For years, punitive student discipline policies and the increased presence of police officers in schools have created a schoolhouse-to-jailhouse path that criminalizes minor classroom behaviors. Now, a group of Boston Teachers Union members is working in collaboration with community groups to establish a school district policy to disrupt what they call a school-to-deportation pipeline.
“We’ve talked about the school-to-prison pipeline and how it affects Black and Brown students, and now, we have to talk about how that intersects with the school-to-deportation pipeline,” says Lena Papagiannis, a high school history teacher for Boston Public Schools. “It’s helpful to talk about how schools can be complicit.”
