Beyond the Numbers of the School to Prison Pipeline:

Community Conversations with Assemblywoman Ma and Senator Leno

First Event with Assemblywoman Ma Tomorrow, April 8th, 3-5PM at Golden Gate School of Law, 536 Mission Street, San Francisco, Room 3214

http://schoolstoprisonsbayarea.wordpress.com/

Golden Gate University School of Law’s student organization Dignity In Schools and a supporting coalition of community organizations, as well as the following student organizations at Golden Gate University: Queer Law Student Association (QLSA), Black Law Students Association (BLSA), La Raza, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), and the American Constitution Society (ACS) invites you to join us at two community conversations about strategies that the State can take to reduce truancy and support students in finishing high school. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma will be the speaker on Friday, April 8, 2011 from 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. Senator Mark Leno will be the speaker on Saturday, April 16, 2011 from 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

California faces a crisis in students not finishing high school. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that 37% of African American students are not finishing in the state and 22 % of all California students are unable to complete school. A large portion of students who do not finish high school end up incarcerated. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, 60% of African American males who do not finish high school will end up in prison at some point in their lives. The California Dropout Research Project found that a 50 percent reduction in dropouts statewide could save $12 billion and prevent nearly 15,000 criminal acts.

We believe that an important way for us to address this crisis is to develop well-designed strategies to address education deficits and that truancy is a significant point where this issue can be addressed. Students at our University are eager to hear from you about your ideas, as we have been actively holding events to critically examine different strategies to combat the school-to-prison pipeline, and we have found that many of the students in our program made the decision to come to law school so that they could better serve the children in our community.

We hope you will join us for a dynamic discussion that we hope will be the first of many, as we work together to build solutions to this significant civil and human rights issue that plagues our state and our nation.

Our first event will be a community conversation with Assemblywoman Fiona Ma on Friday, April 8, 2011 from 3pm – 5pm at GGU in room 3214.

We will also be having a community conversation with Senator Mark Leno on Saturday from March 16, 2011 from 9am – 12pm. This will also be held at GGU in room 3201.