We live in a nation where a Black high school student in Texas got suspended from school last fall because of the length of his locs — where in 2020, police in Florida arrested and handcuffed a Black 6-year-old girl for throwing a tantrum. And in California, a 9-year-old Black girl was suspended while learning over Zoom for sending too many messages in the chat. Suspensions of Black students are so out of control in California that a state senator recently introduced a bill to prohibit suspensions for K-5 students for “willful defiance.”
Things aren’t much better in Arizona, where Janelle Wood, founder and CEO of Black Mothers Forum, lives. That’s why Wood is hard at work to put an end to the mistreatment of Black children in schools. Her Arizona-based social services organization provides a space for Black mothers to congregate, discuss, and create solutions that directly impact the in-school experiences of students across the state.
“You tell the people, this is what the data says, and this is what we want you to do about it. We learned how to start to speak that,” Wood tells Word In Black.
A 2022 analysis by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found that “Black students made up 6 percent of the total enrollment across all 20 districts but received 15 percent of suspensions.”
With the help of a network of Black mothers, and support from both local and national organizations, Wood sees ending the school-to-prison pipeline in this country as a feasible vision.
“One of our principles is that I will confront ideas, not the person,” Wood says. “We don’t tear down one another. We’re a very loving group, and we have mothers come in with all sorts of pain and all sorts of trauma and belief traumas.”
Laying a Foundation for Action
Wood called the initial meeting of Black mothers in August 2016 for the very first Black Mothers Forum meeting.
“Our focus was on addressing the many concerns about the safety and welfare of our Black children, especially our Black sons. We want to dismantle the systems that have adversely impacted our Black community, and begin to create safe and supportive environments for our children and families,” the website’s call to action says.
While their original goal was tackling countless issues impacting Black students, their main goal became to educate, organize, and take action to promote healthy mindsets and relationships to end the school-to-prison pipeline.
“There is great power when a community comes together to develop our collective voice with respect to issues facing our Black children,” the organization’s website reiterates. “We tear down barriers to academic excellence due to low expectations and break the cycle of the school-to-prison pipeline. We can stop the violence, police brutality, and bullying. We can improve the mental health and well-being of our children and families.”
Now, Black mothers from all walks of life have found their way into the BMF network — many of them coming with their own grievances, pain, and trauma from time spent in public schools. Now, they can funnel it all into their work.
Focusing on Black Kids at School
Wood says deciding what the Black mothers would focus on when they first gathered in 2016 was difficult because of the multitude of oppressions Black youth face every day. Eventually, they decided to focus on the public education system.
Her background in ministry and her work in an Arizona women’s correctional facility exposed her to the intensity of how Black students are funneled into the prison system from their very classrooms.
“There’s different layers and pieces,” to the school-to-prison pipeline, Wood says.
“Many of our children get entered into that particular system through their schools, their learning environments. How that works is these zero tolerance discipline policies. It’s the mindsets that the people have that are teaching them that don’t look like them.”
Wood says 80% of teachers in Arizona are white female teachers, who at times have viewed Black students, particularly Black males, as a threat. This then begins the process of pushing them out of schools, into suspensions, developing a record, and, for some, into the juvenile justice system.
“If [the teacher] asks him a question, if he moves around in his chair, he doesn’t fit the ideal student.”
Wood says these are all examples of how the escalation into the pipeline begins. The teacher then “goes to her little policy, she goes, ‘he’s a problem, I’m threatened, he’s not doing what I needed to do. I send him to the office, right?”
From the office on a referral, that student starts to build up a record of discipline to the point where he gets suspended and, eventually, pushed out of school.
And the problem isn’t just one for Black boys. In a 2018 report by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, stark disparities were revealed in the disciplinary experiences of Black and white girls in schools. According to the findings, Black girls face a disproportionately higher risk of punitive measures compared to their white peers. The data showed that Black girls are six times more likely to face expulsion, three times more likely to receive suspensions, and four times as likely to be arrested.
Microschools Make a Difference
As a direct solution, BMF has opened over 10 microschools since January 2021. Described by EdSource as a “re-imagining of the one-room schoolhouse, where class sizes are usually fewer than 15 students of varying ages,” these schools support blended learning environments of grade level bands starting as young as pre-K up until 12th grade.
The students are taught by two coaches — their version of teachers. They accept students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds who have been expelled, over-policed by school resource officers, or whose parents simply want them in a safe space to grow.
Instead of trying to catch students being “bad” or assuming they’re misbehaving because of racial bias, the staff sees students through building relationships with parents and guardians, and interacting with students with an asset-based lens. This approach acknowledges the complexities of individual circumstances, suggesting a more empathetic and personalized method of addressing disciplinary issues, a refreshing contrast to punitive “zero tolerance” measures prevalent in many school districts.
Black Communities Can Put Pressure on for Change
Nearly eight years after the organization’s first meeting, Wood says she’s seen first-hand what happens when Black families and community members come together and show up for their students. Whether in board rooms, courtrooms, or classrooms, Wood says it’s important for Black faces to occupy those spaces to invoke the change they wish for. And part of not taking no for an answer is also holding national organizations like the NAACP accountable to the promises they make to locally based organizations like BMF as well.
“I have been shocked to hear the when the NAACP tells me they’re not for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” Wood says. “They need to change their national agenda; they sit down and be a part of being on the ground and seeing what’s going on, and listening to parents, but they need to change that national agenda, to support children, to say we are focused on making sure our children have safe and supportive learning environments, wherever that may be.
BMF is bringing together national agendas and ideologies as dozens of organizations from across the country flock to the National Mother’s Rally in Washington, D.C., on January 24 to discuss ways to further dismantle the system.
“The National Parent Union, which is a group who I had not worked with before — I am now connected with them, and they are helping us with this work to mobilize with the mothers,” Wood says. “We’re creating a call to action to mothers across the nation to address ending the school-to-prison pipeline and to supporting alternative educational environments for their children while we deal with what’s going on in the traditional public schools.”
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