Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) 

I chose to focus on Los Angeles, CA, USA because there has been a tremendous amount of organizing done around the school-to-prison pipeline. I focused more specifically on the The Los Angeles Unified School district (LAUSD). The LAUSD serves over 600,000 students and over 1,000 schools in the city of Los Angeles, 31 surrounding municipalities and unincorporated areas in Southern California (LAUSD Website). The district is the nation’s second largest district and continues to make strides to revolutionize school discipline.

LAUSD and Zero Tolerance Policies: 

The Los Angeles Unified School District has seen recent changes regarding the school-to-prison pipeline representing huge strides toward accountability of the district and schools. The LAUSD addressed school suspensions in a 2013 bill that banned suspensions for willful defiance. The ban was a recognition of the harmful effects of zero tolerance policies on students of color. The board’s reasoning for banning willful defiance suspensions “was that willful defiance was a vague term disproportionately applied to African-American and Latino students, and that suspending students out-of-school only tends to worsen behavior, not improve it” (Jones 2019). Instead, schools implemented restorative justice programs, so that when students are reprimanded, they are referred to speak to a counselor. The LAUSD has seen a decrease in total suspensions from 26,569 from 2011-2012 to 6,423 from 2017-2018. This ban is a huge step in the LAUSD’s ultimate goal to rid of defiance suspensions entirely (Jones 2019). Strides such as the ban on suspensions for willful defiance cannot be down without the work of advocates in grassroots organizations such as Students Deserve.