Students at the Center – Strategies

  • Identifying Oppression

  • Individual Empowerment to Take Action

  • Educational Campaigns

  • Writing – Counterstories

Students at the Center provides teachers and students an opportunity to reflect on their personal experiences and listen to those of others (Buras, 2015, p. 150). Participants of Students at the Center mobilize these verbal conversations into variations of literature and media to gain traction of their goal: to identify oppression and inequality and finding a voice to speak out against it (Buras 2015, p. 151). Students have found great utility in their individual and collective  voice.

Students at the Center became a part of Douglass High School in 1998, a time in which Douglass was one of the lowest-ranked public high schools in New Orleans (Buras, 2015, p. 149). During that time the state, using its “accountability plan,” was trying to close Douglass (Buras, 2015, p. 149). In response members of SAC organized a campaign called “Quality Education as a Civil Right” (Buras, 2015, p. 149). Given media misportrayal, Douglass acquired a tainted image of a beat up place with reckless students (Buras, 2015, p. 149). However, the “Quality Education as a Civil Right” was a positive step in reconfiguring the shallow interpretation of Douglass (Buras, 2015, p. 149).

Given the rapid development of charter schools in New Orleans, teachers and students of the SAC feared the possibility of no longer having, what Maria Hernandez–a member of the SAC–called, “the choice of a truly public, neighborhood-based education” (Buras, 2015, p. 151). So, in response to the movement of charterization, members of SAC began crafting “counterstories” (Buras, 2015, p. 151). The purpose of these writings were to stand up against “dominant narratives of reform” in the context of New Orleans the counterstories would more specifically “challenge white-majoritarian narratives” and highlight the “experiential knowledge of people of color (Buras, 2015, p. 151). For example, SAC student, Vinnessia Shelbia, wrote about her family’s experience of being homeless after Hurricane Katrina hit (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Shelbia explained that after Katrina, the prices of rent increased, forcing her family into numerous homeless shelters (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Shelbia connected her experience to the disinvestment policy makers had on public housing and education in black neighborhoods in New Orleans (Buras, 2015, p. 152). Beyond the counterstories, the dedication of SAC to relentless activism has driven the organization to produce 16 books, a newspaper called Our Voice, videos, and collected about $1.5 million in grants (Buras, 2009, p. 436). 

The work SAC is doing is critical. Although Kalamu ya Salaam, one of the co-teachers at SAC, doesn’t “believe that we’re [SAC] gonna win this one [the fight against charterization]” he firmly believes that “the story is important” and that “we [SAC members] have to tell our story” (Buras, 2009, p. 445). The stories that are being produced are being heard, and if nothing else, they create friction to the decision makers that are seizing the public schools.