their white peers were simply suspended for.
Leaders Igniting Transformation along with other Milwaukee area community groups and students will gather for a press conference and rally outside prior to a meeting of the Milwaukee school board. They will deliver a letter to the members of the school board expressing their disgust about disproportionate suspension and expulsion of black students, the presence of armed and uniformed police in their schools and the number of student arrests taking place at places of learning.
Joya Headley, a 16-year-old student at Milwaukee School of Languages, will be the primary youth voice speaking in front of a few dozen people during the event.
“We just want our voices to be heard,” Headley told Madison365. “The police in schools are criminalizing black people. We don’t want to be criminalized. But that’s what America wants. That black students should be policed, that they won’t be as successful. They’d rather have us in prison.”
Headley points to interactions between black students and teachers as being a flash point for the school to jail pipeline, that whenever there is an issue of any note involving a black student, the police immediately get involved. Headley said that if the police were not there, teachers and students would be able to learn how to work through issues with one another and build trust.
But instead of finding trust and common ground, students are finding gun-wielding police with handcuffs and metal detectors and zero tolerance for kids being kids.
TJ Robinson, a 17-year-old student at Milwaukee School of Arts, said that working out issues without using those handcuffs isn’t the forte of the police on site at schools.
“Most of the time situations wouldn’t even be that serious,” Robinson told Madison365. “But the police don’t even try to work situations out. Schools handle situations a lot differently when they don’t have police there than when they have police there. It’s completely unnecessary to have armed guards. Staff are saying they expect us to do bad, they expect us to do these things.”
Dakota Hall, the executive director of LIT, says that the police are getting involved in situations that don’t even include assaults, violence, guns, or drug possessions. Hall says simple a dispute between a teacher and a black student results in the police, who are already in full active uniform in the school, responding to basically take the black student away.
Hall says he has had some support from local officials in Milwaukee in terms of looking at the disparities, but that he hasn’t gotten the same backing in terms of simply removing what he termed a militarized police force from the school altogether.
Hall told Madison365 that the guns, the handcuffs, the metal detectors, the huge drug busting dogs that randomly appear in schools sniffing through student lockers all need to go.
A recent investigation into the disproportionate suspensions and expulsions from Milwaukee schools was hardly a transparent one. Several students told Madison365 that none of the students and in most cases even school board members didn’t even know it was going on.
The kids feel like the closed door mentality doesn’t lend itself to building trust at a time when trust is at a low.
“MPS tries to hide things from us,” Headley said. “I only heard about it from small talk around the school. But no one really knows about it. The committee was really secretive.”
Robinson agreed.
“There was no communication with us. No one asked what we thought about it,” he said.
The report doesn’t detail the precise infractions that resulted in suspensions or expulsions for black students. But publicly available data says school rule violations were the cause. Which means that doesn’t include weapons, guns, assaults or drugs. It’s things like talking too loudly or being disruptive. Those were the infractions that led black students to be suspended and/or come into contact with police.
The idea that a white student having a meltdown or argument with a teacher represents a mental health issue whereas a black student having the same issues becoming criminalized, is not new around Wisconsin.
The perception is that it’s just flat out scarier when the black kid yells than when the white kid does. Milwaukee youth have had enough of that perception.
The rally and press conference will take place tonight at 6pm on the sidewalk outside of a meeting of the MPS school board.
