The Campaign Against Student Apathy (CASA) is The New York City Student Union’s newest, most groundbreaking project. We seek to identify the causes of student apathy within our schools, our communities, our government, and ourselves, and construct a new plan for how we can maximize the potential of every student, not only to learn, but to become active, engaged, and to positively change the world around them.

Student apathy is a large and complicated idea, and sometimes seems difficult to stick into a package, like CASA. But student apathy becomes concrete and very real when we recognize the ways in which it manifests itself. An astonishingly high dropout rate, a low percentage of students involved in extra- and co-curricular activities, low test scores, truancy, vandalism, and even classroom violence are all caused, ultimately, by student apathy.

After hours of discussion with students from schools around New York City, we realize that student apathy pervades all schools, high and low performing, well- and under-funded, specialized and zoned. Consequently, we have concluded that student apathy originates at a place much deeper than the sources traditionally cited as causes of student failure. Student apathy comes from the universal feeling that we, students, are herded around what feels like a learning factory (or worse, if there is little learning happening), nameless and faceless - merely a desk that isn’t empty, and that in four years, we will graduate and move on, never to return.

This is why we must, above all, turn our schools into much more than schools for our students. We must turn them into homes.
Hence, CASA. Home.