News & Commentary

The ACLU of Arizona teamed up with Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) and other organizations to bail moms out of jail so they could celebrate the holiday with their loved ones.

Following the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, students across the nation have come together to fight for gun reform. They have decided they can no longer sit still while reform efforts fail and school shootings become increasingly normal.

In partnership with the Demand to Learn campaign, Rising Youth Theatre created The 100th Day, an original theatre production. This collaboration highlights the injustice and discrimination within Arizona’s education system and allows audience members to learn through young people’s eyes.

Arizona does not need more mandatory minimum sentences. We need a system that values treatment and prevention, as well as flexibility for judges to determine individualized sentences when incarceration is unavoidable.

Racial bias plagues our criminal justice system. That is why yesterday, with the Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, we filed a brief with the Arizona Supreme Court in a case about racially discriminatory jury selection, Urrea v. Arizona.

When a child is born in Arizona, their vital records should reflect--and respect--the reality of the family they are born into. Right now, that's not the case. We hear far too often from LGBTQ parents who are frustrated and upset that their child's birth certificate does not match their family.

When the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools cancelled its monthly meeting “due to no requests for Board consideration,” education advocates and parents like me decided to hold our own public meeting and highlight the issues the board refuses to acknowledge.

Demand to Learn recently took a team of youth, moms, educators and community organizers to Denver to learn about the restorative practices (RP) that have transformed a school there from a prison pipeline to a model of smart school discipline. I was lucky enough to attend and learned far more than I imagined I would. I thought I would be learning about their discipline procedures and I did learn about that, but what struck me was that the majority of restorative practices are not about how to deal with conflict and rule infractions but how to build relationships and create a culture of caring and respect.

On January 16, Demand to Learn allies accompanied me as we delivered over 2,500 petition signatures to the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools and demanded they stand up for families across Arizona. The signatures were gathered after an ACLU of Arizona report, Schools Choosing Students, was released in December that revealed hundreds of public charter schools across the state have enrollment policies that are unlawful or discriminatory.