Chicago Students Teach Through Their Walkout for School Safety - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

Chicago Students Teach Through Their Walkout for School Safety - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:

Chicago Students Teach Through Their Walkout for School Safety

by Anthony Cody

Last week I posted a report from some Chicago High School students, which described their concerns about safety at their school. Today I am sharing a follow-up, which explains how their attempts to have these issues address were received by their administration.
Guest post by Yoseling Cueto and Leslie Leon.
Lately, an issue that's come between me and my education is the lack of safety at the school. This makes me feel uncomfortable and often makes me think twice about attending school or not. Since I started at Gage Park, this school has had a reputation of being "one of the worse schools" but before I never saw where these comments were coming from. Sadly, this year, I see it coming true. Before students were scared to walk out of school and have something happen to them but now we are frightened to go to school and have something happen to us inside the school too. A lot of this is rooted in the lack empathy for our daily experience. No one really takes into consideration the student point-of-view. It's why people don't understand why students behave the way they behave and why the biggest challenges we face never get addressed; our voices are often entirely ignored! I hope through this work, we can change that. Can you hear us?

On March 7th, the Thursday after we chose to refuse to take the NAEP exam, over 100 students signed