Studying the school-to-prison pipeline from my home standing desk was the reality of my 2020-2021 school year
Author: Leen Abochale | Major: Special Education
My name is Leen Abochale, and I am a senior special education major in the college of education and health professions at the University of Arkansas. I have been researching patterns of suspension and expulsion in early childhood education settings in the state of Arkansas, alongside Dr. Schaefer-Whitby and Dr. Speight in the Special Education department. During the summer term, I wrote the literature review aspect of my thesis project, and I am currently working with a statistician to compare the data we have collected from the Civil Rights Project University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the Arkansas Department of Education, and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). I am currently applying for master’s programs in educational policy nationally and abroad. I hope to continue to build on my research with a broader scope into my master’s degree, as well as my PhD.
My research was based on the content I learned this year in my High Incidence Disabilities class. In this class, we learned that young students from marginalized populations are more likely to be sent to the principal’s office than their white peers, which makes those students more likely to be incarcerated later in life. This phenomenon is called the school-to-prison pipeline, and as a person of color myself, this concept sparked my interest. The more I researched it, the more I wondered how early this phenomenon began; thus, creating the basis of my research in exploring the suspension and expulsion rates in preschools. While it is absurd to think three- and four-year-old students could be expelled, I chose this topic to explore my speculations about the correlation between early punishment to the school-to-prison pipeline. My research focuses on the rates of punishment in Arkansas preschools, which makes it more real and more relevant than just observing the data on a national scale.
The impact of this research will be substantial, as it reveals both the statistics and the classroom factors that play a role in the excessive amount of suspension and expulsion that exists in early childhood settings in the state of Arkansas. As a special education major, I learn a lot about alternative punishment methods in the classroom that are effective and less exploitive to students. Much of what I have learned through my research is that suspension and expulsion are both isolating and humiliating to a young student. This ultimately leads to a student creating negative associations with school and following the school-to-prison pipeline pattern. Some of these patterns include engaging in behavior that puts them behind academically and makes them more likely to drop out before high school.
Before beginning my research, I had a difficult time finding a topic I genuinely wanted to research during a pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, I had wanted to research the impact of CBD on individuals with special needs, and so I was introduced to Dr. Whitby in the Special Education department. Although I was eager to do that research, the Black Lives Matter protests that had occurred that summer, as well as me learning about the school-to-prison pipeline inspired me to seek another topic. After learning about the school-to-prison pipeline in class, I met with my professor, Dr. Speight. We had a casual Zoom conversation that could have lasted hours, but I asked her if she would be willing to support my potential research about the topic, and within a couple of months, the three of us began planning what my research would look like. We identified potential problems to the data collection, such as a lack of data from private preschools and this being an unexplored topic. However, I found enough data to make a significant observation regardless. My faculty mentors also offered me great assistance and emotional support in completing this research, which empowered me to maintain patient and optimistic throughout the process, despite being fearful of doing something new and adult-like.
The most important thing I learned from this semester’s research was that I am a passionate person who desires a future in advocacy. While researching and collecting data, I will be candid: there were some days where I could not sleep imagining the impact of a poorly structured class or judgmental preschool teacher could have on a very young student. I was thankful to be white passing in a small, Arkansas town when I was in preschool, but while I was researching Arkansas suspension and expulsion data, I found that my own preschool had one of the highest punishment rates for black students in the state. Although this unsettling information kept me up at night, knowing this information motivated me to continue to research through the summer with the goal of publishing my findings in a journal to inform others of this information, too. My research has also influenced my decision to apply for a master’s program in educational policy with the intention of advocating for marginalized populations of students.
The honors college grant has enabled me to do all that I can to complete this project in a timely manner and with as much incentive as possible. I’ve also been able to hire a statistician to assist me in preparing and analyzing the data I have collected. I am hoping to continue just as strong through the fall semester, and hopefully publish my findings by the spring semester of my senior year.