About ShiraDestProjectDoBetter
Shira Destinie Jones is founder of #ProjectDoBetter, a long term plan proposal for community building, and a published poet, academic author, and advocate for improving our #PublicDomainInfrastructure. Her other book, Stayed on Freedom's Call, on Black-Jewish Cooperation in DC, is freely available via the Internet Archive. She has organized community events such as film discussions, multi-ethnic song events, and cooperative presentations, and is a native of Washington, DC. She promotes peaceful planning, NVC and the Holocene Calendar, and is also a writer.
More information at
https://shiradest.wordpress.com/
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Context, Thought, and Learning: ShiraDest Offers Project Do Better 
A lack of resources that’s nothing foreign to us. Loved this: “a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”
This is a stark reality that has been in our faces for decades now. Blind justice! 😞
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Exactly, yup, and Yes, it has! But how on earth has it been ignored when we (or some of us) have been jumping up and down and pointing at it for 20 years, now?!
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Because so many choose to ignore the problems that don’t affect them Shira. Many folks act as if these issues don’t exist and that we’re making much to do about nothing. But as I’ve said before, without addressing these issues and pretending that they only affect a certain segment of society and not theirs, those segments will one day deal with something more tragic. That something may not be able to have an immediate resolution. The pain will dwell much deeper. 😞
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I know: like certain people I know, unfortunately, here in ‘real life’ as they say.
So I keep working on empathy building, and getting others to recognize the value of actually empathizing, walking in the shoes, of people who neither look like them nor grew up in their towns.
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I agree that policing schools may be doing more harm than good. I think if we’re going to pursue this we should have officers that are highly skilled at getting to know the kids and de-escalating tense situations. Too many police officers seem to be looking for troublemakers rather than trying to serve, support, and steer kids in a positive direction.
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Thank you, Carol, quite true. I believe that the trend started back in the 80s, as my high school had both metal detectors and police officers in the building by the time I was a senior in 1987. But, this was inner city DC, so since we were also starting the process of changing the name of our basketball team from The Bullets to anything but that, and the principal was telling us to avoid guys who looked like walking jewlery stores, there was more of an emphasis back then on dealing with the drug problem than at looking at potential side-effects of those policies.
Back then, we were all being pushed to get scholarships, do well, and give back to the community. I’m not sure that anyone was doing much more than reacting, rather than long-range planning.
And you are most right, we need all officers and officials to be looking to serve, rather than merely to been seen to punish.
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Interesting to know a bit more about you Shira. My all white high school (that’s a mild exaggeration because I think there were 4 Latino kids in a school of 1400) had lots of drugs back in the 70s. Plenty of kids came to school stoned day after day. In our rural community almost everyone had easy access to a firearm but luckily owning automatic weapons and school shootings weren’t yet a thing. There were also no gangs and I can’t even recall a fight at school. No thought was given to having a security presence even though drugs were bought and sold routinely at school. Our mascot was the Redskin which was dropped in 2002. What took DC so long? Anyway, I know kids live in a totally different world today but I’m not a big fan of school security in its current form. I don’t even agree with locking all the doors in and out of the school which has been the case at my kids’ schools for several years.
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No fights?! God, we had at least one fight every single damned day. Idiots would gather in the cafeteria to watch from the floor-ceiling length windows, which gave a full view of the courtyard and nearly to the bus stop below, out the main doors. The question was always weather a knife or gun was going to come out, and I tried to avoid the cafe as much as possible. Same reason I always hit the track after classes, to wait out the crowds at the bus stop, or just walked the 40 minutes or so, as I recall, to the nearest metro station when I could take the train.
The stoned kids were not the problem, it was the LoveBoat and crack dealers that were the problem, for us, and to the fact that guns were illegal in DC at the time (we had strict gun laws until some yahoo moved in from some gun-happy state, complained to his former senators, and went to court to get the Ccongressional DC Control Board to change our gun laws!!), so you knew that if you saw a gun, it was bad news.
Yeah, I grew up with the ‘Skins as just normal, so my “crazy drunk Cherokee great great grandfather” stories sort of fed right into it, as making a team like the Redskins more popular in either victory, or more often, defeat. It was a joke that no one really noticed growing up, but it went along with the harsh questioning when darker-skinned Black (generally other girls) would demand to know if I was “mixed-Indian or something” and try to pick a fight. The situation was difficult because we knew that so few of us would get scholarships and find a decent way to make a living, or even make it out of there at all. Many of us lived in the projects, and some were even worse off.
Part of what makes it so important for those of us who did survive to prevent this from happening again/so often/etc…
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I’d say you’re doing a fantastic job of giving back! Thanks again for the personal insights.
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Thank you, Carol, I really appreciate that!
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I posted on Brandon’s blog, but I’ll also post here to get your thoughts. My understanding was that the zero-tolerance policies and increase of policing in schools was being driven by the unfortunate increase in school shootings. I definitely see where these policies are doing more harm than good (and I have my doubts on whether they are effective for school shootings) but it would be good to understand what the original motivation for implementing these policies in the first place was.
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It mostly started back in the 80s, when the War on Drugs began as a reaction to the Crack epidemic. The violence levels in inner-city schools skyrocketed, but the policing reaction was worse than expected, since racial profiling was used at the same time, resulting in stop and search mostly in ‘bad’ areas, but not in white areas.
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