Ashley C. Sawyer

Ashley C. Sawyer sees schools as a microcosm of the racism, transphobia, and hate we see in our society. Children are routinely pushed out of school and “not told that [pushout] is part of a bigger systemic failure, but [instead that they are being pushed out] because they ‘misbehaved.’” While everyone should have access to good, public education, it is not equal across race and class. That’s why for eight years, Ashley has been an attorney who works at the intersection of educational justice and ending criminalization of children in schools. But she defines her role as “helping youth to see themselves as people who have power.”

Ashley started her career as a Stoneleigh Emerging Leader Fellow at Education Law Center-PA (ELC-PA). Her project was designed to get youth out of juvenile detention through Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) complaints. During her time at ELC-PA and in her years of public interest work before and during law school, Ashley saw the same patterns repeating—Black youth, and Black girls and gender non-conforming youth in particular, were criminalized in school. For her, the fellowship was a formative experience and one that shaped the trajectory of her career.

Ashley then shifted into a direct representation role at Youth Represent in New York City. Her clients were almost exclusively Black, Latinx, and Indigenous youth and older adolescents who were subject to harsh consequences of the criminal legal system. She routinely saw educators participating in the criminalization of students through suspension and expulsion. Rather than attributing some behaviors to special education needs or focusing on other ways to engage students through sports or poetry or fine arts, educators who were already stretched thin in under resourced school districts used criminalization to address school-based behaviors. Ashley saw the education system enacting violence against young people through systemic responses to behaviors and use of school police and decided she wanted to use her legal career to shift resources away from criminalization and into the hands of the young people and their families.

In her role at Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), Ashley’s work moved from direct representation to legislative policy work and campaign-based organizing. She sees herself as a “budding movement lawyer” whose most important role is to work alongside youth and communities with lived expertise to build their power. At GGE Ashley worked with social workers, policy analysists, and students to make change at the local, state, and federal level. When she joined, there was already a focused movement to end the school to prison pipeline in New York City schools and remove police from schools. Ashley stepped right in, with experience from past positions to coach youth on delivering testimony and to help develop school-based curricula to address issues ordinarily outsourced to law enforcement. Ashley also worked on an effort to remove from New York law a statutory mechanism used to criminalize Black children—“incorrigibility.” The law set forth a vague and subjective standard that would put youth on probation or into foster homes if they were deemed “incapable of being corrected” or “unreformable,” even if they had not engaged in any unlawful act. And the law was disproportionately being applied to students of color. “The statute itself allows for the harm.” As a lawyer with the movement, she was able to spot how the law was being weaponized against Black children and use that context to ask for a legal response. She would follow up the students’ testimony about their experience being pushed out of school with a legal hook for legislators to respond. Ashley saw her role not as providing the legitimacy of the ask, but as support for the youth’s requests. “Young people harmed by these institutions should see themselves as powerful organizers with every right to demand more.”

In Fall 2021, Ashley joined The Advancement Project in its national office to work on educational and racial justice policy. Her years of experience have led her to this role; her goal now is to dismantle the systems that harm youth by making sure schools can be liberatory places instead of sites of criminalization for Black, Latinx, Indigenous families. She’s eager to join the fight to end corporal punishment in schools and remove police from schools. Through movement lawyering she ensures that she is not creating a system of dependency with youth and families affected by these systems, but instead sharing space and making sure their voices are on equal footing with hers. “I will always have their back.”

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