The 74 million: NYC Student Activists Can’t Boycott Schools That Are Closed, but as Coronavirus Highlights Longstanding Inequities, a Chance to Change Policy Emerges
With New York City schools closed from coronavirus and social distancing the new normal, student activists in the country’s largest school district are recalibrating their campaigns, focusing on outreach to at-risk peers and using the newly magnified attention on the system’s inequities to force new policy.
Before the pandemic, student groups Teens Take Charge and IntegrateNYC were prepping for a May 18 districtwide school boycott, taking a page from the playbook of young activists in 1964 who’d turned out by the hundreds of thousands to protest school segregation. The spring boycott would have marked an escalation from seven near-weekly strikes starting in the fall that demanded immediate action on integrating the 1.1 million-student system, still one of the nation’s most segregated.