On Thursday, hundreds of students at Little Rock Central High School participated in a walkout motivated by a number of the moment’s political indignities across the state and nation. Among the reasons for their protest were the recent reelection of Donald Trump, the Arkansas LEARNS Act and its threats to public education, and restrictions on abortion access. The following is an open letter from the organizers of the demonstration, as well as reflections from two individual students who took part.
Over time, Central High School students have been known to speak out against injustice: We see it as vital that students work together to ensure their voices are heard. Whenever we talk about the LEARNS Act and different education legislation coming from the Republican Party, we typically say that they are attacking our public education system. We frame it in this way because we see that the policies we take issue with are part of a broader plan to deconstruct the educational system to reshape the young workforce into subservience. This is a deliberate effort from the wealthiest members of our society to deconstruct our existing institutions for the sake of rebuilding them with a higher concentration of power at the top.
Examples of this are already at play. Consider that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to get into physical altercations. Instead of providing resources and support, the plan from the government is to send them to juvenile detention. Almost half of the children sent to juvenile detention end up in prison early into adulthood. The system sets them up for unpaid labor in the prison system. One fight could change a child’s life forever, one bad day could become a lifetime of suffering and unpaid labor.
The Republican educational agenda on a national stage targets Black and Brown children at an alarming rate, since, in urban settings, they are often the groups who come from these lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Because of this relationship between race, class and social status, urban public schools like Little Rock Central would become segregated back to old extremes. Biracial and Indigenous children go to public schools classified as “low income” at disproportionate rates as well.
The Republican establishment wants to abolish the Department of Education, which would eradicate protections and funding for these kids. Black and Brown students are known to struggle more academically, so Department of Education resources like Title I supplemental funding for low-income schools are vital. It is terrifying to see that the government is against us and that they actively don’t want people of color to have power in the workforce.
The Republican plan further targets students of color by proposing that the public school system needs complete reform when it comes to teaching topics such as the colonization of the Americas and slavery. Not only do political leaders aspire to repress the economically disadvantaged, segregate our children and create a system where racial minorities are much more likely to spend their lives in prison, but they also want to erase the history, the hardships and all of the work that Black and Brown people have gone through to build this country.
Little Rock Central High School has a deep history of advocating for equality, and we will not accept our public schools being reduced to a correctional facility program aimed at people of lower economic positions and people of color. These policies of erasure and segregation are dehumanizing. The government views our children with contempt and as a statistic — we deserve better.
While there is a lot of back and forth about the policies detailed in voucher programs such as the one included in the LEARNS Act, we think it is far more worthwhile to actually paint a picture of what the classroom will look like in a world where the far-right is able to transform the education system in the way that they want. Public schools in Arkansas have had barely functional budgets for as long as our generation has been alive, but with these new policies in the Republican education agenda, we are looking at a cut so deep into our funding that our extracurricular school programs are now under the largest threat.
The first things on the chopping block will be anything outside of core classes. Exciting parts of our community like theater, speech, debate and art programs, as well as sports teams and STEM programs will have to be shut down as spending plans are increasingly gutted over each coming year. Students who are interested in taking the stage, picking up a paintbrush or exploring their understanding of technology will have their opportunities stripped of them.
We are already seeing this with schools across the state being told to fire large parts of their faculty, and consistently, when the decision is made, the core classes always have to take priority, and the life that is brought by extracurricular programs is called to be sacrificed. Just over the last year, the LRSD let go of 66 different teachers for the sake of budget cuts and targeted mostly curriculum specialists. Will public schools eventually shut down altogether? What concerns us the most is that our generation is facing changes to our educational system that, if made, will burn a lot of the bridges for us to get into college and pursue the careers that we aspire to.
While this all seems like unexplainable and irrational behavior from the most influential people in our government, we see it as part of a concerted effort to concentrate power at the very top of our system. For a while, public education was fully supported by the wealthiest in politics because it helped condition Americans into a skilled work life. But as time has passed, we’ve entered a world where information can be distributed through media without any actual population literacy, and many service jobs (which is most of our labor market) don’t even require high school degrees, so public education is becoming a liability and an extra expense for the wealthiest of people who feel no connection to the real freedom that it brings to everyday life.
Despite the fact that supporting our public education and reinforcing diversity and inclusivity would place our economy in a universally better position and improve our society, the most powerful people in this game are more concerned with broadening the disparity between themselves and everyday people by creating a powerless workforce. We walked out last week for this exact reason. We are not blind. We see the continuous attacks on the youth and our futures in this world and we find them repulsive and intolerable, and we are going to dedicate ourselves to protecting the most vulnerable of our people and doing everything within our capacity to protect our future.
Sincerely,
Gabrielle Torrence
Rhône Kuta
Organizers in the Student Protection Coalition
***
There were a lot of topics and people represented at our protest. It was about the Arkansas LEARNS Act, but also much more. It was a big crowd of us that day, some even carrying inspiring posters — it is quite an experience to be a student at a school that lets us have these demonstrations.
One thing that we stood up for is women’s rights! That’s what people seemed to speak loudest about and support the most in the crowd. How can we not be able to choose if we want to have children or not!? It’s not fair to us at all to be the first generation of high school students not to have these rights — I mean children are having children these days! We all know that a child cannot raise another child. To make matters worse, many of these pregnancies are coming from sexual abuse, and that’s something far too many women in the world suffer from and know firsthand. Which is sad because they didn’t choose that path in life, but they have to live with it.
Our protest was also about how the state is literally handing over public school money to send kids to private schools! Our parents work hard every year for us to go to public schools. Guess what they get, though? They don’t get a dime from anyone!
It was very inspiring to see all my classmates stand out there and stand up for what was right! Many didn’t cooperate well in the crowd, but most of us were listening as our classmates took a stand for what was right — even though most of us aren’t very into politics, or maybe we are now! I am also grateful to actually go to a school where I get a chance to experience something so inspiring!
—Sophomore Carmillia Morrison
***
As a Hispanic student from Central High School where we are very diverse, I feel the election of Donald Trump was not the right call. The meaning of community will be damaged.
Watching the protest made me feel an emotion I hadn’t felt in a while, almost as a reality check. I’m worried about what will happen to my parents, they could be sent away. Even something as trivial as feeling that my parents may no longer be here to make me do things, like homework, has me upset. But more painfully, I may no longer be able to hug them — and my siblings would have to go with them, which makes me almost scared.
And when it comes to women’s rights, I might no longer have control over my body and or child. Hearing that at the protest made me feel upset. But seeing that crowd and seeing how many people were around me made me feel supported. I watched people speak and even cry about how serious this situation has become. Watching that crowd grow by the second and watching a community of our future be united under a chant: “Up, up with education, down with discrimination.”
These words show how the new generation feels about all that is going on. And how we still want a chance to graduate and have a way out. Central is a historic location, with diversity and protests at the heart of our story, going back to when the Little Rock Nine were walking these very same halls. Seeing us all out there shows that times haven’t necessarily changed — and even back then it was students who had to take the first step.
—Sophomore Melanie Villanueva Sotelo
Source
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
