Saida

New York City’s Implementation Plan for Free, High-Quality, Full-Day Universal Pre-Kindergarten (2014). To supplement the remaining children unable to take part in pre-kindergarten offered in a local public schools, parents enrolled their children in half-day pre-kindergarten programs and sometimes in conjunction with childcare providers like CBOs and Head Start Services, which contract with Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), to which parents would have to pay a fee for full-day service. A Work in Progress, “Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K program has seen registrations increase by 12,000 children in its second year of operations, with double-digit percentage increases across income levels except for one group: those who need it the most” (Rochabrun 2015). Overall, the de Blasio administration’s push for Universal Pre-kindergarten in New York City can be said to be a stepping stone toward closing the wealth and income gap.

TBI is a nonprofit action-tank whose mission is to “change the discourse of public debate, train and educate new leadership and develop initiatives to build wealth, build power and deliver justice to Black people”. The mission of the M/WBE campaign was to bring to light the issues that minority and women owned business enterprises faced, such as lack of access to resources and capital. As part of the M/WBE project, TBI hosted a Five Borough Tour: a series of forums where we invited business owners and local politicians to speak about these issues and to hear the alarming concerns of minority and women business owners. In this report we listed our findings from the Five Borough Tour and devised policy suggestions to bridge the disparity between M/WBEs and their counterparts in hopes of closing the ever increasing wealth gap between races and genders in NYC in the future.

The school-to-prison pipeline (“the pipeline”) is the mechanism by which students are channeled through the American public school system and into prisons and thereby ultimately becoming entangled within the American Prison Industrial Coommplex (PIC). This would result in the school-to-prison pipeline, whereby “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies are implemented in failing schools, as noted in Building Staffing, and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison According to Christopher A. Mallett’s The School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Critical Review of the Punitive Paradigm Shift, Initially, under zero tolerance policies students would endure punishment for more serious crimes like “violent behavior” and “destruction of school property”, but eventually such punishments would be applied to students who engage in “non-violent student behaviors, such as verbal harassment, disobedience, obscene language and truancy” (Mallet 18). Furthermore, the racial disparities as marked in youth sentencings, as a result of the school-to-prison pipeline by way of zero tolerance policies, is a reflection the racial disparities present in the American prison system.