Software engineer, student teacher, and designer studying Computer Science at Berkeley.
she/her/hers
Evanston Fight For Black Lives is a Black youth led abolitionist organization in my hometown of Evanston, Illinois.
I had the privilege of working with them this summer to create content for their social media. This post was released with an official statement demanding that Evanston Township High School sever ties with the Evanston Police Department and remove School Resource Officers from the campus. Using data from the ProPublica Miseducation Database, I created a series of graphics demonstrating the disproportionate policing of Black youth in Evanston Township High School (ETHS).
I sought to highlight the stark differences of student experiences: days of school missed, as well as the disproportionate investment in punitive systems rather than restorative resources.
The most drastic finding from this dataset was that Black students are 10.5 times as likely to be suspended as White students, and I selected this as the first slide of the Instagram post. We saw a lot of community engagement supporting this data with anecdotal experiences.
If I were to explore topic further beyond the quantitative data, I would like to interview current and former students about their experiences with School Resource Officers (SROs), the discipline system, and the student support systems at ETHS.
For this graphic, I wanted to experiment with brighter colors and multidimensional type in order to grab users’ attention and tie in the growing use of gradients I’d seen on social media graphics this summer.