About the Project

Across Pennsylvania, incarcerated people and their loved ones have been fighting for decades to build a more free world. Now, a group of educators, care-givers, and organizers from the movement to end mass incarceration are founding a school in Philadelphia for the children we love. At Freedom Side School, we teach love, learn freedom, and practice healing justice. Our goal is to nurture, strengthen and prepare our students to be future visionaries and organizers to create a better tomorrow.

We wonder:

What happens when we start from the beginning?

What happens when the wild, other-worldly ideas of young people are taken seriously?

What might they be able to imagine?

What happens when children are given the love, time, space, and resources they need to treat one another with compassion, care, and collective responsibility?

Who do those children become?

What does the world become?

The School

Vision

Children (particularly children who are most directly impacted by mass incarceration) have a place in the abolition movement where they are supported to become the leaders of the next generation of abolitionists. Children have access to learning spaces where their whole selves are acknowledged, affirmed, and tended to at every level. Children become practitioners of transformative justice and architects of a world where community accountability is well-resourced, healing is centered, and prisons are obsolete.

Mission

At Freedom Side School, our mission is to provide a free elementary school education grounded in abolitionist values to a mixed-age group of children who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Our school structure and curriculum are founded on central tenets of the abolition movement: that punishment and prisons are fundamentally harmful, that with resources and support everyone can grow and transform, and that true freedom is collective. Our goal is to work in partnership with grassroots organizations to give students access to organizing tools and frameworks, and provide them with ample opportunities to take action in their communities. We work to incorporate transformative and restorative justice practices into all aspects of community life, and we are committed to processes that address the root causes of conflict. We are dedicated to critical, anti-oppressive curricula that emerge from the passions, curiosities, and interests of our students. In order to do this, we are committed to low student:teacher ratios, and our educators are dedicated to seeing and attending to the whole of each child.

Download our Mission/ Vision PDF

Timeline

We are committed to providing a free education to all of our students. This means we have to fundraise to meet all of our expenses. Stay tuned for updates about programs and events we will offer as we continue to raise the funds we need to open our school!

The Philosophy

We believe that:

Children learn by doing. Providing opportunities for hands-on learning and allowing children’s interests and curiosities to lead are essential aspects of our program.
Inquiry, imagination, and play are integral to children’s learning and development. Providing ample opportunities for children to freely play, explore, imagine, and wonder, allows educators to observe and understand each child more fully. Through understanding each child’s likes and dislikes, passions and beliefs, we find access points to support their learning and development.
Children have wisdom to teach grown-ups. As educators, we learn the most from the children in our care. Part of our role is to listen closely to children and take their ideas seriously.
Learning occurs in ways unique to each child. Our mission is to meet each child where they are at, and support learning in ways that are most developmentally appropriate for that child.

Children have their own standards. Our role as educators is not to impose the same standards of learning on every child. Rather, our role is to offer the support children need to identify and meet their own standards for learning and growing.

Children should be told the truth and supported to think critically about our world. Educators have a responsibility and obligation to teach about oppression and injustice honestly and with intention, and to care for students as they navigate difficult truths.
Children should be given the tools they need to build a more free world. Children are naturally oriented towards justice and fairness and are creative problem solvers. Educators can and should help them harness these talents so children can create the world they want to live in.
Classrooms should be spaces where we learn and practice collective care.

The Movement

What is the movement behind Freedom Side School?

Freedom Side School was born out of the movement to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania and across the United States. In addition to being educators and care-givers of young children, Freedom Side’s founders all have roots as community organizers in the movement to end mass incarceration in Philadelphia. The vision for Freedom Side School was made possible by the work of organizations such as the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), the Human Rights Coalition (HRC), Right 2 Redemption, and many more. The school grows out of the principles and lessons of this movement, and out of the relationships and commitments of the people in it.

What is abolition?

The movement to abolish prisons is built on the understanding that punishment and prisons do not heal communities, but rather cause further harm. In the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions.” Abolitionists envision a world where communities are well-resourced, thriving, and able to meet the needs of every member. As abolitionists, we are invested in building healing communities that holistically support individuals when harm occurs. We are building a world where we respond to harm and violence by uprooting and working to transform the conditions that caused the harm.

What is abolition in education?

Abolitionist teaching comes out of the broader abolition movement, and out of educators’ commitment to critical pedagogy, or: a way of engaging students that honestly and appropriately confronts oppression and injustice. Where the abolition movement seeks to build a system of justice where the dignity and humanity of all people is protected, abolitionist teaching extends this vision to all children, in all schools. This movement within education is motivated by educators’ understanding that, right now, many schools employ punitive and restrictive methods that mimic prisons and the criminal-legal system, and that these schools are failing and harming our children. At Freedom Side School, we are bringing the principles and practice of abolition directly to the children whose lives are touched by incarceration. In an abolitionist classroom, we respond to harm, conflict, and disruption with restorative and transformative practices. We address the underlying need that is causing the harmful or disruptive behavior, and take collective responsibility for harm that happens in our community.