A young man who was kicked out of school in Alabama will tell his story on the world stage this week as he meets with leaders at the United Nations in Geneva.
CJ was a senior at Paul Bryant High School in Tuscaloosa when officials kicked him out of school for a marijuana crime he says he did not commit.
AL.com reported on CJ’s experience last year and found that in Alabama, Black students are nearly twice as likely to face every type of classroom removal as compared to their white peers, although they only make up 32% of the student population. AL.com did not use CJ’s last name because he was a minor at the time and was not charged with a crime.
“Alabama is a state that has a history of pushing Black kids out of schools and into punishment-oriented settings,” said Delvin Davis, a senior policy analyst who focuses on criminal legal system reform policy at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “CJ is one of many, many cases where you have a young Black person who should be in school, but instead of providing resources and education for him they choose isolation and punishment.”
Along with his dad, Cory Jones, and representatives from the Southern Poverty Law Center, CJ will address the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent.
The international forum, which was created in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, has identified structural racism in education as one of their focuses. CJ’s story will help to explain how Black students are disproportionately removed from school in the United States.
CJ and the SPLC delegation will meet with UN officials, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and representatives from civil society groups to discuss his experience.
One afternoon in November 2022, CJ missed the bus from the Tuscaloosa Career and Technology Academy, where he took classes, back to Paul Bryant High. So he caught a ride with a friend.
A school resource officer found weed in the friend’s car, but a police investigation determined that it did not belong to CJ, and someone else was charged with possession.
CJ refused to confess to having the weed and spent the rest of his senior year in disciplinary limbo, missing key milestones like prom and his final baseball season. He eventually withdrew from the district to be homeschooled and finish his degree on time.
“It was all taken away from me for no reason. Taken away from me like it was a joke,” CJ told AL.com last year.
School officials first placed CJ in in-school suspension for over two months then sentenced him to an additional 40 days in alternative school – for an infraction he says he did not commit.
“Nobody, nobody was listening to me,” CJ told the SPLC. “I told them the truth, and nobody listened.”
Throughout the process, CJ was denied standard due process rights, like not being able to effectively appeal the school board’s decision or bring his lawyer into any hearings.
Alabama is one of the only states in the Southeast that doesn’t have a statewide guarantee of due process in school discipline, allowing each district to set its own policies. Numerous attempts to grant universal protections to students have made their way through the legislature over the last four years without success. Two bills, HB188 and SB165, will make that same attempt this session.
“Our hope at the end of the day with all of this is to get whatever input from the UN we can get that will help us to influence both policy and relevant legislation around school issues,” Lisa Borden, Senior Policy Counsel for International Advocacy at the SPLC, said.
CJ and his dad have advocated for due process laws in Alabama since the incident, but this will be their first time traveling internationally for their advocacy.
“We will be able to tell our story and it is just such a blessing,” Jones, CJ’s dad, said.
