Expelled, Hungry, and Forgotten, by Juan Moreno Haines

The following piece is written by Juan Moreno Haines, one of Back to the Start’s incarcerated Co-Founders. He currently works on our Legislative Priorities team to choose bills  that best fit the founding principles of Back to the Start and address the priorities of incarcerated individuals. Haines is also a celebrated journalist and member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). His story offers first-person insights into the importance of reforms reflected in our program's 2025 priority bills.

Expelled, Hungry, and Forgotten:

Reforming Our Educational System and Chidren's Safety Net

After spending nearly three decades in prison, I've met dozens of incarcerated folks whose stories began in childhood classrooms when their basic needs were not met. Not in courtrooms or jails. Like me, they slipped through the system’s safety nets that are supposed to help children be able to reach their full potential.

I am part of Back to the Start, a program founded on the belief that upstream evidence-based solutions will produce the best possible outcomes. We tell our stories so that future generations hopefully won’t have to go through what we did. We’re offering solutions to the systems that have failed when we were children. 

A common theme among Back to the Start participants is not finishing high school, turning to the streets, and winding up behind bars. This all too familiar trait–that of the dropout–exists even though all research shows finishing high school steers graduates to college or vocational trade schools and away from prisons and jails. It is for these reasons that our key legislative priorities aim to keep kids in school. To achieve this, we need to dig deep and think beyond academics.

As Curtys Taylor, an incarcerated program participant, said, “My expulsion story does not start at school. It starts at home.” Taylor recalls that he often arrived at school late. However, “[i]nstead of being curious about why I was late, my teacher would write my name on the whiteboard, letting me know that I had lost my privileges for the day and was one step closer to detention,” Taylor reflects. He explains, verbal and physical abuse in his household “was so normal” that he learned how to “endure the abuse and eat a bowl of cereal at the same time.”

Taylor goes on to describe the particular day he was expelled. After being late and crying the entire way to school, he was chastised by his teacher and made fun of by his classmates because he didn’t complete or understand the previous night’s homework assignment. As his eyes turned red, trying to hold back his tears, the teacher’s only response was to accuse him of doing drugs. The kids burst out in laughter, and a classmate, Ricky, teased him that maybe he was “crackhead” like his auntie, and called him by a racist nickname that they coined for him a few years prior. Taylor states, “At this point, I had lost my cool in the classroom, and the sadness and embarrassment I was feeling showed up as a blinding, uncontrollable rage. I released this rage on Ricky. Before I knew what was happening, a security guard was pulling me off Ricky.”

Taylor was expelled that day. His family could not afford transportation costs for him to go to a school further away from their home. That was the beginning of the end of any hopes of Taylor getting a meaningful education that prepared him for a vocation or life off the streets.

I can’t help but imagine how the outcome to this story might have changed if one of our programs’s selected priority bills, AB 1230 authored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, had been in effect. AB 1230 fundamentally reforms how schools handle expulsions by requiring individually tailored rehabilitation plans and addressing the root causes of ‘bad’ behavior. An investigation would have inquired into what was troubling Taylor, and he could have gotten the support he needed with a team and expulsion plan that aimed to help him to get back into school.

Another one of our selected priority bills is SB 411, which aims to expand access to school meals to children. Unbelievably, food insecurity exists in the Golden State. While in grade school, I was often incredibly hungry. I envied the kids who could afford to eat in the school cafeteria. Instead of focusing on learning, I’d be sitting in class thinking about getting something to eat. Once, in middle school, I was so famished that I stole donuts and milk from a school breakfast program. 

As Jason Jackson, another Back to the Start participant, put it, “the persistence of an empty fridge will give a child grown-up ideas. Hunger, for a child, creates more than just stomach pains. It tends to rob a youthful spirit of the joys that come with childhood, at least the joys that should. At 9, 10, 11 years old, I was too young to understand the mechanisms of poverty; young enough that I shouldn’t have had to worry about it at all.” Many other program participants have shared stories of the terrible hunger pains, subsisting on meals of white bread and maple syrup or taco shells, butter, and coffeemate (just imagine how hungry a kid has to be to eat that)…until even those last items in the kitchen ran out. There are countless stories of kids ultimately resorting to stealing food, sometimes even as a family activity.

School meal programs mitigate some of these problems. But we can do better. Filling in the gaps in school meal access should be a top priority. Nutrition programs must be expanded to be easily accessible to all children. SB 411, as originally intended, would ensure that kids like ]Jackson would be able to get easy access to food and focus on school rather than their empty stomachs. The initial draft of the bill included expanding school meals to summers and school holidays. This portion of the bill unfortunately got cut during the senate appropriations process, which we hope gets added back–if not this legislative cycle, then next. However, the bill as it stands now still improves school meals enrollment processes and provides privacy safeguards for families of students accessing them, which removes a barrier to application for many vulnerable children.

Taylor, Jackson, myself, and others tell our stories in hopes that the public might learn and benefit by reading our childhood experiences. The 2025 legislative cycle offers many ways to reimagine our safety nets so that children are supported holistically. Our mission is to promote healthy families and communities rather than costly, punitive approaches that perpetuate trauma and harm.

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Other Back to the Start 2025 legislative priorities:

AB 1376: Endless Juvenile Probation – Mandates that probation conditions must be tailored, developmentally appropriate and reasonable to each child. 

AB 1195: Incarcerated Parent/Child Visitation – Strengthens visitation rights between children and their incarcerated parents to promote family stability, support, and reunification. 

SB 48: Safe Access to Schools – Provides protections to students and families to attend school safely by restricting local educational agencies from granting immigration enforcement officers access to school grounds if not in possession for a valid judicial warrant.