Building the School-to-Abolition Pipeline

An earlier version of this article was originally published in Lux Magazine.

Just as the news outlets began to declare that our schools were in crisis and that our students were absent, disengaged, and out of control, it dawned on me that in New Haven, where I had been teaching for nearly 10 years, I was witnessing students rise up like never before.

At my school, they were staging sit-ins to protest racism, transphobia, and invasive searches by school security. At a high school down the street, they were walking out of class to demand survivor-focused responses to sexual violence. At city council meetings, students were speaking out for mental health support instead of metal detectors. A range of issues were moving New Haven youth to action, but what united them was a call for non-punitive solutions, for a form of justice that gets to root causes and seeks to repair and transform.

This was during the 2021–2022 school year, our first full year back in the classroom as the pandemic raged on. Like the rest of us, young people were struggling. Yet in the face of this struggle, students were not giving up like the newspapers claimed. Instead, they were shouting that another world was possible and showing us how to build it.

As the school year neared its end in May of 2022, New Haven youth came together to make their collective voices heard. Organized by Citywide Youth Coalition, hundreds of students from a dozen high schools across the city walked out of class and marched downtown to rally for police-free schools. Citywide’s demands, which focused on ending the school district’s contract with the police department, also called on New Haven to reallocate millions of dollars from the police budget to public schools, specifically for mental health services, nurses, school counselors, and social workers.

Toni, one of my students who marched downtown that day, put it simply: “We protect ourselves better than the police do.” Far more than a rhetorical statement, these words came from a student who knew that we could build alternatives to police, suspension, and other punitive discipline models. Toni knew another way was possible because it existed at our school.

In 2019, when Toni was in 9th grade, a group of Metropolitan students and teachers came together to form our school’s Youth Justice Panel, a restorative justice model that focuses on repairing harm, restoring relationships, and addressing root causes. 

Though Toni had been familiar with restorative justice, they weren’t always convinced. “I’ll admit,” Toni told me, “I fell into the group of a lot of people who didn’t see it, who didn’t understand how you can make it actually work when someone does something wrong.”

But in their four years at our school — from our early experiments with restorative justice to founding a Youth Justice Panel course — Toni lived into the realization that restorative justice is “more than just a concept,” as they put it. “We’re working toward building a better place.”

Working alongside students and teachers toward building this better place within our school has been among the most important work I have done. It has made real for me what before had only been a hope — that schools can be a vital site for growing and teaching abolition.

* * *

I first learned about restorative justice out of desperation as a first-year teacher in Philadelphia in 2011. That year the city declared a hiring freeze, leaving charter schools as the only available jobs. I was hired to teach special education, despite not being certified in this area, and spent one year at a corporate charter school, which was the most punitive environment I have ever worked in. Students were forced to walk silently in the halls “head behind head” as if they were in prison or the military. When they didn’t follow the school’s many rules, they were reprimanded with dollars deducted from fake weekly paychecks. A student who found themselves “in debt” had to wear a white shirt rather than the black school uniform and to eat both breakfast and lunch on the floor.

These were impossible conditions for teaching and learning, dehumanizing for the students forced to endure them and for the educators ordered to enforce them. In search of support and guidance, I turned to Philadelphia’s Teacher Action Group and joined their restorative justice collective, a community of educators each navigating their own punitive school environments. We had no blueprint, yet together we found ways — small as they may have been — to interrupt the carceral logic of our schools. 

Nearly a decade later in New Haven, I was still drawing on what I had learned in that group in Philly — that when our schools feel broken, the answer is for teachers to turn to each other. 

I was among the small group of teachers who came together in 2018 as a restorative justice working group. We had been steeped in the philosophies of restorative justice by our principal, Judith Puglisi, who had recently retired. In her absence, it became clear how much of our school’s non-punitive approach had relied on her leadership. Without her it came undone, and in the chaos of its undoing we learned that for this work to endure, it had to come from the ground up.

Inspired by models we had seen teachers and students build in other schools, we decided to form a Youth Justice Panel. We invited our high schoolers to join us and nearly 30 students attended our first after-school meeting. 

Toni remembers one of our earliest sessions. “There was a spectrum activity that we did at the very beginning, and I remember one of the questions was ‘Do you believe that everything can be forgiven?’ I was the person on the furthest to the no side, because I was like there are certain things that have been done to me that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive.”

Together with our students, we grappled with questions like these and shared the experiences that shaped how we handle harm. As Toni’s comment reveals, students didn’t all enter this space with an abolitionist mindset. They didn’t yet believe in the possibility of a society in which everyone’s needs are met, one where we can address all harm without relying on systems of violence. Many joined still holding tight to the idea that if you did wrong you should be punished. 

They were angry with their peers who disrupted class, who smoked weed in the bathrooms, who pushed past them in the hallways. But for years they had watched their classmates get suspended, and they’d seen all the same problems persist and even worsen. The students weren’t sure if restorative justice would work, but they were certain that punitive discipline had failed them.

* * *

We have allowed the school-to-prison pipeline to become the status quo. . . . It doesn’t have to be like this. We can choose whether to reproduce this punitive ideology, or to resist and replace it. If schools are powerful enough to lay a pipeline to prison, then we can build a school-to-abolition pipeline instead.

Schools are some of the first places where young people learn that our society is a punitive one, and where this model of discipline becomes normalized. Millions of dollars flow into schools for this purpose — for spaces and staff devoted to in-school suspension, metal detectors and surveillance systems, security guards and school police, and even teacher training programs and prepackaged curricula that promote carceral logics. It should come as no surprise that many students and teachers are persuaded that a punitive approach is the only way.

When it came time to introduce the Youth Justice Panel to the entire school staff, this was the reality we were up against. We gathered in the library, teachers around tables in the back and students in front. A student presented a mock case to the library full of teachers, who recognized their own classrooms in this one: A teacher confronts a student on their phone, the student refuses to put the phone away, cursing at the teacher and storming out of the room. I didn’t need to decipher the looks on my colleagues’ faces to know what some of them were thinking: Suspend that kid, teach her a lesson, don’t send him back to my class.

Schools tend to operate in direct alignment with such views. Yet, here were students modeling a different approach. Here were students modeling what it takes to build the world we deserve, starting at the scale of the classroom, the library, the school.

As students showed us, it’s not light work. First, two Youth Justice Panel members demonstrated how the process begins, meeting with the student involved, asking questions like Why do you think this happened? Is there anything you would now change about the way you handled it? Next, two other students acted out a meeting with a teacher to learn her perspective. I later observed an actual such meeting and was struck by the students’ incredible ability to make the teacher feel heard and understood. 

Next, Youth Justice Panel members representing both the student who made the mistake and those representing the school community come together to discuss the root causes at play and prepare questions and statements to get at the heart of the matter. They modeled this part quickly, but for the real thing Youth Justice Panel students devote hours to writing meaningful statements, asking for and incorporating each other’s feedback in some of the truest versions of collaboration I’ve witnessed in the classroom. 

All of this before a hearing even takes place. For the hearing, students play every role: a facilitator guiding the process, advocates representing the student and community, and a panel that determines a restorative agreement. Students modeled all of this for their teachers that day. And then they left. 

There were a few moments of quiet, some shuffling, and resettling. Then a teacher raised her hand. She complimented the students’ preparedness, how well they had performed, but as for the substance, she was concerned. “This,” she gestured to where our students had been sitting a few moments ago, “is not the real world. This isn’t how the real world works.”

Years later, I told Toni about this teacher’s comment and they revealed that a different teacher had told them the same thing. They were quick to respond: “Well, it’s not ‘real life’ now. But that’s the reason we do stuff like this in schools, because we are the future of what the world looks like. Instead of school mirroring the world, why would we not want to create what we want the world to look like within the school? So that once you leave the school, you’re like, this isn’t what the real world is, but this is what the real world could be and should be.”

Toni knows that schools do not exist merely as training ground for the “real world.” Quite the opposite — schools possess unparalleled potential to interrupt the inevitability of the world young people are taught to expect.

The right wing knows this. That is why in recent years, right-wing moms and representatives alike have renewed long-standing campaigns to control what happens in schools. They have launched assaults on teaching the truth, on calling our students by their real names, and on how we protect each other from gun violence. 

As educators and students fight back against these attacks, we must ask why schools have become staging grounds for these political conflicts. There’s only one reason — despite the claims of naysaying teachers, schools are powerful. How we harness this power is the question at stake.

We have allowed the school-to-prison pipeline to become the status quo. Despite growing criticism of this system, we have yet to replace it with a different model and a different logic. The school-to-prison pipeline is not only a set of policies, but also a set of ideologies that deem punishment and removal as right, and render repair and reconciliation as unworthy of our time or imagination. In this way, schools grease the pipeline not only by pushing young people toward incarceration, but also by authorizing incarceration as an acceptable solution.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We can choose whether to reproduce this punitive ideology, or to resist and replace it. If schools are powerful enough to lay a pipeline to prison, then we can build a school-to-abolition pipeline instead.

* * *

As teachers working within a broken system, we are practiced at creating humanizing spaces under dehumanizing conditions, and returning to do that work day after day.

Two months after students introduced their teachers to the Youth Justice Panel, we held our first official hearing. Those same students who had modeled the process in the library that day were now doing the real thing. They were nervous, but they were ready. They dressed up with button-ups and skirts, clutching their printed questions and statements nervously, but still making sure their voices were loud and steady. 

After receiving his restorative agreement, the student at the center of the hearing told us he wanted to join the Youth Justice Panel. We were in awe of our students and profoundly hopeful about what this could mean for our school.

A few days later, the COVID-19 pandemic was announced on the school’s PA system and we all went home. When we returned, restorative justice fell by the wayside, overwhelmed by the work of keeping ourselves and our students healthy, and trying to teach in impossible conditions. Pandemic promises to reimagine education were quickly replaced with business as usual. Forget the mass death and trauma, schools seemed to say, forget the uprisings of 2020. But students did not forget.

Toni and their peers shared the impact that the uprisings had on their own protests throughout the 2021–2022 school year. “The world seemed pretty hopeless because of all the deaths, but I think having that sense of hope that things can get better through the act of protest is what kept us going,” one of Toni’s classmates recounted. “And I think students are taking that too. They’re done with not being treated like they should.”

All of this culminated in the citywide student protest on May 12, 2022. While Citywide Youth Coalition’s demands have not yet been met, it happened to be that very day that our school’s principal approved a Youth Justice Panel course for the following year, the first in New Haven’s history. No longer would the vital work of restorative justice be relegated to an after-school activity; it would now be embedded in the fabric of our school. 

More than two years had passed since our first hearing, but we had not forgotten all the work that brought us there, all the learning we had done alongside our students. We had not forgotten the seed of possibility we planted. Witnessing our students rising up throughout that impossible year reminded us that we could not give up on building a better place. 

Shortly after attending the protest, Toni enrolled in the new course, and as a senior they joined 24 of their peers in the inaugural cohort of the Youth Justice Panel class, co-taught by Julia Miller and Steve Staysniak. Reflecting on the impact of the course, now in its third year, Julia told me, “We have all been changed in our conceptions of justice, community, and what school can look like.” Steve and Toni also emphasized the transformative power of this class for the participating students and teachers, along with its potential — one they acknowledged was not yet fully realized — to transform the entire school. That this work not yet complete is not a failure, but a lesson — one for all of us working toward abolition. 

As teachers working within a broken system, we are practiced at creating humanizing spaces under dehumanizing conditions, and returning to do that work day after day. For those of us striving for abolition, this level of sustained commitment to build something liberatory in the face of violence is what is required of us. And we need more of us to sustain it. That’s why our work must not only teach others how to be abolitionist practitioners, but also how to become teachers of abolition. Toni is a perfect example of the generative possibility that comes from this kind of pedagogy.

After months of training, just after the class held their first official hearing, Toni brought the Youth Justice Panel home. To work through an ongoing conflict between them and their sister, they suggested a justice panel hearing to their family. They used the script from their classroom, asking one parent to facilitate and the other to determine the restorative agreement.

The class’s impact on Toni extended beyond the walls of the school and shifted Toni’s core beliefs about our capacity for change. “I saw the world a lot more black-and-white before that class,” Toni told me. “There were certain things that someone might do and I would straight be like, they’re a lost cause. Being in Youth Justice Panel has shown me that there truly are no lost causes.”

This is the school-to-abolition pipeline at work.

We have to figure out how to live into Toni’s words, to build communities in which no one is disposable. I don’t always feel optimistic about this project, but there are moments when I know it’s possible — and it’s always in the presence of young people. This is just one reason why schools must be a place to grow abolition and a model for how to do so.

When I asked Toni how we spread restorative justice, they answered without hesitation: “First we grow it in more schools.”

* * *

Last school year, when the second cohort of the Youth Justice Panel class completed their training, their teachers celebrated the occasion with a field trip. They gathered at Possible Futures, a beloved New Haven bookstore, where Julia and Steve held an induction ceremony for their students. It was an apt location for such a ceremony, because Possible Futures recently became home to the first-ever mural of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a celebration of Gilmore’s abolitionist vision, ever present in her hometown of New Haven.

Students held up their Youth Justice Panel certificates smiling in the glow of a three-story Gilmore who holds in her hands the seeds of an abolitionist movement. Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us that “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.”

Here they are, those fragments and possibilities, real as can be, found in the classroom and in the streets, found in these young people and their teachers building the beginnings of a school-to-abolition pipeline.