We are thrilled to congratulate Ni’Aisha Banks on the successful completion of her American University Proseminar consultancy project in partnership with Advocates for Justice and Education (AJE)!

Ni’Aisha has been a vital part of our community as an AJE Parent Ambassador, while also serving as an Experiential Learning Leader and School of Education Ambassador at American University (AU). Her dedication to centering family voices and bridging the gap between policy and practice shines through every aspect of her work.

As part of her Proseminar consultancy project with AJE, Ni’Aisha played an essential role in supporting our 2026 Health Policy Camp, helping gather crucial community poll data on the barriers families face—including care coordination challenges, cost-prohibitive yet important evaluation tools that support early identification of learning and behavior challenges, and support with navigating the DC systems of care. Her efforts helped ensure that authentic family perspectives remain at the center of health and education policy discussions.

Explore the resources and materials from the camp in the 2026 Health Policy Camp LiveBinder.

Ni’Aisha also developed a policy brief as part of the coursework for the Preseminar consultancy. Entitled “Early Identification as Prevention: Improving Access to Comprehensive Evaluations for Children and Youth with Disabilities in the District of Columbia,” she reviews literature that examines how accessibility to and affordability of timely, comprehensive disability education-related evaluations are a crucial preventative and early intervention strategy against literacy and learning challenges that contribute to disciplinary exclusion in schools.

Drawing on her background as a restorative justice practitioner and lived experience as a mother navigating the DC systems of care, Ni’Aisha’s policy brief focused on the disconnect between written legal protections and what families actually encounter on the ground when needing access to expensive evaluation tools, such as neurodevelopmental evaluations.

Crucial insights from her research include:
– Evaluation Delays in DC: In FY 2023, over 1 in 4 initial evaluations in DC (915 out of 3,426) missed required statutory timelines.

– Discipline Disparities: While students with disabilities represent less than 20% of student enrollment in DC public schools, they account for nearly 30% of out-of-school suspensions.

– The Burden on Families: Families are far too often forced to serve as default coordinators between schools, pediatricians, insurers, and community providers without clear structural guidance and support.

Ni’Aisha’s policy brief offers insights that move beyond identifying problems to delivering concrete, community-governed solutions. Her research offers five priority policy recommendations for District leaders:

1. Create One Understandable DC Evaluation Pathway: Develop a unified, plain-language roadmap distinguishing between evaluation protocols based on disability needs and the routes to obtaining them in schools (via IEPs or 504s) and in clinical settings.

2. Default to Warm Handoffs & Closed-Loop Referrals: Implement consent-based referral protocols with named tracking so families are not left navigating systems alone.

3. Strengthen Child Find & Evaluation Accountability: Publicly report LEA-level evaluation timeliness and audit whether implementation strategies of multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in schools are inadvertently delaying evaluations.

4. Expand Evaluation Capacity & Clinical Access: Address workforce shortages with school-based behavioral health staff and address barriers to clinical diagnosis to reduce waitlists and eliminate family cost-shifting.

5. Require a Bridge from Evaluation to Action: Ensure evaluation findings immediately translate into time-bound, implementable classroom strategies and plain-language family conferences to include caregiver expertise to track and monitor progress of agreed strategies.

What makes Ni’Aisha’s work so powerful is her insistence that research must not stay “at the paper level.” Her proposed framework embeds AJE Parent Ambassadors and youth advisory roles directly into policy co-design and decision-making infrastructure. By bringing restorative principles, research rigor, and parent advocacy together, Ni’Aisha is helping build a system where warm handoffs, true collaboration between systems, and meaningful educational supports are equitably accessible to DC children and families.

AJE is incredibly grateful for Ni’Aisha’s leadership, passion, and tireless advocacy! We look forward to continued collaboration as she translates the policy recommendations as part of her Parent Ambassadorship and beyond.