Jayleen Salcedo: “Organizing is…”
Speech at Providence Student Walkout, January 20, 2017
Hello, My name is Jayleen. I am a student organizer at the @pvdstudentunion. Thank you all for joining us here today.
Trump is trying to take away our rights. We know that his policies on immigration, abortion and his denial of climate change are a danger to all of us. Most importantly, his public school policies that directly affect us. He wants to disenfranchise our schools and appointed an inexperienced education secretary. I want to emphasize the importance of youth uniting against these gross policies rooted in hatred, bigotry and white supremacy. It’s time that we got organized and stand up for our rights, to fight for better schools, for better communities and for all the things we deserve.
We are all minorities, in some way, that are being targeted and oppressed by Trump’s policies. The human response to oppression is, and must always be, organizing. Organizing is bringing people in so you can let the fire out and turn the heat up! Organizing is noticing that within society there is a power imbalance and harnessing the power of the people to combat that. Organizing is preparing everyday for a movement. And organizing is practicing for and seizing upon moments where you can transform society.
In school, we are trained to recognize the problems around us and react to them, but we are never trained to demand them solved. We are trained to believe that we deserve the obstacles that stand in our way and that we must deal with them. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t deserve to be treated as less than. And that you don’t have to accept this treatment.
Look around you. Look at all that we can achieve as students, look at the history we are making. Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.
Soon, PSU will be launching our next campaign — the Student Bill of Rights. This is a document that lists all of the important rights that students are entitled to. It lists the conditions of the education we deserve. In this document, students are demanding over 25 rights, including:
- School construction funding, so our ceiling stays on the ceiling and so our air and water are safe and clean
- Schools free of police presence because they are schools not prisons, and we are students not inmates
- Transparent school budgets, so that we the students can see where our money is really going!
We will propose it to the Providence School Board, the Providence City Council, and the people at the State House behind me, as a challenge. Will they stand up for youth? We need you to get involved to make sure.
The more students we have, the harder it is for our voices to be ignored.
Take your phones out and text @mySBOR to 81010 to let us know that you want the Student Bill of Rights passed.
Thank you!
