NU Borders and Identities Collaborative

How are student rights infringed?

Students lack the proper information to learn about and practice their student rights in their respective schools. In the current student handbook, it does not clearly state that students have a voice in their education. Currently, students feel as if they are not receiving the quality and equitable education, as is promised in the current student code of conduct.

Students are not receiving fair, equal treatment. Our treatment is based on race, gender, and class.
Students do not have a voice within the curriculum, or the day-to-day acts of the school.
Students are not receiving proper information and support to succeed within the school.

Using maps of our respective schools, we:

• Identified favorite/safe places
• Identified Security Procedures
  • Counselors vs Security
• Identified areas of racial segregation
• Initial demographic information
• Student athletes

Critical Tours of Northwestern University and Local high schools provided personal narratives about students’ lives.

We could discuss and view first-hand:

• Disparities in treatment, discrimination, and favoritism
• How the school is organized, structured, and managed
• The condition of the school buildings
• Resource availability and lack thereof
• Identify similarities and differences between the three schools

We collected data on:

Racial makeup, Suspension rates (racial demographic), Graduation rates, Income, Number of security guards and number of counselors, the student/teacher ratio, ESL students ELL/English language learner, Special ED/Diverse learners, Translation services, Languages offered, and AP classes and honors classes

We identified key people who we could interview to help us understand what schooling, education, and student rights look like in the local high schools

Interviewed: 2 Alum, 2 Current Students,  and 2 Disciplinarians
Coded interviews and found main themes

• Over policing of students
• Segregation in Schools
• Lack of Resources for Students of Color

We read the student handbooks and identified things in the handbooks that we wanted to keep and change. We closely examined the schools’ respective rules and regulations.

Core purpose: To analyze our interviews and personal narratives alongside the handbooks in order to identify inequalities and disparities in how the rules and regulations at each schools were upheld.

There is over-policing and over-disciplining of the student body.
Students, and even some administrators, lack a voice in the institutions they partake in.
There is an ongoing lack of communication and a prominent lack of accessible information available to students and parents and some administrators.

For our action component, we developed a new student code of conduct that focused primarily on equal/quality education, voice, and education policy (link below).

We also created a documentary (uploading soon).

We sought to resolve:

Disciplining and Policing

Education Policy

Equality and Balance

Voice