Short film starring DC students explores ‘pushout’ in high schools
Half out of breath, Teonna rushes through the front door of her high school. She throws her bag and jacket onto a conveyor belt, which ushers her belongings toward an X-ray machine. She asks a classmate for the time and is relieved to learn she’s not late for class. Teonna starts walking toward a metal detector when a security guard stops her.
“You’re on the list,” the guard says. Teonna has been suspended.
The opening scene of East of the River, a short film that played the Tribeca and Slamdance film festivals earlier this year, tells a story that is all too real for many students in DC.
The short film had its DC premiere last Wednesday with an afternoon screening for students and faculty at Anacostia High School in Ward 8. Afterward, a question-and-answer session featured some of the short’s creators and Ayiana Davis, 17, the rising senior at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts who played Teonna.
Davis isn’t the only DC student in the film: All of the short’s major characters are played by real DC high-schoolers. The opening scene featuring Teonna was shot at Dunbar High School, where dilemmas like hers have played out numerous times, according to Stacey Eunnae, the film’s producer and co-writer. Eunnae said it is not unheard of for students to be suspended without knowing why.
This is part of a systemic phenomenon called “school pushout,” in which zero-tolerance disciplinary policies cause students to miss valuable class time, placing them in the school-to-prison pipeline.
“It’s a feeling where you’re being pushed into other opportunities because school’s not welcoming you,” Eunnae said. “School’s not giving you what you need.”
For Eunnae, the film — which she made along with director and co-writer Hannah Logan Peterson to highlight the problem — goes hand-in-hand with her day job. An attorney with the nonprofit Advocates for Justice and Education, Eunnae advocates for students at DC Public Schools and local charter schools. She also performs “know your rights” training sessions for parents.
“In terms of attitude, it takes a cultural change paired with the legal change to really impact folks,” Eunnae said in an interview with The DC Line. “I thought film was the medium to do it.”
East of the River was launched as a Kickstarter project in August 2017, with the final editing completed last year. Before shooting the scene at Dunbar High School, Eunnae had to secure permission from school administrators.
She said her pitch to then-Dunbar principal Abdullah Zaki was a complicated one. “When I talked to [Zaki] about filming at this location, what I said was, ‘We do not agree. I have been here many times fighting student suspensions,’” she recounted. “‘But you agree that they are out and I agree that they are out. And we want to show what happens to kids when they are out.’”
The DC Council passed legislation addressing the school pushout issue in May 2018. Aside from restricting the use of suspensions in kindergarten through eighth grade unless student safety has been threatened, the Student Fair Access to School Amendment Act forbids the suspension of high school students accused of minor offenses. The legislation also requires schools to ensure that suspended students are presented with a path to return to class.
“This bill is about ensuring student success, and disrupting the school-prison pipeline,” at-large member David Grosso said in a statement when he introduced the bill.
The legislation took effect in time for 2018-19 school year, with information on its effectiveness expected to be part of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s report on school discipline due in December. During the 2017-18 school year, 6,383 students in DC received out-of-school suspensions, with more than half of them having to remain out of school from two to five days, according to last year’s report. Another 939 students received in-school suspensions.
In East of the River, Teonna walks around DC after being turned away from school and meets two other teenagers. The first is a truancy-prone boy out skipping class. The second is a girl who has given up on formal education altogether to try to make money on the street. From Gallery Place, the trio hops a Green Line train heading south and ends up on the other side of the Anacostia River.
Peterson previously worked on The Florida Project, a 2017 movie about a poor family living just outside the borders of Walt Disney World — reminiscent of how the characters in East of the River live in the shadows of the Capitol.
With an eye toward expanding national perceptions of Washington as solely a political town and tourist venue, the filmmakers opted to focus on the eastern part of the city because it’s “a part of DC that’s rarely talked about but where a staggering divide of race and class can be witnessed,” Peterson explains in a video on the project’s Kickstarter page.
Consciously absent from East of the River are scenes shot with the monuments in the background and B-roll of recognizable DC landmarks.
Davis, who plays Teonna in the short, understands why. “When you think of DC, you think downtown DC,” she said in an interview with The DC Line. “Before I came here [three years ago], that’s what I thought DC was. … But when I moved here, I realized there are other neighborhoods with other stories, with other narratives.”
Other than middle school drama classes, East of the River marks the first foray into acting for Davis, who focuses on music at Ellington. She does not have any future roles lined up — yet — but said she is interested in participating in similar projects that explore social issues. In college, she hopes to double-major in music and sociology — and then maybe go to law school.
“Of course that’s not final because I’m just a junior right now,” Davis said.
East of the River was funded through Kickstarter, where it was once featured as a “project of the day.” Almost 250 people pooled their money to donate over $15,000, enough to complete the film. One donor gave $1,000.
Now that the short is a festival-circuit success, Eunnae hopes that East of the River might be adapted into a feature film or miniseries, bringing attention to DC and to the school pushout issue. In the meantime, it’s scheduled for another screening in August as part of the international Still Voices Film Festival in County Longford, Ireland.
Comments are closed.