I missed this yesterday because I am so swamped with work. Apparently hundreds of NYC students rallied in support of the Student Safety Act.

According to the NYCLU website:

Hundreds of New York City students and parents today joined local lawmakers and the Student Safety Coalition in front of Tweed Hall to rally support for the Student Safety Act, legislation being considered by the City Council that will bring transparency and accountability to NYPD activity and Department of Education suspension practices in the city’s schools.

This is incredibly encouraging. Public schools in the U.S. have been transformed into high security environments, complete with surveillance technologies, security forces, and zero tolerance policies. I know that I write a lot about this but I don’t think that it can be overstated. As educator and theorist Henry Giroux has persuasively argued, youth are living in a “suspect” society. Angela Davis has suggested that “when children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.”

So it is encouraging to me to see that young people are resisting their criminalization by institutions like schools.

Quoting once again from the NYCLU website:

With more than 5,200 uniformed officers, the NYPD’s School Safety Division is the nation’s fifth-largest police force – larger than the police forces in Washington D.C., Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, or Las Vegas. There are more police in our schools than there are guidance counselors.

NYPD School Safety Officers have the authority to detain, search and arrest children, yet they receive only 14 weeks of training—compared to six months for police officers. All too often, this police presence has led to interventions by law enforcement situations that should be handled by educators.

Take, for example, Denis Rivera, a 5-year-old special education student who was handcuffed for throwing a temper tantrum in his kindergarten class. The NYPD handcuffed and arrested 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez in school for scribbling on her desk in erasable marker. And Mark Federman, a principal at East Side Community High School, was arrested for trying to prevent the police from humiliating his honor roll student.

The escalation of police activity in the schools has also created a de facto zero tolerance policy in schools serving the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In these schools, which often have permanent metal detectors, students are suspended and even arrested for minor disciplinary infractions.

“The Student Safety Act will help students stay in school and ensures that we have some place to go if we have problems with school safety issues,” said Nazifa Nahbub, a 17-year-old senior at Long Island City High School and a youth leader for DRUM, Desis Rising Up and Moving.

“We need the Student Safety Act passed by the end of 2010 so no more students will be criminalized,” said Praz Barua, a youth leader for DRUM and the Urban Youth Collaborative. “This bill will create the transparency that we desperately need in our schools.”