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• ANDREW: Thinking about zero tolerance and how it's influenced policy over the past three years, it's very tangible, right, in recent memory. It's just a long line, but it requires so much collective effort to think through how you have to vigilantly attack these things like consistently be contributing to the narrative that Black and Brown children are not habitually violent. They're not super predators. They deserve abundant grace and compassion and care in their schools.

• PAIGE: Welcome to the IDRA Classnotes podcast. I'm Paige Duggans Clay, IDRA's chief legal analyst. We are continuing our series of episodes on education and the law, where we work to uplift the stories behind landmark cases and laws impacting education civil rights.

  In March 2024, we observed the 30th anniversary of the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, a landmark bill that promised to bring about an end to gun violence on school campuses. Despite affirmations that the legislation would address lawmakers' concerns about school-based violence, research has made clear that schools are no safer now than they were when the law went into effect.

  While school shootings are still rare, they've increased in prevalence across the nation since the adoption of the Gun Free Schools Act. Despite the law's failure to mitigate this alarming trend, policymakers have continued to rely on the Gun Free Schools Act and its flawed underlying policy rationales to justify harmful discipline and school safety measures. These include hardening school facilities, surveilling students and families, investing in school policing and security, and relying on so-called zero-tolerance punishments that push students out of school and into the criminal justice system. Three decades after the Gun Free Schools Act's passage, these policies and practices continue to harm students, particularly Black students, other students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.

• PAIGE: Today, we'll unpack the history and background of the 1994 law and explore what lessons school leaders and policymakers can learn to create truly safe, supportive schools. I'm so delighted that joining me for this conversation are two of my absolute favorite people on the planet, Morgan Craven and Andrew Hairston. Returning to the Classnotes podcast, Morgan is IDRA's national director of policy, advocacy, and community engagement. Morgan coordinates and works to advance IDRA's mission to secure educational justice for all young people by promoting excellent and equitable schools that prepare all young people to access and succeed in college. And she's a national expert on school discipline and safety issues, including having recently presented expert testimony before two congressional committee hearings on school safety issues. Thanks for joining us today, Morgan.

  I'm also so thrilled to extend a special welcome to my friend, Andrew Harrison, who serves as the director of the Education Justice project for Texas Appleseed. In that role, Andrew engages in public policy advocacy and works with community groups to diminish the presence and influence of school police officers across the state of Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.

  Before we dive into our discussion about the Gun Free Schools Act, though, I'd love the listeners to get to know both of you just a little bit better. Maybe you could start by sharing just a little bit about your interest and what brought you into this work of doing education justice and school safety-related issues.

• MORGAN: So, I can start. I have always deeply appreciated and thank my parents and grandparents for these issues related to access to education. They always impressed upon me the value of education, they were very clear about how education was denied to young people, particularly Black people, people in our family. And so, I just grew up with that understanding.

  And in law school, I wanted to focus on criminal legal issues and thought that I would go into a career as a public defender but moved to Texas and found that to be very difficult, given some sort of horrible ways of protecting people in the criminal legal system in Texas and a sort of lack of infrastructure to do that work. And so, through a project that I worked on at the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, fell in love with school-to-prison pipeline issues as sort of the coming together of education issues, access to school issues, issues that specifically impact Black students and other systemically marginalized students. And thinking about how the criminal legal system is sort of mashed together with our education system in horrible and harmful ways and have been doing that work ever since, both representing kids and families and then doing state and federal and local policy work in that area.

• ANDREW: That's a beautiful reflection, Morgan. And I have a similar one. As I started law school, I thought I'd be a public defender in Louisiana where I went to law school and where my mother was born and raised, but shifted my thinking as the nation took in the news of Michael Brown's murder in 2014, which coincided with me beginning my second year of law school. But kind of zooming out from that a bit, I come from a line of educators. My maternal grandmother was a seventh-grade math teacher in Madison Parish, Louisiana for three years. My mother is currently an assistant principal at a middle school in Oklahoma City Public Schools.

  And I do aspire eventually to be a classroom teacher. I'll have to take my expertise from the current Sunday school classes I teach of first through sixth graders in Austin into a classroom teaching career. But kind of the interest that developed as the nation was reckoning with the beginning stages of the Black Lives Matter era and thinking of how education has played out professionally and personally in my family's life, it kind of converged into this career of mine.

• PAIGE: I really love that and so grateful for y'all for sharing those reflections, particularly as both of you have had such a tremendous influence and impact on my career and thinking about being an education justice attorney. So, I appreciate y'all opening us up with that. And since we're doing this reflection, I thought we'd sort of take it back. Today's topic is around the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994. And just to sort of orient us to what was happening in 1994, I was doing some research. I'm a huge fan of Britpop, and it was a great year for that genre. Oasis released Definitely Maybe. Blur released Parklife. These are formative albums.

  And it was an even bigger year, right, for our culture. 1994 was The Lion King, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Dumb and Dumber, right? These are iconic movies and moments, I think, for so many of us. While reflecting on some of those cultural things may make many of us feel nostalgic, on the flip side of that, 1994 was also a tumultuous and I think watershed year for our national politics and maybe sort of a predecessor to the moment that we find ourselves in now with things swirling. And so, I wonder, Morgan, could you give us some framing? What was the national conversation and the landscape looking like at the national level that sort of led us to this moment of adopting the 1994 Gun Free Schools Act?

• MORGAN: Yeah, happy to do that. And I'll just say as a person who was not a Britpop stan in 1994, it was also the year that OutKast's first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, was released. Shout out to 1994. So, I will tell you, as I kind of thought about this conversation and this question in particular, I really referenced a book which I encourage listeners to get and read. It's called Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-prison Pipeline. It was written by Mark Warren but really draws on the stories of a lot of incredible young people and families who have done school-to-prison pipeline advocacy and continue to do it to this day and just the importance of those community-led, student-led, family-led movements to try to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and push back against some of the harmful policies that we'll talk about today.

  So, I'm drawing from his book quite a bit before I pass to Andrew to sort of dig into what 1994 was really like. But one thing that I know all of us recognize is that when we look at a lot of these harmful policies, both school-to-prison pipeline policies and the very, very related larger criminal legal system mass incarceration policies, they're deeply rooted in racist beliefs, and ideologies and stereotypes, particularly about Black young people and Black families, which I know Andrew will talk about more.

• MORGAN: And so we can look at the decades leading up to 1994, even policies that were sort of more focused on what we would think of as sort of the larger criminal legal domain as being highly relevant to how we thought about young people in schools, how a lot of policymakers thought about young people of color in schools, young Black people in schools and how they should be monitored and surveilled and policed and criminalized.

  So just to name a few of those sorts of major milestones that are highlighted by Mark Warren. In 1965, it was under President Johnson. So, he passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which gave the federal government more of a direct role in police courts, and prisons. And that was a novel concept at the time that the federal government would be that involved in those spheres. And that was in 1965. So, around the time of what we would know is a lot of passage of major civil rights legislation, there was also the passage of these pieces of legislation that were highly harmful to communities of color and Black communities.

  In 1968, the Safe Streets Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which started to give federal funds to local police departments. And that's certainly a theme that we see even today is that federal funding of local police departments, including school police departments. And increasingly around this time, law enforcement agencies began to take on other tasks beyond what they traditionally had, including intervening in health and housing and education policies and programs. President Nixon increased punitive policing practices. Under the Ford administration, there was an expansion of juvenile detention facilities. And under the Carter administration, there was expanded policing and public housing.

• MORGAN: And so, again, the same ideologies are driving these policies. It's a bipartisan effort to police communities and insert federal dollars and federal policy into local and state policing decisions. And of course, leading up to 1994, right before that, there was the federal war on drugs led by President Reagan and changes to a lot of our sentencing laws and just real increases in our mass incarceration system. I will pass now to you, Andrew, now that I've taken us through several decades very quickly, leading up to 1994.

• ANDREW: I appreciate that very helpful background, Morgan. So yeah, with all the cultural moments that Paige lifted up, 1994 was indeed a very fascinating year for our national politics. You're thinking about Bill Clinton a couple of years into his first term, and he's already considering his reelection bid of 1996. Certainly, he and Hillary are working on the healthcare initiative trying to get that program. And it's not going anywhere. And so you also contend with this backlash as often is the case with the president of any given party and the makeup of Congress that they have to deal with, right, the election of Newt Gingrich and several other Republicans in 1994. You start the Clinton administration with a relatively centrist view on a lot of these things. And increasingly, as you're moving through the '90s, you have a rightward push, especially on issues of school safety and how young people will even be discussed in political spaces.

• ANDREW: So you can think about that context as the Gun Free Schools Act is being debated. Think about the crime bill of 1994 as well, which is a whole other topic. But that background, right, is very much so evident in how this policy debate took hold, right? This notion that young people are super predators who need to be brought to heel and almost direct quote from Hillary, from that era. And to think about that pathologizing the Black families that had continued, Morgan gave a very beautiful overview of the late 20th century.

  But I wanted to lift up a guy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who worked for the Johnson and Nixon administrations as is relevant for this conversation, and wrote a report on the Negro family during his time in the federal government that recommends many initiatives, but also examines this racist notion that Black people are somehow responsible for the woes that they face, for the lack of investment that they have faced, and that single-parent households, for example, are the reason that Black families are suffering in 20th century America. So that, I think, gives a lot of context to the landscape that led to the passage of the Gun Free Schools Act in 1994. And happy to discuss what kind of came after that.

• PAIGE: Yeah, what I'm learning from both of you is that while some advocates may have touted and some lawmakers might have said that this is about school safety, addressing guns, the presence of guns in our schools and their lack of regulation, that there's a more insidious background here. You must view this piece of legislation within this broader backdrop of efforts to police control communities of color and Black families. So, I think that context is critically important and is often forgotten in our debates. So I thank you both for lifting that up. We've been talking about this act now for a couple of minutes. And Andrew, I wonder if you might just remind our listeners what's in the Gun Free Schools Act? What are its main requirements for schools?

• ANDREW: Yeah, thank you, Paige. Yeah, so if schools under the Gun-Free Schools Act, often referred to as local education agencies, receive federal funding, which most schools do in the US, they must expel young people, children, for gun possession if that occurs on the school campus. One thing I will note about the Gun Free Schools Act and its introduction here is that it carves out an exception, this is one among many, that it doesn't apply to a gun that is stored inside a lot vehicle on school property. So I want us to kind of hold that contradiction, right? That if you are a kid and it is deemed that you are possessing a gun, you'll be expelled. But the kind of nuances given for gun rights, for adults like the ability to have different rules for different people in the same environment that very much so, I think, contextualizes school policy from the Gun Free Schools Act on.

• PAIGE: Deeply appreciate that nuance, which again, I think is often missed in these conversations. And another piece of context that just really fascinates me as we look back on sort of the history of this act and how it connects to the present is that this is, of course, the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994. And of course, it was motivated at least ostensibly in the record around concerns about gun violence. But of course, we are now in a new era where Columbine, the shooting at Columbine High School hadn't even happened yet. Of course, that shooting occurred in 1999.

  Five years after the Gun Free Schools Act, really ushering in this new era, right? Again, targeted school shootings are very rare, but we are seeing them increase in cadence and in prevalence. And so, I find it fascinating to think about this moment where we were attempting to, at least on its face, to regulate guns in schools, but the outcome just has not been the case. We've seen a rise in these school-based incidents, particularly involving weapons. And how we're thinking about safety and discipline issues now in light of this law is sort of failure to prevent that. I just find that very, very interesting. But I'll stop editorializing. I'll get off my proverbial soapbox and come back to our wonderful experts here. And one of the other interesting nuances of this law is that the law itself, as Andrew just laid out, is focused on the regulation of guns. And it very specifically talks about what happens to young people who bring guns on school grounds.

  But of course, that policy, and y'all's background has been so helpful, has translated to a whole web of harmful discipline and safety practices that have been sort of swept in. And so, Morgan, I wonder if you could sort of help our listeners understand how the Gun Free Schools Act and this emphasis on guns in schools has since been translated into zero tolerance and regulating even more closely the behavior of young people in our schools.

• MORGAN: Yeah. So, I think that there are three elements to look at. One is what the Gun-Free Schools Act signified as a major piece of legislation that acted on the rhetoric of the time that, as Andrew laid out, was completely racist and not based in any research or real data, relied on stereotypes, dangerous stereotypes about Black communities and communities of color. But what that did is that it created and sort of codified a climate of saying, "Okay. Well, these stereotypes," which have now been absolutely proven to be untrue, we knew they weren't at the time.

  These stereotypes in the ways that we are thinking about young people, framing them as juvenile super predators, as Andrew laid out, how we think about their capacity to excel in school and go on to live the lives that they are meant to live. And who deserves to have those beliefs held about them and who doesn't? How we think about Black communities and Black families. And as Andrew laid out, the pathologizing of Black families. So all of that created a climate that then made it okay for local and state leaders to say, "Okay, well, if that's the time that we're in, here are the policies that we need to pass." So really this sort of rhetoric in a climate of the time. And then the policy itself led very easily in some ways to adopting state-level policies. So, the GFSA said, "We're taking a zero-tolerance approach to certain behaviors." There's automatic expulsion if a student has a gun in this specific context, as Andrew said. So then states start saying, "Well, if there's zero tolerance there and we can expel there, we'll add on these other so-called offenses for which we will also quickly and easily expel or suspend or send students into alternative schools."

• MORGAN: And so, the federal policy itself easily led to the implementation of highly related state policies based again on this climate that was created around racist stereotypes and lies about students and Black students in particular. And then as you were pointing out, Paige, it was a time where people both-- because of that climate and because of the literal policy language were conflating safety and discipline and saying if we want safer schools, then these are the things that feel like they will increase safety: cracking down on small offenses, having more police in schools, expelling students quickly, taking a zero-tolerance approach. Now there is nothing in research that says that we should put together or that we should assume that increased school safety is connected to harsh discipline and policing of students. The research says the opposite that those two things are opposed. But at the time, again, both the rhetoric and the climate and the actual policy itself were doubling down on this idea that those two things are connected and creating the space where then state policymakers could adopt these harmful policies in the name of protecting students in schools.

• PAIGE: Thank you so much for that tour, Morgan, of how this ostensibly narrow law has evolved into a whole pattern and web of harmful practices and policies and laws. And I think we're going to talk about some case studies about how that has translated to places like Texas and other southern states that have borne the brunt of many of these policies and practices. But before we do that, I think our listeners will be wondering what has happened since, at least at the federal level. The Gun Free Schools Act was adopted 30 years ago in 1994. Has there been any effort to build on or even change the law around school safety at the national level?

• MORGAN: Yeah, so there have been efforts to address school safety in research-based ways and also address the rise in zero tolerance exclusionary and punitive discipline in schools. I was going to say and policing, but not so much policing, really discipline in schools. And when we talk about that, we're talking about in-school and out-of-school suspensions, using corporal punishment, sending kids to alternative schools and expelling students and several other harmful punitive and exclusionary discipline practices.

  But just as a very quick overview, in 2014 in the Obama administration, thanks to the efforts I want to emphasize of young people and families and researchers and advocates who were saying, "Hey, look at this data. We've been telling you this for some time. The school-to-prison pipeline is real. It is a thing that is happening. And it is pushing kids out of school, particularly kids of color, especially Black kids, kids with disabilities." And now we're getting increasing data, thankfully, around the impact of these policies and practices on LGBTQ+ students. And of course, students living in the intersections of all of those identities.

  But under President Obama, the Department of Education and Justice released a guidance package that encouraged schools and state leaders to reduce the use of exclusionary and punitive discipline practices like suspensions and invest in research-based practices that we know work to keep students in schools, to create the safe and trusting school climates that we want to see that really improve situations for students and also increase school safety.

• MORGAN: And then also importantly, the guidance addressed what to do about racial disparities that were very evident in discipline data and continue to be very evident in discipline data nationally at the state level locally, including by reviewing data and determining if there was a disparate impact or if the impact of the policies and practices in a particular school or school district or state were impacting some students unfairly, particularly students of color and students with disabilities. Under the Trump administration, there was a rescission of that Obama era guidance and a real doubling down on, again, the conflation of a zero tolerance in school discipline and school safety.

  So there was a Federal School Safety Commission under the Trump administration that said, "We were sent the Obama era guidance. And we think that this whole effort to stop suspending kids and implement all these other things like restorative practices, we think this is creating unsafe schools. And so we are walking back what was put out under the Obama administration." The Biden administration reversed those findings and issued a set of resources, not the technical guidance that the Obama administration issued, but a set of resources on addressing racial disparities in school discipline, on investing in better school discipline techniques, and then also released guidance around disparities for students with disabilities.

• MORGAN: So those are sort of the main recent federal moves under different administrations to address school discipline issues and tackle this connection between school discipline and safety. And the last I'll name is now we're in a time of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which has allowed school districts to essentially use massive amounts of federal funding on school safety, including school safety practices like policing in schools that research has not shown to be helpful or has not shown to improve school safety, but instead compromises safety, particularly for the students who are most likely to have those harmful interactions with school police.

• PAIGE: Gosh, that is such a useful perspective on how federal policy has ebbed and flowed. I'm seeing this tug of war, right, between administrations. And I think what's so interesting is that you mentioned a current piece of legislation, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, but everything before that was administrative guidance. And so still having really important information and weight in terms of school's compliance but not necessarily the same weight as a law.

  So I think what that has done in addition to create mixed messages to our policymakers and our school leaders and school communities is it's given states sort of a lot of discretion as they have always had in this nation to implement the pieces of this that connect most closely with whatever political environment they find themselves in. And so going back again to 1994, Andrew, we have the Gun Free Schools Act implemented. I want to offer our listeners sort of a case study because Texas is such a fascinating place for so many reasons. But it's one of the states that took up the mantle in terms of implementing some of these harmful policy recommendations that Morgan just walked us through. So, I wonder, could you tell us a little bit about the Safe Schools Act of 1995, which was adopted in Texas, and how that translation of school safety and gun regulation looked like in a state like Texas?

• ANDREW: Yeah. I'll say that Texas almost took it as a green light to take the Gun-Free Schools Act and try and put it at 60 miles an hour. In 1995, as Paige said, the Texas Safe Schools Act was passed, right, that in part created several ultimately proven draconian measures, disciplinary alternative education programs, juvenile justice alternative education programs and kind of took this focus on truancy measures, for example, where young people might not attend school, then the school district will follow up and lead to perhaps a court appearance for the young person, really had some harmful criminalizing effects of that process, both in the fees that were assessed against young people and their families and the potential of jail time in certain instances.

  And so that very much so was the catalyst, the Gun Free Schools Act for policymakers in Texas to move forward with these very primitive measures, right, that had no basis in research as Morgan has been consistently uplifting and just kind of tried to go as hard as they could to say that, "We just don't like the fact that Black and Brown children are present in the public school system and we're just going to try to bring the hammer to bear on them as decisively as we can." And this is slightly unrelated, but I appreciated your message about mixed messaging, Paige, where Morgan very eloquently outlined that action since 1994. What's interesting to think about within the administrative state currently is the Community Oriented Policing Services office within the US Department of Justice, which has been responsible across administrations for sending billions of dollars to school police departments across the country.

• ANDREW: And so they kind of sit with that contradiction, right, where advocates fought so hard and won that guidance in 2014 and have had to deal with the whiplash from Obama to Trump to Biden to whoever comes next. But also, you have this kind of fortified notion, right, in how dollars are flowing from the federal government to communities across the country to say, "Not only do we endorse the philosophy behind the Gun Free Schools Act, but we're trying to expand it as best as we can through funding the police state in schools."

• PAIGE: And this may seem self-evident for us for folks who work on these issues in state or local or national policy campaigns and certainly for those of us with lived experience, as people who have been targeted or living in communities where we are overrepresented by these harmful policing and surveillance and zero-tolerance measures. But, Andrew, Morgan, I'm throwing you a curveball here because I think it might be helpful just to, again, provide some context. I think the school-to-prison pipeline is omnipresent in our collective lexicon around discipline, safety, and schools. And everybody sort of knows what it is from research and a policy and a legal advocacy standpoint. But could you just give us sort of at a high level, what does that mean when we say we have now criminalized kids, pushed them into these exclusionary settings? What's the impact of that on young people and why do we spend so much time thinking about this and working to walk that back?

• ANDREW: Yeah, Morgan and I could go for hours. Yeah. It's completely holistic, right? It's social. It's academic. It's psychological, right? It's economic, right? If we go there, the notion that Black and Brown children, who in my experience-- I'm a non-parent, but I have seen children throughout my life, my relatives, people in my community of faith, kids, and community. Children are very aware of disenfranchisement. They're very aware of how the suppressive system operates, and they might not have the language for it when they're very young, but it shows up very early in their lives. And so, they get to their school environments, and they see that it's militarized in so many ways. You walk through the metal detector to get into the school building. You see the police officer there, certainly, if you're here in Texas at this point. You know that your coach or your PE teacher or any other teachers have guns in their cars, right? And they're allowed to do that, Second Amendment, right?

  But if you do that, you will face criminal legal and exclusionary consequences. And so young people are just very aware of that on multiple levels. And just like any human being, it might show up, right, when you feel injustice in your life, and you feel in a sense disenfranchised to talk about it and move the needle on change. It might manifest in action against your current environment, right? It might manifest in a protest or some kind of expression against the current system. But in all the research, I'm so grateful for IDRA and its groundbreaking research across the past 50 years, and grateful to be doing this work at Texas Appleseed, where we're constantly identifying the harms and the various ways in which these draconian policies affect young people.

• ANDREW: But also, again, as Morgan uplifted, young people are and have been organizing among themselves, have been engaging in intergenerational organizing models. And despite these harms that are manifesting in their lives, I think they are, even now, three years after the Gun Free Schools Act, really pushing us to think of a very different way of administering schools, of making sure that they have everything they need in these environments that they must be in under law.

• PAIGE: I appreciate that context, Andrew. And of course, when we push kids out of school, we know that the mental health impacts their absenteeism and their ability to just learn and be present, the social relationships and the bonds that they have, all these negative impacts academically, socially, emotionally, as you laid out, that is well documented at this point. And one reason why I think for so many of us, including IDRA and Texas Appleseed, this continues to be a critically important focus. And what's so interesting about this conversation, we're having it because of this anniversary or this milestone of this policy and this law and opportunities to reflect. But as I previewed for our listeners, 1994, some of the political shenanigans that were happening at that time seemed to be potentially repeating themselves.

  And despite having sort of decades of evidence now and research dismissing the validity of using zero tolerance and carceral responses to student behavior as a way of increasing school safety, we're now seeing a resurgence of that again. I think there are a lot of theories as to why some policymakers will point to the challenges that young people are experiencing because of the pandemic and being out of school and disconnected for so long, which is ironic, right, considering that if that theory is true, students are having this behavior because they are disconnected. And so the solution then is to disconnect them further. That's, I think, a bit hypocritical at the very least.

  And we've also certainly seen responses growing out of this broader movement to respond to, as you pointed out, Andrew, the Black Lives Matter movement, efforts to create more culturally sustaining classrooms. So, with that as backdrop, Andrew, I think I want to start with you. We're focusing on this case study of Texas. What has that looked like in Texas recently? You and I have been side-by-side testifying at the Texas ledge and doing office visits. What have we been seeing from a policy standpoint and how this is coming back?

• ANDREW: Yeah. Paige, Morgan, and I have worked multiple legislative sessions across our tenures, right, doing this work of civil rights lawyers in Texas. The 88th regular legislative session was the worst. And there were several contributing factors. Uvalde occurred about eight months before it kicked off, right? And so that debate was just omnipresent, right, and very much so influencing policy conversations. And then there is just this inclination, right, with the mixed messaging, again, coming to bear that we want to go further than we have in the past to try to exclude Black and Brown children from environments where they undoubtedly belong.

  And so during the 88th session, Paige and I were working assiduously to post two bills primarily when we were successful in halting HB 655 from the regular session in 2023 that would have classified young people as habitually violent. And I mean, Paige gave powerful remarks. I testified against it and I uplifted this narrative from the Clinton era. This is super predator by another name. And everybody on the dice, I think because of the contributed effort of advocates and teachers and young people who showed up to oppose that bill, it did halt and we were glad to celebrate that. But then in a parallel way, HB3, which is the armed school security officer mandate, moved through the process, right? And Paige and I were insidiously fighting against that. We thought we got the armed security officer requirement out. And then of course, Memorial Day looms, the session is about to end. It's resurrected at the midnight hour.

• ANDREW: Kind of thinking about zero tolerance and how it's influenced policy over the past three years is very, right, in recent memory and something that I offered to the listeners of this podcast and to other folks who are thinking about this work. It's just a long line. The three of us are honored to be in it, and I think history will smile upon us. But it requires so much collective effort to think through how you have to vigilantly attack these things at various points of history. Kind of take your rest when you individually need to, but consistently contribute to the narrative that Black and Brown children are not habitually violent. They're not super predators. They deserve abundant grace and compassion and care in their schools.

• PAIGE: Absolutely. And I appreciate sort of where you landed on that because I think one of the reasons that the HP3, the armed security officer mandate was so heartbreaking on so many levels, including sort of the last-minute politicking that allowed that bill to get passed, was that it was so powerfully opposed by a very strong broad coalition of parents, educators, schools, safety folks, some law enforcement representatives, right? And so I appreciate that reminder, though that was a disappointment. It is critically important for folks to show up.

  Morgan, we're spending a lot of time talking about Texas and how it's played out because Texas is the Wild West in many ways and can be, I think often is the ground zero for a lot of these harmful policies and practices to sort of be fertilized and tested out before they go out to other states. I wonder. Can you give us a perspective on regionally or nationally how other states are continuing this unfortunate trend of over-relying on zero tolerance?

• MORGAN: Yeah, several states have proposed or passed laws around the same time. And this speaks to, again, what we've been talking about, the climate and what is going on in a lot of spaces influences policymakers when it comes to discipline policy, but sort of this general return to zero tolerance and fears around school safety. And I will say understandable fears around school safety. But the wrong and harmful responses to it we've seen come in states.

  So, for example, in Kentucky, a new law will go into effect that requires a student who has made threats that pose a danger to the well-being of students, faculty, or staff to be expelled for at least one year. Now, that's extremely vague language. It's common among these policies to have this extremely vague language that gives a lot of latitude to districts and school administrators to decide what type of punishment is considered a danger to the well-being of students, faculty, or staff, and who is engaging in those behaviors. And we know that disproportionately they identify Black students as being the ones who engage in these behaviors when we have these vague descriptions of what constitutes an offense or a safety danger in school.

  In Tennessee, something slightly more concrete, the governor there signed a bill into law that allocated $230 million in funding to school militarization and hardening measures. And that's $30 million in grants for Homeland Security agents to partner with Kentucky schools and then money for each public school to have a full-time armed school-based police officer on campus.

• MORGAN: So that's a significant amount of money that's being poured into a strategy that research tells us does not work and creates less safe schools for students rather than investing that money into the types of services and supports that we know work to support students and create the school climates that we want to see. And then I'll just add that there were several other states like Nebraska, Florida, North Carolina that proposed bills that would allow teachers to remove from their classroom students who engaged in disobedient, disrespectful, and disruptive conduct. And again, these are very vague and subjective offenses. And we know that when that happens students of color, particularly Black students are targeted. And all of this was done, again, in the name of school safety and protecting students. But of course, we have to ask, "Does this create safe schools?" The answer is no. And which students are these policies designed to target and which are they designed to protect?

• PAIGE: Gosh, I could talk to both of you literally and frequently all day about this topic. It's a sobering topic, an interesting one, and most importantly, just an important one for all of us in our communities. We've spent, I think, most of our time today talking about some of the problems with our current policy and things that we don't want. We don't want armed security or police officers stationed in our school. We don't want our kids to be pushed out of school and into carceral systems and placements that detract from their long-term success and mental health. We don't want teachers relying overly on these exclusionary and punitive measures or certainly hitting our kids in schools, right? I think on these things, we agree. So, I'll give you both sort of the final word here. What do we want to see in terms of promoting and ultimately creating safe and supportive schools? And Andrew, I'll give you the first pass of this.

• ANDREW: Thank y'all so much for this rich conversation. I want to see the full acknowledgment of the humanity of young people in every setting where they appear. Young people vape. Young people might possess guns. Adults possess guns. Adults vape. Paige and I could tell you about our current advocacy and how this is showing up, right? This notion, again, it seems like a bipartisan commitment, is growing around young people and substance use and a zero-tolerance philosophy. But the fact that young people are facing all of the circumstances that adults are without the ability to control them, right, kind of given how the system is built, right? To have the ability to say, even if you mess up as a young person, even if you do bring a gun, right, even if you do vape, there should be an infrastructure in place in your school. Again, compulsory school attendance law, you must be there, right? If you do mess up in that way, the first inclination is not to exclude you, to ostracize you, right, to have a real conversation about what is going on in your life, or you must work to support your family. You've lost multiple family members to COVID-19. You got to see manifestations of racism and poverty all around you. You should be given a breath, and you should be given the ability to talk about what's going on. And even if you do make that mistake, can move forward in your life as a young person, right, and actualize your full potential, whatever it is.

• MORGAN: Oh my gosh, Andrew always has beautiful words. When you said he could go first, I was like, "Ah." I'll just build off of that because I appreciate that so deeply because it is student-centered. I think we could probably name 10 different policy recommendations that would change, at a systemic level, what is happening to students in schools. And we should pursue those, right? There should not be school-based police. We should not be suspending children for these ridiculous reasons and keeping them away from their classrooms and their friends and their teachers. So, I think that there's a long list of policy answers to this and practice answers to this. I deeply agree with Andrew's answer about seeing the value in children and asking why and what's going on rather than jumping to punishment and taking the time to pull kids in rather than push them out. I think that's so incredibly important. And the last thing that I will add, and I know the three of us deeply believe this at Texas Appleseed and at IDRA. Seeing all of the students and families who are impacted by these policies that are in schools and seeing them as part of the policy change process and of changing practice in their schools and making sure they understand that they have a right and a role in our policymaking system, that they should see themselves as advocates for themselves and others and doing what we can, taking whatever skills and knowledge we have to help in those efforts and however they see that playing out for them to get the schools that they want to see for themselves.

• PAIGE: Of course, I did not doubt that you would rise to the occasion, Morgan. Thank you both for those fantastic closing words. Very centering and grounding. And I appreciate how we've come back. I mean, Morgan, you referenced the willful defiance and that, ultimately, we as advocates can and must put forth evidence-based policies and practices to make our school safer. And we must, as Morgan, I think you eloquently laid out center young people in that very rarely, if ever, has this really important policy change happened without them leading and being centered. So, I appreciate this conversation with both of you. I want to say thank you to our amazing communications team for helping put this podcast together. And thank you to our listeners for hanging out with us to talk about this important topic. If you want to learn more about our collective organization's positions and resources on this critically important topic, you can check out the resources associated with this podcast page on IDRA's website. I also want to encourage you to check out Morgan's excellent policy brief, what safe schools should look like for every student, a guide to building safe and welcoming schools, and rejecting policies that hurt students. It's a great resource that I encourage you all to check out. We'll see you on the next podcast episode and hope you all have a great day.

  Thank you for listening to IDRA Classnotes. For more information on IDRA and other class notes topics, go to www.idra.org. You can also send us your thoughts by email to podcast@idra.org.