St. Paul School Board Candidate Questionnaire: Charlotte Castro

Root & Restore St Paul
9 min readJun 21, 2019

Charlotte “Charlie” Castro is running for the St. Paul School Board. Learn more about her campaign at https://www.charlottecastro.com/

How do you understand the school-to-prison pipeline, and how will you work to eradicate it?

The School-to-Prison pipeline is a growing epidemic in our society in which there is a tendency for public schools to track students out of educational institutions and into the criminal justice system. There are many contributing factors to this epidemic, which stems from the early 1990’s. The school-to-prison pipeline has been allowed to continue due to deficit thinking, over representation in special education, tracking, suspension, expulsion and zero tolerance policies to name a few. For us to make real inroads into this issue, we need to redefine how infractions in our school system are labeled and decrease the crippling school discipline policies via reform and open conversation then simply labeling our students of color with a bullseye on their back.

Name a book, movie, individual or experience that has most influenced your understanding and orientation on the school to prison pipeline or youth justice? How did it affect your analysis and work?

A book that I’ve been reading is called On the Other Side of Freedom by Deray McKesson. This book chronicles the road to activism by Deray McKesson after the Ferguson protests and the movement that was born out of that event. Ferguson holds a special place in my history because shortly after college I moved to Ferguson and worked there for a year. I saw first hand the under belly of racism that existed there.

As it relates to the work I want to do on the School Board, I believe our school community would work a lot more equitably if instead of calling the police to report students not being in school we contacted an after-school provider or a community outreach agent and investigated ways to engage kids?

Saint Paul Public Schools employs police officers/school resource officers (SROs) to work in several of its buildings. What is your position on the role of police in schools, and the cost of this service to the school district?

While there may be extreme and often limited times that a Resource Officer would be needed, I believe this position needs to be reworked. There are many ways that we can stop the school-to-prison pipeline; one of these that could be very effective is the Team-Initiated Problem Solving (TIPS) program. This program is multi tiered in its approach; identify the problem, identify the underlying issues, intervene or work on evidence-based practices, work on the replacement behavior and finally create an action plan for implementation and review. Why don’t we do this currently? The simple answer is that it takes too long — we’ve grown into a society and an educational system that wants immediate results regardless of the ripple affect. Our current practice removes these kids from the educational system and casts them aside, would you want to put your kids into a system that would do this to them?

Over the last three decades, spending on corrections in Minnesota has outpaced spending on K-12 education by nearly three times. Budgets are moral documents that express priorities and commitments. How will you use your position to advance investments in education instead of incarceration and systems of punishment and control?

There are a few key values that I think should be reflected in the budget; students, teachers, programs and parent involvement. If you’ve ever come from poverty, you know you watch your pennies and expenditures like nobody’s business — so to, do we need to manage the revenue that St. Paul School has as well as the expenditures. We need to establish St. Paul Public Schools as a place where students and parents want to come for a world class education. As a School Board member, I will use my position to work on expanding the way we define punishment in our schools. I will work towards more constructive discussions instead of the current punitive damaging encounters that have led to a rise in students being pulled from the educational sector. I will also work on realigning the programs we have in place to improve how we interact with students to allow them to realize their full potential in school and not in a juvenile detention unit.

The most recent data available show that black students are 8 times more likely to be suspended than white students in St. Paul Public Schools, and that the use of suspensions has been increasing in recent years. Students of color, especially black students, are overwhelmingly more likely to be pushed out of learning through exclusionary discipline practices. How will you address the alarming and growing disparities in the use of punitive and exclusionary discipline policies?

I believe that the use of punitive and exclusionary discipline policies that exist and are exercised against black students need to be overhauled in a major way. I believe that Implicit Bias is a huge contributing factor to the way that most of these infractions are handed out, to that end a conversation needs to be born out of these statistics in changing the policies and not just adjusting them — they clearly aren’t working. We also need to tackle this question on the teaching front and provide adequate training for teachers in classroom management to enable students to be in the classroom, to learn. On another front, we need to hire and retain highly effective teachers that will work with students in their classrooms to give them what they need. By most accounts, a highly-effective teacher is one of the best ways to combat the school to prison pipeline and best promotes of school success. A highly-effective teacher is one that has high expectations for their students, seeks to know their students — both culture and language and finally, creates a supportive community with their students.

How will you work to support the leadership of youth in co-creating their learning pathways, especially youth who are not traditionally supported in leadership roles?

As a St. Paul School Board candidate, we must fight for what we can’t imagine. Much of what I seek to do on the St. Paul School Board is based on the premise that something better is possible, a different way of doing things will lead us to provide a great education and an even better society. I’m a strong believer that action occurs when more than one person is pushing towards the same goal, you also get more participation if there is more than a single participant. To that end, I would like to adopt a type of mentorship program inside of our schools at all ages to encourage leadership at every step of their educational careers to continue to foster a culture that everyone’s actions count, every opinion matters and should be heard and that we all need to work together. Our youth need to see people of color in leadership roles otherwise the promises we make to them or the hope we give these students is just for show. As a young child watching Cesar Chavez on television I wasn’t fully aware of how much of an impact he had on me. Listening to his words and his rhetoric has allowed me to do the work I have been doing and to engage in this campaign. We are a culture of many and we all need equal representation, we all need to see ourselves at the table of democracy.

What is your vision for meaningful engagement of youth and families in school buildings, and the district, to make sure all have a sense of ownership in what happens in schools and the district?

My vision for meaningful engagement as it relates to youth and families starts with a real presence at all our schools. The St. Paul School Board appears to have a top down issue — as a Board Member, we need to be out in our community having conversations with students, teachers and principals. We need to hold online meetings and face to face engagements with parents to continue the conversation, address issues and work toward a resolution that does the most good. If students, teachers, principals and parents are part of the discussion, how can our school systems not become better for all of those that call these educational institutions home. All to often a decision is made from the top down and schools must figure out the nuances of a new policy or new practice. As a St. Paul School Board member, we need to get out from behind our desks and into the schools to see the impact decisions we make will have, we need to be seen in our community and we need to listen to those that have elected us to govern. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and work hand in hand with our school communities to address the problems that exist and work towards meaning conversations that help enact change.

In the spring of 2018, all school board members approved a controversial data sharing “Joint Powers Agreement” that created a legal structure to share data and apply predictive analytics to flag youth “at risk” of delinquency. Due to community advocacy, that legal agreement has been dissolved. Yet Ramsey County, St. Paul Public Schools, and the city of St. Paul continue to push for data sharing. What is your position on that Joint Powers Agreement, data sharing, and predictive analytics? How will you work to ensure that sensitive family and youth data are protected, and that families and youth are partners in any collaboration around data or services?

I believe that data sharing needs to be blind to the student, race or gender; this information needs to be protected. However, we need to monitor the data from each of our schools to identify trends, issues and programs that are working and those that are failing to provide for all our students. Whether we are specifically talking about the school-to-prison pipeline, Resource Officers (Police presence) in schools, establishing ways to build up families and youth or about creating programs that will combat the gaps that we see for individuals of color I believe that it all starts with conversation and open dialogue. Families, youth, teachers, principals, citizens, school board members and the superintendent need to be at the table working on solutions, thinking outside of the box and strategizing on how to obtain information in a way that is helpful instead of creating bias and furthering racial injustice. It’s time for us to work together to identify needs and create progress. It’s not a time to call out those students that are ‘trouble’ — penalizing these students in an educational environment has no positive impact on anyone and should not be the primary way that we work on resolving our issues.

Students in the district bring a range of experiences, strengths and challenges from their homes and communities with them into schools. How can our schools build upon youth and family strengths, and reduce the impacts associated with adversities?

Our schools have since their inception been rooted in the premise that teachers are the sage on the stage. Think of how our schools are configured, all students file into class and sit in neat rows and look forward at the teacher. This sort of environment doesn’t lend itself to collaboration and engagement, it does perpetuate the very individualistic, I’m in it to win it all approach. What if we reimagined the classroom — what if we organized the environment so that we sit in a half circle or depending on how small the class is, we educated each other in a circle type environment. In this circle type approach, no one student and no one teacher have all the power — the learning shifts to the students. What I have learned as an educator, is that all my students bring insight and perspective and all those voices in the classroom need to be heard. Adversities build character, opinion, confidence and emotional toughness — there is a real impact that adversities have with our students and the families they come from but neglecting those students and not engaging with them in a meaningful way in the classroom has enormous consequences. This harkens back to my call for highly-effective teachers, these are the teachers that get that everyone doesn’t start from the same base line but that everyone deserves to feel that connection and that each student needs a champion.

How can schools expand social and emotional supports for youth, rooted in healing, justice and wellness?

Congress enacted hearings in December of 2012 to bring to light the school to prison pipeline that is occurring in schools across America. To that end, individuals discussed decreasing the funding for police in schools and increasing the presence and funding for counseling, support staff and educational resources. There is strong evidence that evidence-based solutions will assist in ending the racial disparities that shape the strength of the current pipeline. We need to remove the prison state from our schools and usher in a new wave of individuals suited to tackle the range of issues and problems that students encounter from their home base to school each day of their academic lives. There is evidence that if you have a support network — family, friends, teachers, counselors or neighbors it will positively affect your life, decrease your stress, anxiety and stave off other medical issues, but if you think you are alone and feel lonely there is research that indicates the harm done to someone from feeling this way is equivalent to 23 cigarettes a day. We need to do more to foster community, connections, conversations and healing. This won’t happen overnight, it is a life long journey that should start in our schools.

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