Marlyn Tillman
Co-founder and Executive Director of Gwinnett SToPP Gwinnett County, GA Award Year: 2021Marlyn Tillman is Co-founder and Executive Director of Gwinnett SToPP: the Gwinnett Parent Coalition to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline At Gwinnett SToPP, Marlyn leads a parent-driven, community-centered partnership that is dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline by organizing parent and student advocacy and activism. In addition, Marlyn currently serves as the federal strategies co-chair for the national Dignity in Schools Campaign, serves on the steering committee of the Education Civil Rights Alliance as well as on the committee that reviews curriculum for Gwinnett County Public Schools. She is a past recipient of the ACLU of Georgia’s Georgia Civil Liberties Award for community activism.
Marlyn is using her award to keep the advocacy work at Gwinnett SToPP moving through public education and policy change facilitation. Gwinnett SToPP launched several campaigns in 2021, including #KickCopsOutofSchools, which is fighting to remove cops from school grounds and invest in research-based supports such as counselors, restorative justice practitioners, and community intervention workers to maintain a peaceful learning environment. It also launched Finding New Directions, which is developing more restorative discipline policies that are parent‐ and community‐driven (reducing suspensions, decreasing referrals to the disciplinary alternative school, decreasing school‐based arrests and creating more transparency in reporting of student discipline data).
Gwinnett SToPP has been at the forefront of fighting state Senate Bill 42 (SB42), which proposes to remove student discipline from the school climate indicator in Georgia’s school report card.