70 Million: Why Policing Our Schools Backfires
School resource officers are often called upon in middle and high schools to help with routine discipline. But for many children, especially those with disabilities, a law enforcement response to their behavior can lead to the school-to-prison pipeline. This week on Making Contact, we hear a story from our podcast partner 70 Million about the relationship between students with special needs and school resource officers and the changes...
Geraldine’s Story: How Public Schools Are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia
Making Contact · Geraldine’s Story: How Public Schools Are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia Black students with dyslexia all too often carry a heavy burden in our public schools. This documentary centers around a grandmother who fought for years to get her grandkids — particularly her grandson — properly assessed for dyslexia. Like too many African American boys, Geraldine Robinson’s grandson had been erroneously labeled...
The End of Student Debt: Free College and Debt Strikes
Making Contact · The End of Student Debt: Free College and Debt Strikes 44 million Americans hold over 1.6 trillion dollars of student debt and the cost of higher education continues to skyrocket. — And it’s the poor, people of color and women who are most severely impacted. — The COVID-19 crisis highlights the vulnerability of debt when people are unable to find jobs or pay off loans. We look at two urgent...
Mrs. Hamer, Echoes
Making Contact · Mrs. Hamer, Echoes Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke words that are all too relevant. Today on Making Contact, you’ll hear archival recordings, and excerpts from a powerful new film featuring Fannie Lou Hamer’s contemporaries– themselves now elders. You’ll hear about the context of her life, and the lives of other sharecroppers in Mississippi from a seldom heard film produced for the Student Nonviolent...
The Bombing of MOVE, 35 Years Later
The Bombing of MOVE, 35 Years Later Our radio adaptation of the film, Let the Fire Burn explores the controversial, 1985 clash between police in Philadelphia and MOVE, a radical, non-violent, back-to-nature group. After a standoff with the group MOVE, Philadelphia Police dropped a bomb on the roof of MOVE’s home, killing 11 people including five children, and destroying approximately 61 homes. Thirty-five years later,...
The Big Lift
The Big Lift Meeting family needs in a city of widening wealth gaps is a big lift. Dozens of studies show that when parents or guardians are engaged in their kids’ education, it has a huge impact. Not just on academics but on a student’s attendance, self-esteem, and behavior in class. That’s true across income levels. That’s why the San Francisco Unified School District created the position of “family liason” fifteen years ago: to...
