Organizing-Movement Lawyering Partnerships

We have worked in LAUSD with a commitment to South LA and Watts alongside our partners for years to decriminalize schools and increase positive support for students. Following the lead of long-term organizers, we work toward police-free schools to continue our push to create racially just education for all. 

Fighting for completely law enforcement-free LAUSD schools requires comprehensive community monitoring and documentation of school criminalization. Powerful community organizing led to a $25 million reduction of the LA School Police Budget. Building on that win, we used a co-designed Public Records Act (PRA) Request and legal-organizing analysis process we created with CADRE to co-facilitate analysis of racially disproportionate arrest, citation, and school discipline data. Our co-created investigation processes use both monitoring and data to support leadership development and political education.

We continue to center parent and youth-led investigations of school discipline practices and implementation of positive behavioral supports in LAUSD. We focus on creating real infrastructure for school culture transformation and community-based safety to replace policing in schools.

We work at the intersection of education and youth justice, naming schools as primary sites of criminalization and entry into the carceral system.  We collaborate with organizing and advocacy partners to create concrete proposals to meaningfully confront this facet of the school-to-prison pipeline. 

We continue to support school-district and county youth policy transformation. Our movement lawyering support focuses on full implementation of the vision for Youth Justice Reimagined. We connect Los Angeles Youth Uprising Coalition (LAYUP) and Police Free LAUSD Coalition leadership through community based safety. 

In supporting alignment between LAUSD and County priorities, we aim to ensure alternatives to carceral approaches. For example, we support planning on Youth Empowerment Support (YES) teams that centers youth and family co-decision making in place of law enforcement referrals and traditional court adjudication. We believe that Community Intervention is a viable model to replace law enforcement in schools and intersects with school culture transformation models such as Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support.

We began our partnership with COPE in 2017 after their organizing won school discipline and citation reforms. We supported their organizers, youth, and parent leaders in monitoring these victories in the San Bernardino City School District. We worked together to create Public Records Act Requests for community-led investigation into whether COPE’s policy victories were implemented to address their racial justice goals.

Together, we’ve continued to monitor school practices with the long-term goal of divestment from criminalization and punitive discipline practices and investment in evidence-based support and improving learning outcomes for Black and other marginalized students in the Inland Empire.

We co-design processes for community-led investigations of the Ebony Triangle (a trio of cities with a historically Black population–Fontana, Rialto, and San Bernardino). Our collaboration has an explicit focus on dismantling the pushout of Black girls and gender expansive youth, and the creation of educational and community spaces of belonging for Black families in the Inland Empire.