News & Commentary

School just got back in session, but one school district in Northern California already needs a lesson in how to create a welcoming and safe environment for Black students with disabilities.A 5-year-old Black student with autism and speech and language impairments suffered for months, including suffering injuries that needed to be treated by a hospital, all because of the inadequate oversight of Hayward Unified School District’s staff. In a time when Black students are regularly pushed out of classrooms for discipline and other subjective criteria, being Black with disabilities creates a unique and even more troubling set of problems that many school districts fail to adequately address.As outlined in our letter to the school district, in April 2018, E.E. moved with his mother from Inglewood and started at Helen Turner Children’s Center in the Hayward Unified School District. Within a month of E.E. arriving, it became clear that E.E.’s teacher was not creating a safe environment for E.E., which would ultimately lead to physical injury and missed class time for E.E. — the only Black student in a classroom with other students with disabilities.

Schools should be safe learning environments, not arenas for immigration crackdowns. Yet many of the components of the school-to-prison pipeline that cast students of color into the criminal justice system pose a particular threat to immigrant students.

California, the nation’s most populous state and a national leader in protecting and advancing reproductive health, could become the first to ensure that medication abortion is available to college students in public universities.

My local school board will soon decide whether to adopt a sex ed curriculum that makes it clear: LGBTQ+ people are equally deserving of respect and love.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra provided California public school leaders with policies they must adopt by July 1 to protect students from immigration enforcement while at school. We must demand that school leaders adopt all of these policies.

When my son recently brought home a certificate for making honor roll at his middle school, I was so proud. That quickly faded the next day when I received several calls from my child informing me that he had been pulled out of class. Because of his hair.

In California, the broad “disruption or willful defiance” category is a legit reason to suspend students from school. This subjective category must be abolished - here's why.

If we want to be serious about making long-term cultural change to stop sexual harassment and violence, we should provide comprehensive sex ed in all of our schools..

Today, students across the country are responding to the pre-game protests by professional athletes, when players during the National Anthem have chosen to kneel, sit, or raise a fist against police violence and state oppression of African-Americans and other people of color. Inspired, students have bravely followed suit.