The current No Child Left Behind Act will be a pressure point for both presidential nominees as legislatures call for changes to the education policy or its abandonment altogether. Prominent in the movement are the New York City students who formed the N.Y.C. Student Union. Currently, the group is creating a human rights-based summer course and studying how to leverage student governments as a force of power within schools. Children’s Press Line spoke to two LaGuardia High School students who are active participants in the union about the issues that will be important to them in the next four years.

Dana O’Brien

There are four of us who started the Student Union. Last year, they were doing random searches of students and we were all up in arms. A couple of us went and testified at City Hall and we had the tiniest protest you ever saw in your life. So, we decided to get together and start a union. Luckily, we had a lot of great contacts and resources. We’re going to meet with the governor to talk to him about allocating funds and how students can be more involved with how the money is spent, and to just decide where the money is going to.

I go to LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. It’s a pretty good school. The main issue there is that there is very little communication between the students and administration. It is very difficult to reach the principal or heads of departments and to talk to them about the things that are going on. A lot of the students are sitting in classes all day feeling like they have no input on their education and their school. I’m in one of the best-funded schools in the city and you go into my [science] lab and everything is broken and doesn’t work. I remember we had a lab a couple of years ago and we were studying evolution. We were learning about the evolution of pasta, which let me tell you, doesn’t actually evolve. But they couldn’t get the resources to get actual materials.

Seth Pearce

Up until this year, I haven’t had a teacher that knew my name. If you have smaller class sizes, I think it will make a student feel they can really understand a subject and, more importantly, they can understand the teacher. In a school, you’re learning to interact with people and society and you feel like every authority figure is bringing you down because they don’t know you, and they call you by a number and not by name. If they know you by number and not by a name, you’re not going to like your school. I think there is a lot of legislation that can make a difference. For example, restrictions on spending and reducing class sizes so the teachers can really talk to the students and understand them.

I think attendance is a big issue. If a student doesn’t have a reason to go to school, they aren’t going to go. For a kid selling drugs on the street, if they’re going to make hundreds of dollars a week versus finishing school and maybe making a few hundred a week, they don’t have money and grades to go to college, so why not do something against the law if they’re going to make money? How do you argue with that?

The New York City Student Union is a completely student-run organization of students coming from all over the city. They come to our meetings to talk about the issues that face them. We want to be able to speak freely among students and we’re working on getting open mics and collecting student writings about their school and education in general. I think a lot of students have great ideas and we want to publicize them. We try to facilitate and communicate a more effective network of students across the city.