This is an email that I received from Mr. Ed Johnson, Advocate for Quality in Education.  His letter, which was addressed to Atlanta Public School Leadership and others is followed by a letter from Vera Eidelman, ACLU Action which speaks to the issues of student’s rights—that is knowing them.

Ed Johnson’s Letter

Dear APSL and associated others,

Have any of your partners stepped up to support students in their planned walkouts and protests to push for change

You, of course, know about change à la your school transformation strategy and implementations and how such change can make some people fearful.  The difference now, with the students, however, is that change is emerging instead of being imposed.  Interestingly, emergent change can only be systemic change; imposed change may be, and often is, fragmented change.  Fragmentation destroys a system.  Thus the students offer a powerful lesson.

Have any of your partners offered, say, “safety orange” armbands students might ware?  Safety orange, of course, is the hunters’ color that signals “Don’t Shoot!”  Worn inside school, safety orange armbands would be non-disruptive to school functioning, I’m sure you will agree.

In any case, I can only imagine you will want students to learn what they need to know about their rights to walk out, to express related speech acts inside and outside school, and to decide for themselves consequences to face, willingly.

Accordingly, I can only imagine you will encourage the students, their parents, teachers, principals, and others, including, but not limited to, civil activists and advocates for public education to register for the ACLU Action Call described below.  You, yourselves, and APS Police leadership might also register for the call.

By the way, I recently became a card-carrying ACLU member and now anticipate making active use of that membership.

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

ACLU Letter

From: Vera Eidelman, ACLU Action [mailto:aclu@aclu.org]
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2018 2:56 PM
To: edwjohnson@aol.com
Subject: Walking out of school: what you need to know