On Monday, Oct. 16th, we held our second meeting, an action meeting at which we discussed some more issues and came up with some great ways to work on them.

Some new things we talked about were:
- Regents standards, whether or not they are too high, and whether curriculum is too regents-based
- Grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that are running out and the resulting privatization of schools.
- Fundraising as a key aspect of student government.

We broke those issues, along with all the issues brought up at the first meeting (which you can see if you check out our website: nycstudents.org), into a few categories, the most popular of which were security, curriculum, outreach/student unity/student governments, and funding. We then tested out our bicameral voting system (one vote per student present plus one vote per school present) which worked a little sloppily, but we’re getting the hang of it, and came to the conclusion that we needed to break into two campaign groups, one tackling security and one tackling outreach.

—————————————– Security ———————-

The Security campaign has decided to work with Urban Youth Collaborative on finding ways to resolve violence in schools, rather than relying on metal detectors, police officers and punishment to solve the problem. Some of us will be attending a UYC meeting on Monday, Oct 23rd. If you want to come, email nycstudentunion@yahoo.com ASAP to discuss meeting up.

—————————————- Outreach ———————-

At the end of our outreach planning session we came up with a set of action we can be accountable for by next meeting.

-We agreed to all report back to nycstudentunion@yahoo.com by next Wednesday (10/25) about our progress reaching out to schools around the city
-We agreed that each of us would be accountable for working to get two schools to the next meeting. We decided to consider one student emailing nycstudentnunion@yahoo.com to confirm that they would attend the next meeting as a recruited school.
-We mentioned this list of schools to target, we all know which ones we are responsible for:
Finance and Enterprise HS, Grover Cleveland HS, CCNY HS, Hunter HS, Global Studies HS, Bishop Lockland HS, Bedford Academy, Tottenville, PPAS, LaGuardia International HS, ICE, School of the Future, NEST+M, Civil Rights HS, Bronx Science, and Academy of American Studies.
If we can network with all of these schools that would be great.
-To help in the outreach we wanted a pitch letter, I have attached one to this email.
-We also agreed to begin research about a book distribution program by talking to science teachers and administrators about whether unused books are available, who has authority over books, or whether books are needed, or look at the DOE website to try to find out the regulations regarding book disposal or when a book become out of date.
-In addition George, the Stuy Student Gov. President, agreed to look into the annual COSA meeting as a great out reach possibility.

Also, some people wanted a listserv address with which they could email all the other NYCSU members… So Danya, our tech person, is working on this and we’ll try to have something.

Lastly, we were discussing different ways we can work on improving student government in schools, including increased communication inside schools with administration and students. We can continue thinking about this stuff for next time.