Hi friends,
The Sunrise Movement is behind a Green New Deal for Schools initiative to demand climate justice. The initiative is currently based in 50 schools, although I expect it to grow quickly.
Their demands include that they receive instruction about climate change and environmental racism, even in places where local laws prevent teachers from talking about the unequal consequences of global heating.
The Green New Deal for Schools includes demands to update school buildings, buses and other infrastructure to make them more climate resilient. They are also asking that administrators develop climate disaster plans to keep students safe during extreme weather, and free and ideally locally sourced lunches.
Youth activists are also calling for schools to prepare them for green jobs after graduation.
Learn more about Sunrise and support their work!
Modeled on the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, the new program will
pay participants and act as a jobs training program, since most positions won’t require previous experience. The administration is also proposing new regulations that would streamline entry to civil-service jobs after the program.
This is great news for young people, the climate, and the nation.
In 2019, NYS passed legislation to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote prior to their 18th birthdays. Unfortunately, the change in the law was not communicated effectively. Last October, when I went into classes, only two students were aware of the opportunity to pre-register.
New York State lawmakers passed a new law to require schools to bear special responsibility to prepare young people to be engaged citizens. The law requires that they
develop procedures for providing access to voter registration and preregistration applications as well as assistance with filing such applications; and informing students of the state requirements for voter registration and preregistration.
Governor Hochul signed the bill late last week. Even though it doesn’t take effect until July 2024, we can still get started. I already have four workshops on my calendar for October and I’m very excited about this work.
If you teach in a NYC public high school, you can invite me to your classroom to lead a workshop about why and how to pre-register to vote.
The former president is concerned about the new law in PA, which is likely to harm Republican candidates. He has urged Republicans in the state to start suing right now.
Twenty-three other states have similar automatic voter registration laws in place. It is particularly welcome in PA, where the window for pre-registration for young voters is very small. They do, however, allow same-day registration and voting.
In honor of National Voter Registration Day, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram to direct her fans to register through Vote.org. After registering more than 35,000 new voters, the nonpartisan organization tweeted
Look what @taylorswift13 made us do!
Vote.org also reported that they were seeing a 72% increase in the number of 18-year-olds registering compared to 2022.
Last week, the White House announced the creation of an Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The two-part mandate of the new office is to implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last year and to recommend additional executive action to stop gun violence.
The youngest member of Congress, Maxwell Frost, shared the podium with Biden and Vice President Harris. This was only right, since young people like Frost, who served as the National Organizing Director of March for Our Lives, should be credited with any federal action that addresses this long-standing problem.
Frost got involved with anti-gun violence activism after the Sandy Hook shooting, when he was a teenager. During his teens, he witnessed a shooting in Orlando and worked closely with survivors of the mass shootings at Parkland High School and Pulse nightclub.
Cassidy Hutchinson gave her second live interview last night; the first was her interrogation by the January 6 committee. This young woman, who was assistant to Trump’s chief of staff, has courageously spoken out again about Trump’s behavior and that of his associates which threatens ‘the Republic’. She has faced vitriol and threats to her security.
A few weeks ago, the California legislature approved a measure to make August Trans History Month. California is the first state to do so, which is fitting, because of
California’s long-ranging significance in trans history, starting with Spanish colonizers’ “suppression of gender variance” among indigenous people, which the resolution says was “a foundational event of the history of the state.” It also cites the Stonewall precursor Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, Lou Sullivan’s trailblazing activism on behalf of trans men, and the establishment of the Transgender District in San Francisco in 2017, among many other events.
I tend to resist history-of-this-week and celebration-of-that-month as reductive. At the same time, it is a first step against erasure, and that is always a step worth taking.
Dozens of cities in Canada held anti-trans protests on September 20 focused on the supposed dangers of learning about trans identity in schools. How fitting that they were far outnumbered by trans rights counter-protesters.
I liked the sign that read:
guess who got caught acting sexual in front of an audience full of kids?
not a drag queen
over a photograph of Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.
with love,
L