Zainab I Farhat
Posts by Zainab I Farhat
The Student Rights Project (SRP) is an interdisciplinary consortium of Law, Social Work, and Education graduate students specially trained to advocate for the educational rights of K-12 students across Southeast Michigan. Through our unique community-university partnership with the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, SRP trains volunteers to advocate for students facing suspension and expulsion to ensure that every student’s right to an education is protected.
Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline is at the core of our mission. We recognize that zero tolerance policies, often codified in school disciplinary codes of conduct, subject students to severe and punitive discipline, criminalizing typical behavior and resulting in academic disengagement, failure, push-out, and delinquency. Moreover, schools and administrators must adapt their disciplinary processes, including their codes of conduct, to reflect changing local, state, and federal educational laws.
Thus, as a part of our advocacy work, SRP launched the School Code Project to work with public schools across Michigan to review and revise school codes of conduct. The purpose of this project is to challenge institutional threats to students’ educational rights and encourage schools to align their codes of conduct with evidence-based, nationally recognized best practices for responding to student misbehavior.
Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline is at the core of our mission. We recognize that zero tolerance policies, often codified in school disciplinary codes of conduct, subject students to severe and punitive discipline, criminalizing typical behavior and resulting in academic disengagement, failure, push-out, and delinquency. Moreover, schools and administrators must adapt their disciplinary processes, including their codes of conduct, to reflect changing local, state, and federal educational laws.
Thus, as a part of our advocacy work, SRP launched the School Code Project to work with public schools across Michigan to review and revise school codes of conduct. The purpose of this project is to challenge institutional threats to students’ educational rights and encourage schools to align their codes of conduct with evidence-based, nationally recognized best practices for responding to student misbehavior.