TALK IT OUT

For the next two months, I'm wearing my community engagement hat and re-connecting with Sacramento. Talk It Out: A Community Conversation to Fix School Discipline is a project of Cornerstone Theater Company that is made possible by The California Endowment. Last year, I helped to arrange story circles with students, parent, teachers, and community leaders about zero tolerance. The project culminated with a performance at the State Capitol the day of the education hearings. This year, we are going back to continue the conversation and to talk about the issue of "willful defiance" and AB 420. A staged reading with community actors acting alongside professional actors is planned for the last week of June. 

Here are some statistic about the state of school discipline in California.

• According to unofficial data obtained from the California Department of Education (CDE), it is estimated that "willful defiance" was identified as > the most "serve" grounds for between 8-12% of all expulsions and 42% of  all suspensions (five days of less) in 2010-11 
• In a 2012 data report issued by the U.S. Department of Education's Office > for Civil Rights, African American students in California were more than 3 times as likely to be suspended as white students.
  
  

You can read more about the project here: https://www.facebook.com/SchoolJusticeCA or here: http://cornerstonetheater.org/plays/talk-it-out/about/