‘School-to-prison pipeline’: A New Jersey pastor recounts how her small Trenton congregation is spreading its arms around the city’s vulnerable children – Karen Hernandez-Granzen

On the south side of the Lower Trenton Bridge are large, neon-lit letters that read, “Trenton makes, the world takes.” When the slogan was adopted in 1917, Trenton, New Jersey, was a different city: a major manufacturing center brimming with jobs. Today, decades after the factories were boarded up and those who were able fled to the suburbs, the sign seems to be more a museum piece than a reality. Other than government positions mostly staffed by residents of the surrounding suburbs, jobs are in short supply. Gang violence is common. Schools are overcrowded and poorly funded. With a per capita income of $17,400, approximately one-fourth of the city and over one-third of its children live below the poverty line. Nine state prisons fall within 40 miles of the city. They have become the schools and cages of many of our children.

And in that sense, Trenton has not changed much. That early-20th-century prosperity was also the age of segregated schools. Today, in what some are calling the “school-to-prison pipeline,” it’s the city’s children of color—as well as children with learning disabilities or histories of poverty—who are most vulnerable.

“Millions of our children are bleeding from many wounds that we have the means but not the love and will . . . to prevent and heal,” writes Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund. “Our Creator did not make two classes of children. It is our responsibility and within our power to make our nation see and protect all our children as the sacred gifts they are and not just as fodder for war, the prison industry, or the consumer market. We must challenge ourselves . . . to make our children’s health, safety, education, and family and community life our overarching national purpose.”

Presbyterians have long made the welfare of our world’s children a denominational priority, and Westminster Presbyterian Church (WPC) is bringing that legacy to Trenton. Heeding God’s mandate to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer. 29:7), WPC—a relatively small multicultural and multiracial urban church founded in 1898—supports quality public education for neighborhood children and works to educate their parents. In the end, despite all of Trenton’s struggles, this city is our home. And it is a place full of good and visionary people—a place of community, rich history, arts, and genuine possibility.

Trenton once played a pivotal role in desegregating schools across the nation. WPC is only one block from the historic Hedgepeth-Williams Elementary School (HWS), named in honor of two African American mothers who sued Trenton’s Board of Education over racial discrimination against their children. In 1944 the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled in their favor and abolished segregation in the state. A decade later, the US Supreme Court cited the Hedgepeth-Williams case in the famed Brown v. Board of Education decision to overturn the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

We did it once, and we can do it again.

That’s why we keep WPC’s doors open six or seven days a week, convert its fellowship hall into a children’s gymnasium and theater, and dedicate its classrooms to educating neighborhood children and their families. For years, WPC offered support and education through the federally funded Head Start program. Today, we support our community’s children through a day-care center, a free after-school mentoring program known as Get SET (Scholastic Enhancement Tutoring), a summer camp, the English School of Lawrence Road Presbyterian Church, and Trenton’s YMCA.

The majority of our Get SET students attend HWS. With the loss of jobs, suburban flight, and low-quality education, HWS has become the default education for children whose families have no means of escape. And in Trenton that means mostly children of color. African American and Hispanic children make up over 94 percent of the student population. The sad irony is that HWS—named in honor of the two women who fought to end segregation on behalf of their children—has become, in effect, a segregated school.

But separate is never equal. Students’ achievement-test scores are well below the statewide average. While 56.4 percent of New Jersey’s fourth graders tested proficient in language arts in the 2008–2009 school year, only 22.7 percent of HWS students did. Johns Hopkins researchers have dubbed Trenton Central High School a “drop-out factory.” In 2009 only 61.6 percent of the school’s students passed the High School Proficiency Assessment test—contrasted with the state average of 89.3 percent.

And conditions are just getting worse. In the summer of 2010, City of Trenton administrators chose to balance the fiscal budget by closing not only the public library near HWS but all neighborhood libraries, leaving only the main downtown branch.

In response, our congregation, with the help of Jane Rohlf, transformed the WPC library into a neighborhood children’s library. But our greatest impact still comes through our Get SET program, created by the former Bethany Presbyterian Church and adopted as part of an intentional strategy to deal with the community’s dramatically increasing violence and active gang recruitment.

The need for a proactive response became frighteningly apparent when three of WPC’s female youth—participants in the Presbyterian-organized Trenton Youth Connection program—were jumped by over 60 other youth. Providentially, Elsa Santiago, one of WPC’s triumphant saints and a former Head Start teacher, and her daughter Frances Roig, a former Get SET tutor, were there when it happened. Elsa and Frances rescued the girls by courageously driving their van through the mob-like crowd.

Realizing then that we needed to start younger, our congregation made the decision to become a community center. We began by implementing our own multilingual after-school programs as an alternative and sanctuary from the “code of the streets,” in which violence begets violence. Get SET isn’t just about helping kids with their homework; it’s an opportunity to embrace the arts, build self-esteem, develop leadership skills, partner with parents, and teach respect for oneself and others.

This mission extends far beyond the classroom. WPC is one of only a few city churches with a large green space. In 2004 we named it “The Rainbow Quad” and dedicated it to fun, families, and festivals. All kinds of events take place here: neighborhood barbecues, “Take it to the Streets” block parties with 17-foot waterslides, concerts, back-to-school backpack and school-supplies giveaways, carnivals, health fairs, Easter-egg hunts, and live nativities.

In the summer of 2009, volunteer pastors teamed up with youth from our congregation and First Presbyterian Church of Albany, New York, to convert WPC’s former sculpture garden into a vegetable, herb, and flower garden by building a beautiful pergola (or shaded walkway) and recycling the stone sculptures to create a mosaic floor. The following year, the space evolved into a community garden outfitted with rain barrels and compost units. There, Get SET children learn about healthy eating habits and plant vegetables and flowers using “worm poop,” that incomparable organic fertilizer. Afterward, they take pictures of the plants and beneficial insects. You can’t see it in the photos, but behind those cameras are smiling, proud faces.

It’s a very different world from what these children experience elsewhere. Even before learning the term school-to-prison pipeline, I, as an urban pastor, witnessed firsthand its negative byproducts. I noticed the dramatic decrease in academic and cultural-enrichment course offerings, the increase in the “digital divide” between urban and suburban children, the surge of school suspensions for relatively minor offenses, and the daily use of prison nomenclature by our children and youth. It is disturbing to hear Get SET students casually remark, “Oh, we were on lockdown today at school.”

“The ‘school-to-prison pipeline,’ ” says the American Civil Liberties Union, “refers to the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” For many, the pipeline represents a prioritization of incarceration over education. While our nation builds more prisons to house the greatest number of inmates the world has ever known, it closes schools and libraries, reduces services like counseling and special education, and cuts back on the arts and physical education. In the meantime, the schools themselves are becoming more like prisons. Educators are faced with some tough decisions as they consider the realities of bullying and gun violence among our children, but too many are simply turning to zero-tolerance policies, severely punishing even the most minor infractions. Students are suspended, expelled, or sent on to the courts and then juvenile detention, where they will find few, if any, educational services.

The American Bar Association argues that the zero-tolerance approach has become a “one-size-fits-all solution” for problems that require contextual interpretation and case-by-case assessment. A 2009 Forum on Public Policy article describes, for instance, an incident in which a 14-year-old Florida special-needs student was referred to the police by his principal for allegedly stealing $2 from a classmate. After being charged with “strong-armed robbery,” the youth was held for six weeks in an adult jail, the charge dropped only when a 60 Minutes news crew appeared at his hearing.

There is a better way. WPC’s Get SET program is part of the Trenton Public School District’s strategy to actively involve the faith-based community in providing services to students and families. The strategy is a central theme of Superintendent Francisco Durán, who has created a cabinet-level Office of Family and Community Engagement. “After-school programs in high-poverty communities provide opportunities for children that less economically depressed locales take for granted,” says Fran Atchison, the district’s grants manager and a member of WPC. “From field trips to hands-on science, Get SET goes beyond homework support to offer students engaging activities. Schools can be hard places for students, academically and socially. Get SET gives them the time and attention to be restored at the end of a bad day. The result: a calmer child who greets mom with a smile along with a report that the homework is almost finished—and then says, ‘Look at this cool stuff I made!’ ”

In an effort to cut off the problem at its source, WPC recently joined the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. It is a coalition of faith communities and secular leaders working to end mass incarceration and the discriminatory practices in the US criminal justice system through education and action. Our Trenton chapter is committed to promoting reading proficiency. The nonprofit group Advocates for Children of New Jersey noted in a 2012 report that, startlingly, only 28 percent of children in Trenton public schools attain reading proficiency by the end of the third grade.

Barbara Flythe, the coalition’s current chair and former moderator of the New Brunswick Presbytery, says that “one group presently has a computer-based, teacher-assisted model in two public schools, which shows promise. Our goal is to have, within five years, every student in Trenton reading with proficiency at the third-grade level.”

Once again, Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman speaks prophetically about the matter at hand, this time in her Child Watch Column of May 3, 2013:

Poor three- and four-year-olds denied early child development services . . . may not be able to call Congress, but we need to speak out for them. . . . We know that eliminating a child’s early education investments now will increase his chance of going to prison later by 39 percent. And paying for that prison will cost all of us nearly three times more a year than it would have cost to provide him a quality early learning foundation to get ready for school.

WPC’s missional story shows that a small urban congregation working with a network of church and local partners can be an agent of transformation in its community. WPC labors in the company of a glorious cloud of witnesses that includes New Brunswick Presbytery, Nassau Presbyterian Church, the Bonner Foundation, current PC(USA) moderator Neal Presa, and 30-plus partner churches, educational institutions, local leaders, and teaching artists. Glory be to our God, who dwells in the city with God’s people of every race, nation, tribe, and language!

Karen Hernandez-Granzen is pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Trenton, New Jersey.