D.Y. is a 13-year-old girl from the Bronx who dreams of one day being a veterinarian and has always enjoyed school. This changed on the morning of October 7, 2009, when D.Y.'s mother dropped her and a friend off at school. D.Y. and her friend were confronted by two strangers who were being rambunctious, yelling, and acting threateningly toward them. Scared and panicked, D.Y. texted her mother.
So went the call for change on the steps of New York City Hall. On October 22, folks from the New York Civil Liberties Union and I participated in a rally at City Hall to raise public awareness about and garner support for the Student Safety Act. The rally was attended by over 100 high-school youth active in the Urban Youth Collaborative, a network of community organizations committed to ending overpolicing in New York City public schools and ensuring that our schools are safe places of learning for everybody. Unfortunately, overpolicing in public schools is hardly limited to New York City schools. The school-to-prison pipeline—a term given by advocates to the convergence of harsh disciplinary policies and reliance on police in schools that pushes children out of educational environments and into the juvenile justice system—is a growing problem all over the country.
"Dan Rather Reports" recently featured two ACLU clients in the episode, “A Question of Rights,” which focuses on the Justice Department’s politicization of the Civil Rights Division and its failure to enforce civil rights under the current administration. The approximately 20-minute segment in which our client
