Academically speaking, suspension is the worst thing a school could do to a student. As we could all guess, the less time you spend in the classroom with your peers learning new material and practicing skills, the less likely you are to do well in school. Imagine getting suspended then missing a week’s worth of classes and not being able to make up assignments or projects. Then imagine getting tested on that material you never learned a few weeks later. It’s no wonder where the inequities in standardized tests scores come from. On average in Washington’s public school system, 76% of white students graduate high school on time. In contrast, only 60% of Black, Latino and Native Americans graduate on time. Needless to say there is a problem here. When we look at information that tracks how school districts discipline their students, we see equally alarming data. In 2006, more than 3.3 million students were suspended or expelled, which is a ratio of about 1 in 14 young people pushed out of the public school system. In that same year, 15% of our nation’s African American student population was suspended in comparison to only 5% of our nation’s white students. These “gaps” are already egregious. As they grow, Washington digs itself deeper and deeper into a hole. A hole that unfairly privileges white folks through policy, discriminates against young folks of color, and ultimately leaves our society with alarming social inequities. The use of the term School-to-Prison pipeline has become a regular feature in the research we’ve been studying. The language is intentional-- it suggests that there are structures and forces that push young folks in certain situations out of the public school system and directly into the custody of our prison systems. This is especially true for young students of color and especially true for students from lower economic backgrounds. The pipeline could also imply the fact that youth are almost always unaware of the full consequences of the behavior, and plain don’t know the juvenile detention center is what’s waiting at the end of the pipeline. However, the idea of one single pipeline is limited. As we come to understand the vast differences in student experience within the school and prison systems, it becomes clear that there isn’t merely one path down this pipeline. We’re pretty sure a pipeline isn’t even close to describing the enormous diversity of pathways a young person navigates to get their education. Gasworks Park couldn’t house as many rusty pipes as we’ve got to describe our journeys. Some students trip and fall into a cycle of crime, some are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, some students come from challenging home situations that make school a difficult place to stay, while others are simply unable to muster excitement for classwork. Whatever the case, public schools have shown a tendency to rely on punitive, disciplinary measures to deal with students. We’ve even heard of teachers and administrators referring students into the juvenile court system for the purpose of getting that young person the social services classrooms aren’t able to offer. However, once that discipline starts to involve juvenile hall, we see that youth actually begin committing more and worse crimes, in a sense starting to own the label of “delinquent” they were given at school. We’re asking readers and listeners to keep this in mind. The “pipeline” metaphor doesn’t speak as much to the range of options young people have, but more to the systematic denial of an opportunity to succeed, once students stray from a track towards graduation. Before we begin to dig deep into how and why there are major disparities in academic achievement, and why we have a serious over-representation of students of color facing discipline, we should say a quick word about what literally happens when a student gets in trouble in school. There is incredible variation in the way students are disciplined in