Pushout (21 page)

Janis shook her head. “No.”

Though there are concerns about the low success rate of students who enter college without the necessary pathways to success, when students have a team of stakeholders invested in their academic success and financial stability while in school, they perform well. Janis was full of youthful exuberance (and a fair amount of rebellion), but she was clueless about her own educational trajectory. I looked at her and asked, “How do you think schools could better prepare you to get to college?”

She sat back in her chair and thought about my question for a few seconds.

“They need to tell you your credits,” she finally responded, focusing specifically on the juvenile court school. “How much you need [and] what you need. Like, you know how some colleges are like, you got to have this together, or you got to have this grade point average . . . they could help us out with that. Or tell us, ‘If you want to go here, you got to go do this,' you know, like . . . we need to learn stuff. I don't want to go to college and just be dumb, thinking I've been learning all this time, and I've been learning
Little League stuff, you know?” Janis was searching for a pathway from confinement to college.

The punitive learning environment that many Black girls experience in their district schools is often exacerbated in their juvenile court school. The girls who spoke with me were removed from the classroom, suspended, or subjected to a written reprimand for acts of insubordination (“talking back” or refusing to read a book) or for acts that signaled a mismatch between their skill set and the material being taught, such as completing work early or persistently trying to ask a question about the material. Being excluded from their learning environment for asking questions or challenging authority—rather than for posing an actual physical threat to their own safety or to the safety of other students—further criminalizes Black girls in their learning spaces. Worse, it fuels them being disproportionately labeled as “defiant,” “disruptive,” and “uncooperative,” all of which may result in a written reprimand that can lead to more severe sanctions in the hall, including solitary “room time” or loss of recreation privileges. The exclusionary discipline that is often indirectly related to school pushout becomes more direct and pronounced in juvenile court schools.

“We're Inmates, but We're Still Kids”

Jennifer had been sex-trafficked, and her sexual victimization and three-year absence from school facilitated an academic lag. Her relationship with educational institutions needed a lot of nurturing. The juvenile court school was the location inside juvenile hall with the most potential to begin this repair. This was particularly important in light of how Jennifer envisioned her future.

“I care about kids,” she said. “[When I get older] I want to, like, teach somebody instead of locking them up. 'Cause I feel . . . I mean, we're inmates, but we're still kids. You know, a lot of these kids in here go through a lot of stuff.”

Jennifer understood the key role of teachers and wanted to present a different environment for young women who were “going through a lot of stuff.” Her persistent frown suggested that she had firsthand knowledge of the ways in which girls were routinely subjected to dehumanizing treatment, both in and out of the classroom. One morning when I was waiting outside of the classroom before a meeting, an institutional staff person walked past me with Jennifer in tow. She had been called out of class for a court appearance, and the staff person had to pause to speak with another staff member. Jennifer's expression and body language were meek, but the staff person leading her had a different tone.

“Sit your ass down,” the staff person said, pointing to a seat in the general meeting area.

Without a word, Jennifer sat down. She knew how to take orders. Her knees were pressed together as she sat with perfect posture, her hands clasped and resting in her lap. At first, she avoided eye contact with me, but she must have felt my gaze, because she finally looked up.

We had spoken a few days prior about the ways in which those who were supposed to protect her had triggered her, and I wondered why this staff person felt it necessary to bark “sit your ass down” instead of saying “take a seat” or something more appropriate.

“Are you okay?” I quickly mouthed.

She nodded and smiled as if there was nothing wrong. I did not plan to intervene, nor did I have the authority to do so, but I was curious about why this staff member would speak to her this way. I nodded back to her and looked down at my notepad.

Juvenile detention centers are not trauma-sensitive
, I thought.
And they never will be.

“The teachers' attitudes [could be better in here],” Jennifer had said when we spoke. “They [could] explain stuff to us and not get irritated so bad. Not all of them, but some of the teachers think, like, 'cause we're inmates, like, if we say one little thing wrong,
they're going to send us to our room or something. Like, it's just . . . 'cause we're inmates, they feel like they have power because they're outsiders. That's the problem. If they weren't so mean like that, it would be better . . . make [girls] care more about their education.

“I think they should have a thing, a program about why education is important,” Jennifer continued. “You have to go through a process to get what you want. . . . When you're home-schooled, it's more better. When I'm in the classroom, I can't do my work because I get nervous. . . . It's just that I don't like to be around a lot of people. Plus in here, they be arguing over the dumbest stuff ever, like who sit by who, or . . . I look better than you . . . but you in the same suit, so . . . I can't be in no classroom with a boy. You know how little boys make dumb remarks? I'll get irritated really fast.”

I asked if Jennifer preferred the same-gender learning environment that she had while in juvenile hall to the coed classrooms of her district school.

“No, not really,” she said. “I like my own environment.”

For Deja, integration into the juvenile court classroom was less bumpy. She saw it as an important part of her daily routine. At the time of our conversation, she had been in detention for a week and was feeling acclimated to her new learning environment.

“Okay,” Deja said. “About seven, you wake up, get ready to come out and eat. You go back in your room for about another ten or twenty minutes, then walk over here to school. You go to that first class for about, like, two hours [and then] come back for a break for like, thirty minutes . . . we might go to PE or to the library after that. Maybe, if it's our day. And then go to the other class for two hours. Then, go eat lunch, come back and go to this one last class. Then, we go back over [to the unit] and then it's shift change, which means we get different staff. So then, we come out and we go work out for like, an hour, thirty minutes or whatever. We eat dinner. Take showers. Then we have an hour rec or whatever . . . you know, they might have a program set up for
us. You know, volunteers come up or whatever. Weekends are different. We wake, we eat, clean our rooms, and then like, the staff might have a movie for us.”

When I asked her what she thought of school in juvenile hall, she responded, “Well, I like that one teacher, she does take her time and listen. She's really helpful and like, she . . . explains and she goes into more details, versus that other teacher where she just . . . I don't know what's her problem. . . . She just crazy or something.”

“How does she act?” I asked, noting that she positively responded to the teacher who she said “took her time and listened.”

“If you're asking her too many questions or something like, if you keep asking her for help or something, she'll get mad. She'll make up a little thing, make a big deal out of it, and then try to write you up.”

“So do you ask questions when you actually need help?” I asked. “Or do you ask questions just because you want to know more?”

“I don't like to be bothered . . . I really don't. I ask questions when I really don't understand something. Like, I really just try to do it myself before I ask somebody else for help, and then later on do it to see if I got it wrong. . . . It would be better if [the teacher] were to help sometimes. She don't want to help. She just want to give you work and expect you to know how to do it.”

Again, the inability for girls to ask questions—clarifying or otherwise—was perceived as a problem by multiple girls getting their education in juvenile hall. Credit recovery was also a hurdle for Deja to overcome.

“Like, every fifteen days, you only get one credit,” she said. “I almost didn't pass the eleventh grade, 'cause I was just so far behind. [The juvenile court school] needs to fix their school system or something to make it like regular school because . . . you have this school and then when you go back to regular school, [it's hard]. . . . If I were going to [another] school, it would have been harder for
me to get all back my credits 'cause I was just so far back. I almost had to take night classes and everything. . . . I'm missing something [in here]! Like, I feel like [this school] just [takes] a lot from me . . . it wasn't even worth doing the work.”

Stacy had a more intimate relationship with school discipline. As a self-described “problem child,” she often responded to authority in a very negative manner. Specifically, she often called people at school “bitches”—teachers, students, and security guards.

“Why would you call the security guard a bitch?” I asked.

“I had a pass to go to the bathroom . . . She [stopped me and was] going to take my pass . . . and then she took my pass! I looked at her . . . and said, ‘That's hella irritating.' Then she went to my class, so I was like, ‘Bitch, you're hella irritating.' She [said], “You going to make me lose my job.” I was like, ‘Okay, we can just fight 'cause you seem like you threatenin' me, talking about “you going to make me lose my job.” I got a mama that will beat your ass' . . . I'm like, yeah . . . so she [took] me to the office. And then when we get to the office, she [said] that she didn't say that I was going to make her lose her job. I was like, ‘Why is you lying, 'cause the principal right here?' . . . I will tell them what I said . . . I'ma admit to what I said. Ain't no reason for me to lie. I'm like, ‘Why you can't admit to what you said?'”

I looked at Stacy as she cocked her head to the side, folded her arms, and slumped into her chair.

“She know I don't take smack from nobody,” Stacy said, still visibly irritated by that experience.

Remember: hurt people hurt other people.

These girls' stories remind us that a classroom inside of a locked facility is not exempt from being a location for the use (or abuse) of suspension and other disciplinary actions that remove children from their learning environment. We are also reminded that for girls accustomed to using violence as a response to feeling
disrespected, being in a hyperpunitive environment may only reinforce negative behaviors that result in marginalization from schools. For confined Black girls, the juvenile court school can further alienate them from their education, sometimes for the most minor “infraction,” such as asking a question or making a comment to themselves. The problem is that this hyperpunitive classroom management structure affects girls' perceptions about the function of school and their relationship with it. This practice may trigger girls who are in trouble with the law and who are already marginalized from school in any setting. The structure fails to meet girls where they are and guide them through their problems, which in all likelihood leads to exacerbated challenges on the other end instead of leading them down healthier, safer paths.

A majority of the girls I spoke with perceived the level of the coursework to be below their grade level. Irrespective of age or grade level, girls in the juvenile court school were educated in a single classroom and learned the same material. This was a source of great discontent and anxiety among the girls. Those who felt that the work was beneath their skill level were concerned that they were not learning enough to recover credits and return to school with the necessary information to successfully reintegrate into the classroom.

“School here's really frustrating for me,” Destiny said. “The teachers here know that we're here temporarily, so I feel like they don't make sure that we're really learning.”

Another student said, “[This school] don't teach you nothing. I'm in high school. They're teaching middle school stuff.”

The work in the juvenile court school was described by several young women as “the same,” or repetitive, and the girls felt that their learning was stagnated by the absence of challenging material. However, for the younger participants who felt the work was above their grade level, there was a concern that they had missed critical information that might impact future learning and performance in their district school. For example, Mia said, “You're
teaching tenth grade while I'm still really in the seventh and the eighth . . . so you're not helping me. You're teaching me tenth-grade stuff and yeah, I get that stuff because you're teaching it to me
now
, but what's going to happen when I don't know the other stuff? You know what I'm saying?”

“I'm Not Retarded, I Just Got a Learning Disability”

Mecca was a seventeen-year-old foster child who had been committed to juvenile hall five times by the time we spoke in 2013. In our conversation, she admitted that she was afraid to leave juvenile hall because she was uncertain about where she would go or what her future might bring. Though she was often perceived as a “bully” because of her size—she was a larger girl—Mecca believed that she was actually the victim of bullying. For Mecca, “bullying” was part of the hyperpunitive learning environment in confinement. It was a condition that affected her learning because it was coming not just from students, but also from teachers.