Organizing-Movement Lawyering Partnerships

We have worked in LAUSD with a commitment to South LA and Watts for years alongside our communities to decriminalize schools and increase positive support for students. Following the lead of long-term organizers, we work toward police-free schools to continue our push to create racially just education for all. 

Powerful community organizing has already led to a $25 million reduction of the LA School Police Budget. Fighting for completely law enforcement free LAUSD schools requires comprehensive community monitoring and documentation of school criminalization. We used a co-designed legal-organizing analysis process we created with CADRE to co-facilitate a project to analyze racially disproportionate arrest, citation and school discipline data.

Building on our decade of monitoring policy implementation and fighting for transformational change in conditions for Black and Latinx students with CADRE, we continue to provide direct support for parent-led investigation of school discipline practices and implementation of positive behavioral supports in LAUSD. Based on our intersectional work with LAUSD and LA County youth development spaces, we focus on creating real infrastructure for community-based safety to replace policing in schools.

We work at the intersection of education and youth justice, naming schools as principal sites of criminalization. We have collaborated with our organizing and advocacy partners to create concrete proposals to more meaningfully confront the school to prison pipeline and continue to support school-district and county youth policy transformation. We focus our movement lawyering support on LA Youth Uprising Coalition’s (LAYUP) leadership in the county and their vision for full implementation of Youth Justice Reimagined.

Along with our organizing colleagues in the LA Youth Uprising Coalition (LAYUP), we believe a Probation free future is possible for our county’s youth, one that is focused instead on community youth development approaches. As part of this vision, we are part of core planning on Youth Empowerment Support (YES) teams that would center youth and family co-decision making in place of law enforcement referrals and traditional court adjudication. We are hopeful LA County will fund demonstration YES team projects. YES teams will also help transform the ways schools handle incidents that would have normally referred to law enforcement.

We began our partnership with COPE in 2017 after their organizing won school discipline and citation reforms.  We  supported their organizers, youth and parent leaders in monitoring these victories in the San Bernardino City School District. We worked together to create Public Records Act Requests for community-led investigation into whether COPE’s policy victories were implemented to address their racial justice goals.

Together, we monitor school practices with the long-term goal of divestment from criminalization and punitive discipline practices and investment in evidence-based support and improving learning outcomes for Black and other marginalized students in the Inland Empire.

We co-design processes to use the information from multiple PRA Requests throughout the years for political education, shared analysis with parents and community members, and create tools to hold district officials accountable for the continued racial disparities in school-based arrests and citations.