Jena Six Students to Lead Panel at Summit in Washington, DC

To: EDUCATION EDITORS

Contact: Nayyera Haq of Children’s Defense Fund, +1-202-662-3592

WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Singer Angie Stone and “Jena Six” students will participate in the Tuesday, September 25, evening session of the Children’s Defense Fund’s (CDF) national Cradle to Prison Pipeline Summit at Howard University.

Stone will take part in a panel discussion on “Transforming Popular Culture into a Positive Force to help Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline.” Following that, students Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw, two of the “Jena Six” will join others involved in the case for a panel discussion on “Endangered Black Males: Racial Injustice and the Pipeline”. Bailey, Shaw and four other Black high school students in Jena, Louisiana, known widely as the “Jena Six,” have been unjustly charged with adult felony charges for allegedly participating in a school fight. Both events will take place in Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium.

The panel will be part of a larger Summit to address America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline crisis and its devastating impact on children, youth and their families, particularly within the Black and Latino communities. A full Summit agenda is attached. For more information on CDF’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline Initiative visit http://www.childrensdefense.org/cradletoprison.

WHO: Children’s Defense Fund

Singer Angie Stone

“Jena Six” students Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw

WHAT: Cradle to Prison Pipeline Summit Tuesday Evening Session

WHEN: September 25th, 2007

7:30 PM Panel: Transforming Popular Culture into a Positive Force to

help Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline.

9:00 PM Panel: Endangered Black Males: Racial Injustice and the

Pipeline

WHERE Cramton Auditorium

Howard University Campus

2455 Sixth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20059

Media check-in begins at 6:30 PM

RSVP: Media wishing to attend this event must RSVP to Nayyera Haqat

nayyera@childrensdefense.orgor 202-662-3592. A mult box will

be provided.

National Summit on America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline(R) Crisis

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)

September 25-26, 2007

Howard University

Washington, DC

TENTATIVE AGENDA 9-18-07

Tuesday, September 25

8:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Registration

Blackburn Auditorium

Second floor lobby

8:30 a.m. – 9:45 a.m. Continental Breakfast

Blackburn Auditorium

Second floor lobby

Morning Session:

Rankin Chapel

10:00 a.m. — 10:05 a.m. Welcome to Howard University

Dr. H. Patrick Swygert, President, Howard University

10:05 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. Meditation on Why We Are Here

Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr., Senior Minister Emeritus Riverside

Church, CDF Board Member

10:20 a.m. – 10:35 a.m. Welcome, Introduction and Overview of

Summit’s Goals

Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children’s Defense Fund

This session will introduce the honorary co-chairs of the Summit, Dr. Dorothy Height, Dr. John Hope Franklin, and Dr. Dolores Huerta and set the stage for activating the action phase of a broad-based National Community Crusade for Children, the social movement needed to dismantle the Pipeline that CDF seeks to catalyze at this Summit. It also will provide an overall framework for the Summit itself. Special emphasis will be placed on the exceptionally high personal, family and societal toll the Pipeline exacts, the striking failure of our nation to recognize its existence, and to take the urgent and sustained actions needed on the policy, programmatic and investment fronts to redress the multiple, convergent factors that fuel it. (This session will announce the official release of America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline(R) Report that all participants will receive.)

Dismantling America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline: What Will It Take?

Part I. “Mobilizing Public Demand and Political Will”

Moderator: Angela Glover Blackwell, Overall Summit Moderator and Synthesizer, Founder and CEO Policy Link and CDF Board Member

10:35 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. Angela Glover Blackwell

Overview of Summit agenda, schedule and plan of action

10:45 a.m. – 10:55 a.m. “What About the Children?” Yolanda Adams song with Slide Presentation of Photographs of Children in the Pipeline by Veteran Time Magazine Photographer Steve Liss

10:55 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Introduction: Robert F. Vagt, President Emeritus, Davidson College and Chair, CDF Board of Directors

11:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Dr. John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History, Duke University

11:15 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. Introduction: Carol Biondi, California’s State Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, CDF Board Member

11:20 a.m. – 11:35 a.m. Dr. Dolores Huerta, President, Dolores Huerta Foundation and co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus, United Farm Workers of America

11:35 a.m. – 12:05 p.m. Interaction between Speakers and Summit Participants (Angela Glover Blackwell presiding)

The opening addresses seek to provide a historical context for the Summit by highlighting key past achievements, the serious continuing challenges and unfinished agenda, through the lens of the Black and Latino communities, and to build the requisite power base to prevent and dismantle the Pipeline. They will be followed by an interactive dialogue with Summit participants including Theodore Shaw, Director-Counsel and President, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund commenting on the role of race in the Pipeline.

12:05 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. Participants transit to Blackburn East

Ballroom

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Buffet Luncheon served

Blackburn East Ballroom

Invocation

1:30 p.m. – 1:50 p.m. Participants transit to Cramton Auditorium

Part II. Reweaving the Fabric of Family and Community: Challenges and

Opportunities

Interactive Dialogues

1:50 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. The Need for Personal and Community

Cramton Auditorium Responsibility to Dismantle the Cradle to

Prison Pipeline

Moderator: Juan Williams, Senior Correspondent, National Public Radio

Dr. Bill Cosby, Educator, Entertainer, and Author, including Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, with Alivin F. Poussaint

Dr. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., President, Morehouse College, author of Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities

2:45 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Perspectives of Youth and Parents

Cramton Auditorium Moderator: Maya Harris, Executive

Director, ACLU of Northern California

Discussants:

Donnie Belcher Boyd, Youth Advocate, Chicago, Ill.

Michelle “Mickey” McKinney, Youth Advocate, Los Angeles, Calif.

Lupe Ortiz-Tovar, Youth Advocate, Tucson, Ariz.

Hun Pham, Youth, New York, N.Y.

Jasbir Singh, Youth Advocate, New York, N.Y.

Ms. Lorna Hogan, Parent Advocate, Washington, D.C.

Mrs. Wanda Taylor, Parent Advocate, Minneapolis, Minn.

This session will be an honest and provocative dialogue with parents and youth, some of whom have been caught in one or more of the key feeder points into the Pipeline, and all of whom are now working to help keep from entering or being trapped in the Pipeline. Mothers and fathers, many of whom have confronted the Pipeline themselves, know all too intimately the struggles and perils faced in fulfilling care-giving roles for children and youth amid often profound personal and family challenges and unsupportive environments and systems. Through this intimate sharing of experiences, the session hopes to illuminate the very real but often insidious factors that funnel children and youth into the Pipeline and how this affects their lives and that of their families. It also seeks to provide valuable insights from those who have faced the Pipeline head-on about the most urgently needed preventive and other interventions and escape paths.

3:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Break

4:00 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. Interactive Dialogue

Cramton Auditorium Promising Approaches to End Violence and

Strengthen Communities in Dismantling the

Pipeline

Moderator: J. Michael Solar, Esq., Solar & Padilla LLP, Houston, Texas and CDF Board Member

Discussants:

Reverend Dr. Ray Hammond, Chair, Boston Foundation and Chairman and Co- Founder, Boston Ten Point Coalition

Dr. Carl C. Bell, Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health, University of Illinois in Chicago

David Kennedy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and founder of Operation CeaseFire

David Valladolid, President and CEO of the Parent Institute For Quality Education (PIQE)

In the past, parents, neighbors, faith-based and educational institutions and communities were expected to and did assume major responsibilities for keeping children and youth safe, within their families and out of child welfare, and juvenile and criminal justice systems by providing positive adult role models and helping to guide them along paths to success in school and beyond. Today, pervasive poverty, unemployment, rampant substance abuse, widespread crime and violence fuel already high and increasing rates of incarceration of children, youth, and their parents. Popular culture frequently demeans academic achievement and glorifies violence and disrespect of others, including women. Together, these forces have seriously eroded traditional values and undermined family and community stability. This session will explore successful multi-pronged strategies to create new community norms to quell violence and to engage key community stakeholders to buffer children and youth from entering the Pipeline and facilitate the sustained exit of those who already have entered it. Within this interactive format, each discussant will provide a brief overview of his/her respective initiative to be followed by a discussion of the key lessons learned from these experiences and their replicability, to illuminate how to staunch violence within communities on a large scale.

5:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Summit Participants Transit to Dinner

5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Dinner for Summit Participants

Blackburn East Ballroom

Presider: Katie McGrath, Child Advocate, Los Angeles, CA and CDF Board

Member

Invocation

Howard University Jazz Ensemble performs during dinner

7:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. Summit Participants Transit to Cramton

Auditorium for Evening Panel (Note: this evening session will be open to a wide audience, in addition to the Summit participants)

7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Part III.

Cramton Auditorium

Transforming Popular Culture into a Positive Force to help Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline

Moderator: Confirmation pending

Discussants:

Geoff Canada, President and CEO, Harlem Children’s Zone and CDF Board

Member

Dr. Edward Cornwell, Chief of Adult Trauma and Professor, Johns Hopkins

Hospital

Christy Hauberger, Founder, Latina Magazine

Angie Stone, Singer and Composer

Others pending confirmation

Prominent community leaders and positive role models for children and youth are needed from the entertainment world to share their views on what it will take to transform the negative influences that permeate much of today’s national and youth culture into more positive forces to affect the family, community and societal changes required to foster healthy, safe children. They will help formulate a call to action for promoting positive and productive lifestyles for children and youth, and helping change community and cultural norms about violence, underachievement and prison.

9:00 p.m. – 9:45 p.m. Endangered Black Males: Racial Injustice

Cramton Auditorium and the Pipeline

The Jena Six

Moderator: Confirmation pending

Robert Bailey, Student

Casiphla Bailey, Mother

Theo Shaw, Student

Tracie Washington, Esq., Louisiana Justice Project

9:45 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Closing: Marian Wright Edelman

Cramton Auditorium

Wednesday, September 26

8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast

Blackburn East Ballroom

9:30 a.m. – 9:40 a.m. Meditation: Rev. Dr. Bernard Richardson,

Blackburn East Ballroom Dean of Rankin Chapel, Howard University

Part IV. Priority Systemic Reforms to Dismantle the Pipeline:

Interactive Dialogues

9:40 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Current Challenges in Major Feeder

Blackburn East Ballroom Systems’ Treatment of Children and Youth

Major reforms in key contributing factors and feeder systems are urgently needed to halt the Pipeline. This session will focus on interventions and systems which can and must play powerful roles in protecting children from rather than feeding them into and trapping them in the Pipeline. These include the health and mental health care, education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. Discussants will share promising strategies from selected communities and states to ameliorate these risks, and provide three major recommendations to redress the Pipeline from the perspective of his/her respective system. Special importance will be assigned to the need for scaling up and linking these strategies to achieve the greatest impact for children and youth and help inform the larger action plan to reroute children to successful adulthood.

Advancing Child Health, Mental Health, Early Childhood Development, Education and Poverty Reduction

Moderator: Confirmation pending

Discussants:

Jane Knitzer, Executive Director, National Center on Children in Poverty

Bill McNeal, Executive Director, North Carolina Association of School Administrators and former School Superintendent of Wake County, Raleigh, N.C.

Peter Edelman, Co-Director, Task Force on Poverty, Center For American Progress

Others pending confirmation

11:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Break

11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Improving the Child Welfare, Alcohol and

Blackburn East Ballroom Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment and

Juvenile Justice Systems

Moderator: Charles Ogletree, Professor, Harvard Law School

Discussants:

Honorable Judith Kaye, Chief Judge of the State of New York

William Bell, President and CEO, Casey Family Programs

Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

James Forman, Jr. Associate Professor, Georgetown Law School, Co- founder

of Maya Angelou Charter School, Washington, DC, and CDF Board Member

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Luncheon Buffet

Blackburn East Ballroom

Invocation – Rev. Gordon Cosby, Church of

the Saviour, Washington, DC

2:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Participants Transit to Rankin Chapel

Part V. Bringing Us All Together to Dismantle the Cradle to Prison

Pipeline

2:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Leaders Needed at the Table of Change

Rankin Chapel

Moderator: Confirmation pending

Discussants:

Ralph F. Boyd, Jr., Executive Vice President, Community Relations, Freddie

Mac and Chairman, Freddie Mac Foundation

Iva Carruthers, General Secretary Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference

Honorable Donald Cravins, Mayor, Opelousas, LA

George Flaggs, Representative, Mississippi State Legislature and Judiciary

Committee Chair and Member, Dellums Commission

Others pending confirmation

Representatives from selected fields that also must serve as important allies in any initiative to successfully dismantle the Pipeline will discuss how best to mobilize and engage their respective colleagues in our social movement. These key stakeholders include: elected officials, the corporate world, faith community, foundations, juvenile judges and law enforcement officers.

3:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. Building the Will to Do What We Know Works

Rankin Chapel to Reroute Children to Successful

Adulthood

Interactive Session with All Summit

Participants

Moderator: Angela Glover Blackwell

Summit participants will be encouraged to share insights gleaned from

their own leadership roles within initiatives to dismantle the Pipeline.

4:45 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. A Call to Action

Rankin Chapel Next Steps to Dismantle the Cradle to

Prison Pipeline

Marian Wright Edelman

This is to be an inspirational and motivational closing session, underscoring priority steps needed to dismantle the Pipeline, already identified and discussed, and mobilizing each and every one at the Summit to commit fully to work within their own families, communities and networks to this end.

Thursday, September 27

9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Town Hall hosted by Congressional Black

Caucus

Washington Convention “Unleashing our Power to Dismantle the

Center, 801 Mt. Vernon Place NW Prison Pipeline”

Washington, DC 20001

SOURCE Children’s Defense Fund

(c) 2007 U.S. Newswire. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.