 Hi, so Logan here we are all the way from Miami, Florida to Washington DC at the NEA symposium. Hi everybody. Hey and you are a community organizer and you are Afro-Latinx, your trans-masculine non-binary person of color and most importantly you have a lot to share with us. Really important insights about the promise of public education. So what's brought you here today? So it was an evening after work fairly early in the evening you know sun is just beginning to set and I was laying on my bed surrounded by concert memorabilia and posters about trans liberation and as I was leisurely just scrolling through twitter I stumbled across a tweet that struck me and it stayed with me and it said if you were a gifted kid in elementary school there's a hundred percent chance that you're gay and depressed now and initially I laughed because I'm queer and I'm also diagnosed with depression but I noticed when I noticed I when a close friend retweeted it I had a really sobering moment of realization and it was almost everybody who I was with in the biomedical and agriculture magnet program has either experienced or is experiencing some form of depression and when you look at the number of people who have passed away due to suicide or drug overdoses there's an alarming truth that no one is looking at and it's that millennials on forward are in a very intense mental health crisis and no one is talking about it so you know as you know it's very easy to connect depression to tumultuous home life but there's another connection that oftentimes people fail to make and the connection to school system so what do I mean by that the school school in its of itself is seen as a safe home away from home that's all about the wellness and success of students but the unfortunate truth is that schools perpetuate the same systems of oppression that we're fighting against so we're talking about class-based systemic oppression and race-based systemic oppression which is oftentimes internalized yeah so oppression can you say more about what that is what that looks like what are you talking about when you say that okay so first let's take a look at like the geographical inequity it's it's not a secret that low-income schools are completely underfunded and under resource what's interesting is that in the state of florida there's a guidance plan mandate but there's no mandate for an actual school counselor so what that means is that if you attend a low-income school you're either at risk of losing your school counselor or you don't have one at all whereas wealthier schools have you know the extra dollars to invest it in their students wellness while lower-income schools don't and they don't have to invest in their students and then there's also the piece around identity politics right so depending on the intersections of your identity it exposes you to it exposes you to a certain level of trauma in schools so for example black and latino girls face higher rates of suspension in their white counterparts and they're also met with harsher and way more punitive measures than their white counterparts yeah and there's also some really disturbing information about trans students and their experiences so i mean 47 of trans students have admitted that what's in a 30-day period they've skipped school at least once 50 percent of trans students have admitted that they've seriously contemplated suicide and there's a very direct link between harassment in schools and low GPAs and that's not even to mention all of the trauma and stress that's triggered by over militarization in schools and because of the utopian school myth that we all believe in students are not getting the support they need or deserve yeah so some people might say like how would you respond if someone said okay that's probably just a few isolated cases this sounds kind of like a fringe perspective how big of a problem is this really so i mean the statistics can speak for themselves right but there's also tremendous value in actually listening to the experience of students so i was able to find a tweet um that really talked about experience and it reads after seven hours of school i should be able to come home and chill but no i have to sit down and do three hours of homework when will this stop why do we have to act like this is normal and acceptable the system is so messed up and harmful school is the leading cause of my depression so you know we talk a lot about like what it is so what is the impact right so what happens when students leave the school system by however they leave it whether they're pushed out or whatnot they're they can be faced with increased mental health issues as they attempt to unlearn all of the toxic behaviors and ideals that was instilled in them from their experience in the school system yeah and there's also this really intense and tricky stigma about seeking mental health services so what if you don't normalize it in grade school when you get to a point where you're like hey i may need to see a therapist it's intimidating and it's you know foreign but on the flip side there it's a double-edged sword the help that you can receive in school isn't always help that has the student's best interest in mind so because of all these things that pile on top of each other unfortunately that means that not all of us survive suicide is the second leading cause of death for young folks between the ages of 10 to 24 which includes college age youth which means to put it into perspective more young young adults and youth die from suicide than cancer heart issues aids birth defects stroke pneumonia the flu and lung issues combined and it's absolutely terrifying yeah so this is a really big problem clearly can you tell us a little bit about where you are in all of this so my experience in the school system is pretty intense my dad emigrated to the states in the 80s from Colombia you know for the promise of a good education my mom she didn't want to be living in projects for the rest of her life across the street from Edison senior high school she wanted to get out of the hood by any means necessary and for her that meant education because that was the only way you could get out so as you can imagine a lot of the messaging that I received around education was pretty intense and toxic for my development and then of course all the trauma that I accumulated before and after my mom passed away while I was still in high school so I had to graduate by any means necessary and I did but was it all truly worth it I'm honestly not sure yeah so you are a community organizer can you tell us a little bit about what all of this means in your community organizing yeah so I started organizing after my mom passed away so about four or five years give or take and I've heard I witnessed a lot of things in those years and one of the most powerful things I witnessed was when we were holding a series of circles under the Black Girls Matter Miami Coalition and during the closing leadership summit there was a Q&A panel and a foreign principal stood up and was basically asking how can you help Black Girls when they have such abhorrent attitudes and don't respect themselves very heavy engagement like respectably politics and the youth responded with authenticity and truth they pointed out that when Black girls act out it comes from somewhere and it comes from pain and hurt and trauma and instead of chastising them actually listen to them and value them all she could do was take a seat the youth organizers felt truly empowered and finally heard the principal gained a deeper understanding of what it meant to be trauma-informed and this is what happens when you invest in the leadership of Black and Brown girls, femmes, non-binary and trans youth and this is why I organize beautiful so can you talk about what you want to leave everyone with yeah um so we're looking at divesting and investing so divest from reactionary and shallow responses to youth bad behavior invest in holistic support that isn't patronizing or trivializing by hiring more school counselors who actually have time to counsel divest from law enforcement in schools invest in very intentional restorative justice practices and at the end of the day just listen to the students because they are the masters of their own experiences and before we close out we just want to show everyone a really quick video um could we roll the footage please duty to fight it is our duty to fight it is our duty to win it is our duty to win we must love and protect one another we have nothing to lose but our chains thank you