Just a one-hour car ride from Haverford lies State Correctional Institution Phoenix, Pennsylvania’s largest prison and one of the nation’s most active, according to the ACLU. Out of all 50 states, Pennsylvania boasts the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rates in the northeast and the second-highest parole and probation rate in the country.
Among the most affected by Pennsylvania’s carceral system are the children of those incarcerated. “There’s a necessity around the abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania because we have a particular problem,” says Katy Kopnitsky, director of operations and development for the Freedom Side School.
Freedom Side School, which hopes to open next year in Philadelphia, hopes to address Pennsylvania’s issues by offering an education grounded in abolitionist values to elementary-age children directly impacted by mass incarceration. Kopnitsky visited Haverford in December to discuss building a future positioned at the intersection of education and the carceral system.
The discussion, “Education for Liberation,” grows out of a first-year writing seminar that evaluates Black education in the U.S., rooted in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of the Writing Program Christopher Rogers, “Brown v. Board at 70: Unfulfilled Promises & Unfinished Activism for Education Equity” critically engages with what Black education has looked like in the U.S. and positions students within the body of unfinished activism.
“This class was an opportunity to look at the history of Black education in the U.S., community resistance, and some of the institutional and policy failures that persist to this day,” Rogers says.
Seven decades later, students analyzed the court case to think critically about its positive and negative effects. “We learned about how the court case actually had a bunch of negative impacts on education systems and how there weren’t actual processes of desegregating schools,” says Siena Rosen ’28.
Students in the seminar also had the opportunity to work with one of three local groups as part of their final projects and voted to work with Freedom Side School, which will be tuition-free and sustained by donations. Rogers and his students helped support it by hosting a fundraiser before the discussion, raising over $100.
Rogers says he views the discussion with Kopnitsky as an “opportunity to lift up local experiments that are taking place to transform education.”
Freedom Side School arose from the efforts of regional prison abolition organizations, including the Human Rights Coalition, Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration, and Right 2 Redemption. Its educational mission hopes to challenge preexisting notions by centering students’ lived experiences influenced by the state’s carceral system.
Kopnitsky imagines the school will “harness the rich imagination of children and the other worldly ideas of children to contribute to our ability to imagine other how the world can be different than how it already is.”
The school also anticipates positioning students as both teachers and learners, creating an environment where adults take children’s ideas seriously and stress the importance and value of individual voices. With small class sizes and attentive teachers, the school hopes to promote abolitionist ideas about the harmful nature of prisons and the power of the collective in advocating for freedom.
“A big part of the class is talking about unfinished activism and making progress and moving towards a better future,” Rosen shares, “I think this event embodies that in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to the education of the youth and creating an education [system] that is more fulfilling and centering on student well-being.”