The NYC Student Union (NYCSU) is an emerging collective organization of NYC high school students whose goal is to be a voice for student issues and rights, empower students to take ownership of their education, work with administration and DOE officials to secure an education students deserve, build connections across the NYC school system, and take collective action. The NYC Student Union is entirely organized and run by NYC high school students and is open to all NYC high school students interested in working to make a change in our schools.
Right now we are trying to build a network of students to become involved with the Union. We believe that it is about time for students to have a say in their education and in their city. The NYC Public School system is not working for many high school students. We believe that if change is going to happen, students will have to stop being made passive objects of their education, step forward, organize, and make the changes.
Students throughout the school system are disillusioned. How many high school students want to go to school every morning? This is often not simply the result of disinterested teenagers but of ineffective schools. We, students, are impersonalized in oversized classrooms, criminalized with prison-like security, dis-engaged with standardized busywork, and not taught how to think critically. We are dis-empowered because we have no investment in our educations.
These problems are not in every high school, but they are in many. We are merely passive objects because we haven't taken ownership of our education. Now it time we take the issues into our own hands. The NYCSU is committed to building a community of NYC high school students, and taking action. It is about time we have a voice. When we students are invested and take an active role in our educations, we will have the effective schools we deserve.
Our aim as a student union is to insure that schools are places that support all students intellectual and social development. We want to unite across a divided school system and find power in our unity. We want to empower students to be engaged with their education and educators, to build solidarity in a divided school system, and to take collective action. The NYCSU will provide an opportunity for students to learn about our school system and our fellow students across the city. We will work to identify points of concern and points of common ground.
Our mission 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.
- Once you come to a meeting you are a member. This is our union, it only works with everyone’s support. Students from schools ranging across the spectrum of the NYC public schools have gotten involved so far, from Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Staten Island Tech and LaGuardia, to smaller schools like the Academy of American Studies HS, HS of Economics and Finance, and Eleanor Roosevelt HS. It is important that students from your school join too, that is the only we can become a truly powerful, representative, and collective voice for NYC public high school students. We want to join with every student, from the South Bronx to Park Slope, Brooklyn, the upper west side to Jackson Heights, Queens, to assert our right to a quality education.
