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Voices of Youth Education (VOYCE)
Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) is a youth organizing collaborative, consisting of students of color from six local community organizations.31 VOYCE creates research-based, student-led solutions to educational and racial issues in the city of Chicago. Since it’s inception in 2007, VOYCE has worked under the belief that minority students are the best positioned to develop meaningful educational reform, being directly affected by educational inequity. Overall, the collaborative uses research-based methods to organize for the limitation of exclusionary discipline practices that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, the implementation of restorative discipline practices and the investment in social-emotional relationships with school staff. In recent efforts, the collaborative organized to address the overuse of exclusionary discipline through the establishment of a public database on the issuance of school discipline in Chicago Public Schools and the fostering of improvement plans in those schools that employ racially disproportional discipline policies. VOYCE’s campaigning efforts have led to the creation of a new Student Code of Conduct that “ended two-week out-of-school suspensions for minor offenses,” decreased maximum suspension length by half and stopped arrests for disorderly conduct.31
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Blocks Together is a community-organizing group based in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago’s West Side. Beginning in 1995, Blocks Together has empowered and unified Chicago residents, tackling issues relating to education and the criminalization of youth, amongst a plethora of broader issues such as housing and economic justice. The Block Together Youth (BTY) council is the youth organizing arm of Blocks Together, which consists of local youth that have been directly affected by the inequities of the West Humboldt Park area. BTY challenges zero tolerance policies and the reliance on police officers, processing centers, metal detectors and surveillance officers in Chicago’s schools as causal factors in the perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline. Of the goals of the BTY, is the initative to develop innovative Restorative Justice practices within Chicago’s schools. So far, the campaigning efforts have culminated in the implementation of restorative justice models in elementary and high school settings. Moreover, BTY has highlighted the failures of the Chicago Public School system to implement “district-wide alternative discipline approaches.”32