Outreach High Schools

[Realer]

Hi everyone,

This is Babur from Outreach. I already made a few announcements on this matter during our GAs. I also got in touch as many members possible on our HQ on this topic as well. We are initiating Outreach High Schools. It is at early stage. We are going to have a meeting very soon. We are looking for members who wants to involve. Please get in touch with me. I'm pretty much at HQ almost daily basis and I attend our GAs regularly. Looking forward to working with you all.

Babur
Outreach-DA-Press

[ztohovey]

Hi Babur,
My name is Ava and I'm a junior in high school. Right now, I attend public school in Indiana but have been in high schools in Michigan and Chicago as well, everything from music boarding schools whose tuition (not to mention housing) is more than some private universities, to public schools with a 51% drop-out rate. I don't think the wealth-divide in this country could have been more clearly illustrated for me than it has been these last three years.
In any rate, at so many of the schools I've been in, I've met students bristling under bad textbooks, bad teachers, no facilities and a population that would rather give their lives to a corporation than pay one cent more in taxes for their kids' educations. We're in an odd place in high school, not being able to strike out directly at the forces that bind us to our cardboard lunches and vending-machine lessons because the causes of our strife aren't right in front of us. But I feel that Occupy Wall Street can give us, the younger 99%, a voice. I'm very interested in doing all I can to support your outreach program, and mobilizing more students to do so, too. Right now, I can't imagine a walk-out happening in my school in Indiana. But, you never know. I'm looking forward to talking,
Ava

[mejones]

ztohovey,
Please feel free to use the Committee page "http://occupychi.org/outreach" or "http://occupychi.org/social-media" to contact us or join google groups. Thank you for your support and any help you can offer.
Working for a better future,
Jim

[Realer]

Hey Ava, we appreciate your interest. Please let me know what can we do. Are you on outreach google groups? If not I can take care that.


Babur

[ztohovey]

Thanks so much! I'm now in the group and have been in contact with Lucho. I and some classmates are working on a (Occupy High School) website in which students will be able to add their names to a letter of solidarity with OWS, along with fliers and posters that can be printed and hung around the school. Lucho tells me that you guys will be able to help getting the word out about the site; and I think that's where this should be left for now because of all the laws surrounding high schools. Everything has to come from the students themselves so no one can call out "exploitation" against the larger movement. Thank you so much and hope to be in more contact!

[Ray Mathis]

I taught high school for 33 years, and still do presentations on "life skills" to them. I encourage you to get high schoolers involved, but just want to caution you about what you might run into. There are just as many kids in schools (or maybe it seems like it because they can become so loud and obnoxious) who will be openly hostile to what you're trying to accomplish, and to the kids who might want to join you. They are often ones who have been bombarded with ideas (or whatever you want to call them) from their parents. Having taught sex education, ran into this phenomenon many times. The situation with the political ideological civil war that is occurring in this country today is often analogous to the one waged over sex education, and its place in schools. And I also know that so much of what is actually taught in schools about the workings of government in real life and its effects on everyday people is often so benign as to be unrepresentative of reality. Despite what some claim about schools being a liberal breeding ground, most teachers so out of their way to avoid perpetuating one side or the other that what they do teach becomes devoid of reality.

[ztohovey]

Hi Ray,
That's exactly right. I'll never forget getting shouted down in my sophomore government class while giving a presentation on public health care in the US because my classmates, who had just been talking about what they could and couldn't get with their food stamps, thought Universal health care was "communist". I've seen enough teachers edit our already sugared-up text books to know the temperature of the classroom. I'm hoping to avoid the Limbaugh-mudslinging, but am having trouble thinking of how we can go about actually talking to students instead of doing something secondary (electronic contact--I'm working with some classmates on a website to this end right now). I think that, whatever we end up doing, students have to be at front of it. Student-to-student is easier to stomach.

[ztohovey]

Hi,
This is Ava (ztohovey). I've put together a website for for more cohesive high school organization. It's main point, right now, is to get high schoolers talking and sign a general letter of protest (SIGN THE LETTER), also open to parents/guardians and teachers. I want the site to be a starting point: there's a section where students can link any social network page, blog, or website they create for their high school to this main site, a place for discussion about issues specific to high schoolers (which I'm still working on, but it's meant to be fluid and everything is a creation of collective input), and an opportunity to share posters to put up at school.

Here's the site: http://occupyhighschool.com/

I hope it helps. I feel that it will facilitate more youth involvement and bring Occupy to schools around the country. Please take a look, spread the word, and join in by leaving a comment. I'm emailing a link to other education-related Occupy sites, like OccupyEducation (everything's in the LINKS section).

Thanks,
Ava

[ztohovey]

The “National Day of Action” announced by Occupy Education is coming up fast. Too fast.

High school Occupy movements all over the country are atomized and isolated. That’s okay, even good, but only to a point: Students and teachers need to be able to voice the concerns of their individual schools and school systems, but in front of a larger backdrop. Right now, that backdrop is nowhere to be seen. We must work together if we work at all.

I hope that once occupyhighschool.com becomes searchable by major engines like google and bing, the site can act as a kind of index of HS occupations all over the country. Until then, schools need to do some serious brainstorming: Many of us are unable to stage successful walk-outs like Garfield High in Seattle this November, for a score of reasons, safety among them. But this should not prevent us from voicing our discontent. We must have a unified front before we jump to act: The ability to maintain an informed, allied, and cooperative grounding was (and is) partly what made Chile’s student revolts so successful.

The March 1 date for "Action" doesn't gel with OWS's plans for the spring (especially Occupy Chicago, since the NATO and G8 Summits are being held in that city in May)--should it be pushed back?

[BenBurton]

Keep up the good work with the site. How many people are involved? I may try and get social media involved in promoting the site.