Jennings Encourages Activism in D.C. Remarks
From guest blogger Ian Quillen:
After urging students and teachers to try to "change the world," federal school safety chief Kevin Jennings insisted Monday that conservatives' calls for his resignation haven't affected his visibility.
It's just not Washingtonians, he said, who are seeing him.
"I feel like there is a genuine Beltway mentality where it becomes an echo chamber," said Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Education's office of safe and drug-free schools, in an interview after a rare public engagement in the nation's capital. "I think it's more that I don't speak in D.C. I'm on the road a lot."
Jennings, a former history teacher who took his current post last July, lunched Monday at the National Press Club with about 50 teachers from Close Up, a 39-year-old program that aims to inspire students to informed citizenry with hands-on experiences in Washingtom and elsewhere. He later spoke to 200 student participants at an auditorium near his office.
Jennings encouraged teachers to foster activism in students by emphasizing that many smaller actions in the civil rights movement made Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech possible.
"Segregation did not come to an end because Martin Luther King got up, did this speech, and white people in America went, 'Oh my God! We didn't know. We're so sorry,' " Jennings told teachers. "That's really not how it happened. There were decades and decades and decades of folks who came before Martin Luther King."
Jennings also described to students a pilot program that will survey students about the greatest safety needs in their schools. States that win participation in the competitive-grant program will receive money to address those needs, he said. The program will begin in seven states next year, with potential for expansion thereafter.
A former activist himself--best known as the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN--Jennings drew outrage from the right