Hey NYC Student Union!

It was so fantastic to meet all of you guys on Monday, and I thought our meeting went quite successfully. We came up with so many great ideas as a group, I’m really excited to see what we do this year.

To sum up the meeting:

We discussed the goals of the union and our mission, which is:

To act as a powerful, collective voice for New York City students that can defend the rights we are so often deprived of due to lack of organization.

To give students a voice in the decisions made about our own education and to allow students to work cooperatively with school officials, department of education officials, and public officials to find solutions to the problems that plague the lives of city youth.

To provide communication between students from all ends of the city, and to ensure that students are able to make the most of the broad array of educational and social opportunities we are offered.

and then we spent most of the meeting talking about different issues we face at school and in the education system, including:

-Curricula should be less fixed and more adaptable to the needs of a school’s specific students. Students should be involved in deciding on their curriculum. Students should be able to take classes they genuinely want to take. Schools should offer AP, honors, and other advanced courses.

-Students should be informed and equipped for the admissions processes of high schools. Admissions should consider that not all students have had the same opportunities.

-Students need to organize together to work on a variety of issues local, national, international, etc.

-Public schools simply need more funding, and better distribution of funds.

-Low diversity, especially in specialized schools.

-Students should have a voice in how their school functions.

-Students should be provided with tutoring opportunities.

-All schools should have well-functioning, representative student governments.

-There is way too much standardized testing.

-Schools do not recycle and are generally not environmentally concerned, even if the students and faculty are.

-Class size is out of control.

-Teachers are not well-trained, are not held to high enough standards, are not rewarded for good work and do not face consequences for incompetence, are restricted to the curriculum, and lots of other teacher-related issues.

-Transferring schools should be simpler.

-Security and school violence needs to be dealt with in reasonable, long-term ways that does not hold students to the standards of criminals.

-Guidance counselors needs to be more available.

-Health and sex education need to be improved.

-Graduation rates are alarmingly low, and little is done to help schools with low graduation rates.

-School buildings are just unclean.

-Schools are being relocated even though students are strongly opposed.

-The Department of Education has almost no connection to students whatsoever.

But the one major issue that kept coming up was apathy and lack of information. We felt that our peers didn’t know about all the problems of the education system, and either didn’t care or didn’t think they could do anything. We also felt like so much emphasis was being placed on grades and testing that students don’t value education anymore.

Altogether, we had 32 students present, representing 14 schools. We have chapters established in Bard HSEC, Staten Island Tech, HS of Economics and Finance, Urban Academy, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, Brandeis HS, LaGuardia HS, Brooklyn Tech, and Murrow HS. We are off to a very good start!

Our next meeting will be on Monday, October 16th. We will be in the same building, but watch the website and check for emails for room changes. We’re going to need a bigger table! This meeting will be an action meeting, so come with an idea in your head of which of the above issues is most important, and also something we can tackle. If you are really passionate about something, come in with some research and an argument! And no matter how you feel, let’s get prepared to get to work!

On Monday, September 25th the NYC Student Union will kick off its first big event. We are going to be holding a student forum to identify problems in our public high schools and find ways that we can solve them as students. If we can gather a large enough group this can be really big-time.

It is about time for students to have a say in their education and in their schools. To accomplish we are trying to form a New York City Student Union with representatives from as many schools as possible. Being that we are a young organization there is no election or application process to become a representative, nor should there necessarily be one (but that’s for you all to decide). To become a representative all you need is the desire to improve your school, your community, and and the City and its Department of Education. Just imagine how we, the students who this education system is designed for, could improve our schools if we had a say in our education. That is the goal of the NYC Student Union and we hope that you will join us. Please send this to your friends and spread the message. The more student we have with us, the more we can do.

The meeting will be held on Monday 9/25, at UFT (United Federation of Teachers) offices at 50 Broadway a little bit south of Exchange place (Email nycstudentunion@yahoo.com if you need more info on directions.) The meeting will be held from 5:30-8:00PM in Room C on the 2nd Floor with free pizza. If you want to help set up please come a little bit early.

The NYC Student Union is completely run by high school students and is open to all NYC high school students interested in working to make a change in our schools.

Hope to see you all there.

Wanted to let everyone know that the Sept 4 meeting is no longer happening. The UFT is generously offering us space, so we’re rescheduling to fit their time frame. Here is the new plan:

On Friday Aug 25, at 2:00pm we are going to have a little picnic gathering in the park right next to Stuy. To get there, take the 1/2/3 to Chambers and walk straight west on Chambers to the river. We’re not going to do any major recruiting for this meeting, it’ll just be a handful of us, but please bring friends if you have interested friends! This meeting will be more about figuring out how the union will be organized and about planning for the first official meeting.

After school starts, in early Sept, we will have the first official meeting. This will give us some time to talk to lots of kids at schools and hopefully gather up a larger crowd. We’ll talk recruiting at the picnic.

Meeting with FVA went okay. Their organization is very similar to ours and they very much felt as though we were “reinventing the wheel”. FVA covers youth issues in four categories: youth politics, teen issues, environment, and school issues, and they asked if we would be willing to, rather than create a whole new organization, just become the more complex school issues wing of FVA. I said we’d like to get up on our feet before we would even begin to consider a merge, and I think that as we do get on our feet, the differences between FVA and NYCSU will become more apparent.

Another thing we discussed is FVA’s annual Youth Congress, which is a pretty cool event they host every year, where kids from around the city come together and discuss issues, eventually voting on two that FVA will pursue for the following year. I told them we’d be interesting in taking an active role in congress, as they are in great need of kids who are really informed, which we could provide. It would also be a great time for us to gain contacts and to get an idea of what students need.

In any case, I think we should work closely with them for the following year, but to just merge into them seems like giving up on NYCSU, and we’re doing pretty well, so now is no time to give up!