Free Our Schools - Our Education, Our Lives, Our Decisions!

On November 5, 2008 SDS will be in solidarity with students from France, Liberia, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and more countries participating in an international student day of action against the privatization of our schools and lives. Since in America this happens to be the day after the presidential election, people will be distracted and it’s not a strategic day to act. So, instead of one day of action, on the 5th SDS will launch a national Week of Education and outreach, building up to a national Day of Demands on November 14th.

Week of Education:

The goals for this week are to educate, agitate, and organize. We need to GROW! This is a great chance to recruit new people to SDS. We’re also mobilizing students for the national Day of Action immediately following this week.

During this Week of Education SDSers across the country will educate ourselves and fellow students on important topics including, but obviously not limited to:

* student debt
* politics
* power
* oppression
* social change
* student and labor movements

… you know - all the important things our schools are typically NOT teaching us or are teaching us WRONG!

We will use creative and participatory education methods such as:

* student-led workshops
* teach-ins
* street theater
* puppet shows
* parades
* panel discussions
* movie showings
* radical art shows
* banner hangings/ banner drops
* invite speakers (Iraq Veterans Against the War, dissident authors)
* interactive games
* political parties (as in fiestas!)

… and more!

Try and have a daily presence on your campus! Be creative and fun with your outreach!

Let’s remember everyone’s minds will be on the election results, so be relevant and talk about those results! Everything discussed during the Week of Education should be connected to our role as students and the need for us to organize ourselves for social change!

Which leads us to our…
Day of Demands:

On November 14th we will take a step toward transforming the movements for student power and accessible education that we’re building in schools around the country into a Student Movement that can and will make demands at the level necessary to transform the entire educational system. We will, with much fanfare and merrymaking, publicly make our demands to the people and institutions that control our education system; the Department of Education, our school Administrations, Student Loan Companies, and the rest of the unaccountable folks who ignore our needs and profit from our exploitation.

The goal of this Day of Demands is to announce the arrival of a militant, radical, and dedicated student movement and make public our vision for a democratic, liberatory, and accessible education system. It is to take the power we have been building at our schools and in our communities, and by mobilizing collectively allow ourselves to make demands more sweeping and more far reaching than anything we can accomplish at our individual schools.

On the Day of Demands SDS chapters from across the country will organize marches, rallies, and parades that will end in public presentations of both our local and national demands to the targets chosen by local chapters. Media teams will make sure the whole world hears us.

The Department of Education has 10 regional offices in cities across the country which we suggest chapters target if they’re close enough. Office locations are:

* Boston, MA
* New York, NY
* Philadelphia, PA
* Atlanta, GA
* Chicago, IL
* Dallas, TX
* Kansas City, MO
* Denver, CO
* San Francisco, CA
* Seattle, WA

Specific addresses and contacts for each regional office, along with the states they represent can be found here: http://www.ed.gov/about/contacts/gen/regions.html.

Of course, their headquarters is in Washington DC.

Most of the student debt in this country is through federal loans from the Department of Education. Not to mention all the horrible policies they’re responsible for (standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, funding public schools according to property values, etc.)

We need your help to make the Week of Education and Day of Demands possible and successful!