Ending Virtual-School Oppression: Black students are disproportionately punished for harmless behavior at home during Zoom classes

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Friend,

Isaiah Elliott was suspended from seventh grade for holding a toy gun in an online art class.

Ka'Mauri Harrison, 9, faced nearly two weeks of suspension for picking up a BB gun in his own bedroom - after his brother had tripped over it.

A 15-year-old girl was incarcerated for not doing her homework, which violated her parole.

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All three students have at least three things in common: They were punished for normal childhood behavior, they were in their own homes at the time of their petty offenses and they are all Black.

As Black students shifted from the classroom to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, harsher disciplinary measures that had been carried out against them at school followed them home.

"Zoom suspensions followed similar patterns to in-person classroom management tactics that feed Black students into the school-to-prison pipeline," Cory Collins, a senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice program, points out in his story "It Was Always About Control." The story is featured in the latest edition of Teaching Tolerance magazine, a publication of Learning for Justice.

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Prisons and schools have much in common, says Dr. David Stovall, a professor of Black studies, criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hallway protocols, restrictive bathroom policies, surveillance cameras and metal detectors can be found in both places.

"It's something a little more insidious" than the school-to-prison pipeline, Stovall says, arguing that students "are reminded based on the discipline and curriculum policies that they're in a de facto prison in those spaces."

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