My experience in higher education has been shaped by instability before I ever entered a classroom. I grew up without a father, raised by a single mother whose struggled with untreated mental health issues, addiction and incarceration. School was never about academics for me, it was the only place where routine existed, but systemic barriers had greater influence. Through my K-12 education, I experienced adultification as a Black girl before I had the language to identify it. I was not treated as a child who needed support, but as someone who needed to be controlled. I was consistently met with punitive responsive rather that understanding or culturally responsive support. Any time I asserted my agency, questioned authority, or demonstrated intellect outside of what was expected I was met with discipline. My behavior was framed as defiance instead of communication, and my potential was masked by me being a problem. Rather than being met with educators who sought to understand my background or learning style, i was repeatedly suspended, apprehended and punished. I now understand that what I was experiencing was not individual failure but a system that criminalizes Black girls for existing outside of white-centered expectations of compliance. This pattern resulted in me being expelled from high school and placed at an alternative school. At the time, I felt as if I was disposable however this would become the place I was seen. It was not until i became an educator myself that I fully understood my lived experience. Working in special education at a Title 1 school allowed me to see how systems reproduce the same harm under different names. I recognized myself in students who were labeled as aggressive or noncompliant. My expulsion was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that institutionalizes Black children into punitive systems. My pursuit of higher education is directly tied to this connection. I am committed to using my education to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and advocate for learning environments that center cultural responsiveness. My goal is to work at the intersection of education, sociology, and juvenile justice reform to ensure that students are supported regardless of institutional power. The obstacles I face reveled the urgent needs for understanding that adolescent behavior is a form of communication and that intelligence cannot be standardized. Regardless of my education as a youth, who I am now as an adult does not reflect. I got my associates degree in ten months, I work at Seattle Public Schools as a teacher's assistant for kids with intellectual disabilities, I volunteer at Department of Corrections Washington State to visit young ones in juvey, and I am working endlessly to make sure that my educational path leads me to Howard University. I am not a statistic that is used to weaponize or justify the way at which the system continues to oppress Black and Brown students.

My experience in higher education has been shaped by instability before I ever entered a classroom. I grew up without a father, raised by a single mother whose struggled with untreated mental health issues, addiction and incarceration. School was never about academics for me, it was the only place where routine existed, but systemic barriers had greater influence. Through my K-12 education, I experienced adultification as a Black girl before I had the language to identify it. I was not treated as a child who needed support, but as someone who needed to be controlled. I was consistently met with punitive responsive rather that understanding or culturally responsive support. Any time I asserted my agency, questioned authority, or demonstrated intellect outside of what was expected I was met with discipline. My behavior was framed as defiance instead of communication, and my potential was masked by me being a problem. Rather than being met with educators who sought to understand my background or learning style, i was repeatedly suspended, apprehended and punished. I now understand that what I was experiencing was not individual failure but a system that criminalizes Black girls for existing outside of white-centered expectations of compliance. This pattern resulted in me being expelled from high school and placed at an alternative school. At the time, I felt as if I was disposable however this would become the place I was seen. It was not until i became an educator myself that I fully understood my lived experience. Working in special education at a Title 1 school allowed me to see how systems reproduce the same harm under different names. I recognized myself in students who were labeled as aggressive or noncompliant. My expulsion was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that institutionalizes Black children into punitive systems. My pursuit of higher education is directly tied to this connection. I am committed to using my education to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and advocate for learning environments that center cultural responsiveness. My goal is to work at the intersection of education, sociology, and juvenile justice reform to ensure that students are supported regardless of institutional power. The obstacles I face reveled the urgent needs for understanding that adolescent behavior is a form of communication and that intelligence cannot be standardized. Regardless of my education as a youth, who I am now as an adult does not reflect. I got my associates degree in ten months, I work at Seattle Public Schools as a teacher's assistant for kids with intellectual disabilities, I volunteer at Department of Corrections Washington State to visit young ones in juvey, and I am working endlessly to make sure that my educational path leads me to Howard University. I am not a statistic that is used to weaponize or justify the way at which the system continues to oppress Black and Brown students.

My name is Dalayna Wallace, and I am currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in education at Seattle Central College while working full time as a Instructional Assistant in a distinct special education classroom through Seattle Public Schools. My experience with cancer has been influential in the way I work in special education settings. When I was in sixth grade, my mom was diagnosed with Stage III lymphoma. At the time I didn't understand the impact of cancer nor how my mom’s diagnoses would affect me directly. My life became centered around chemotherapy appointments, anxiety and emotional turbulence. Every night I would wake up in a panic and go make sure my mom was still breathing in her sleep, as the oldest sibling I didn’t allow my siblings, or my mom see how much fear I was suffering from. This is when I first experienced dissociation, distancing myself from fear of losing my mom and morphed myself into a survivalist at a young age. With my mom's chemotherapy paralyzing her, by eleven, I became the caretaker of my household. I cooked, cleaned, bathed my siblings, got them dressed, and supported them academically. As my mom health declined, job loss followed, and our family experienced severe financial hardship. I learned early what it meant to survive without stability, support, or invention from systems that are meant to help families in crisis. The clearest memory I have of that time came at the start of the seventh-grade year. School was not approaching, and my mother could not afford backpacks or basic supplies for us. We applied for multiple community and school-based assistance programs, but the school year was approaching fast. I felt urgency to make sure my sibling and I had the things we needed. I took the bus to Target, placed a toy chest in a cart, and filled it with backpacks, notebooks, pencils, binders, and journals and pushed it all out the Target entrance without paying for a thing. I carried the chest onto the bus and brought it home. When my mom asked where the supplies from, I told her they were donated. At the time, my only concern was protecting her from additional stress and ensuring her that my siblings and I could start school prepared. Looking back, this moment represents how early responsibility and system failure shaped my development. I learned when institutions move slowly or overlook families in crisis, children step into gaps they were never meant to fill. Although cancer was influential in my childhood, it did not guide me towards education. What it did was heighten my awareness of how instability and unmet needs follow children into classrooms, and that understanding would help me once transitioning into my career in special education. In distinct special education classrooms, I recognized familiar patterns. Students with carrying invisible responsibilities, disabilities being misunderstood or unsupported and behavioral challenges being met with punishment rather than protection. Special education gave me the framework to understand the link between my personal experiences and how unmet needs, disabilities, and lack of intervention push vulnerable students towards disciplinary systems. My educational goals extend beyond teaching alone. I am passionate of addressing the intersection of disability, IEP intervention, and juvenile systems. My long-term goal is to advocate stronger protections for students with disabilities and are not criminalized for needs that schools fail to meet. Cancer taught me how fragile stability can be, special education taught me how powerful systems can be when they intervene, together, these experiences shape my commitment to educational justice that protect children rather than forcing them into survival.

My Pie in the Sky is to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and disrupt the profit-driven systems that rely on the criminalization, incarceration, and free labor of Black and Brown children by challenging the institutions that benefit from their disposability. My name is Dalayna Wallace, I discovered my passion for this work through learning about the Exonerated Five. Their story exposed me to how deep injustice is practiced within our legal and educational systems, and how vulnerable populations (youth) are often manipulated for economic, political, and social gain. As I continued my education, I began to recognize that mass incarceration does not begin in prison, it begins in classrooms. When I began working in special education at a Title I school, my experience supporting students with disabilities, I experienced how exclusion from classrooms, disproportionate disciplinary practices, and limited educational resources increased students’ contact with the juvenile legal system. Behaviors are often treated as defiance or disruption were actually forms of communication, unmet needs, or trauma responses. Instead of receiving support, students (Black and Brown) were removed from learning environments and placed on paths that mirror carceral systems. When I decided to pursue my degree in education, I also discovered my passion for sociology: the study of how systems, power, and inequality shape lives. Sociology gave me the language to name what I had been learning: how schools function as sites of surveillance and control, and how punishment is normalized for children who are marginalized. Educational inequity is not accidental; it is structural. My long-term plan is to complete my bachelor’s degree in education and pursue a master’s degree in sociology at Howard University, where I can utilize my research and activism within a historically Black intellectual tradition. I intend to start an organization focused on dismantling systems through education, research, and policy advocacy. My work will address issues such as the fact that approximately 70% of juveniles in detention have a disability, with nearly 65% of those students being Black or students of color; that only about 19% of high school credits earned in juvenile facilities are transferable, resulting in recidivism; and that standardized testing starting in third grade are measures of access to resources rather than intelligence or potential. Before discovering my purpose, I was directly impacted by these systems as a Black girl. I experienced adultification, punitive discipline, and a lack of supportive resources, resulted in being expelled and sent to an alternative school rather than being supported. Despite systemic barriers, I returned to school as an adult, completed my associate degree in ten months at Seattle Central College, and was recently accepted into an accelerated bachelor’s program at University of Washington. However, my success is individual, most people impacted by these systems, especially those with criminal records, are not given the same opportunities.