Students Walk Out Over Covid in New York, Michigan, Oakland, Boston

While teachers' unions and local governments fight it out, K-12 students are coordinating resistance to forced in-person learning.
Masked students walk to their classroom.
Michael Loccisano

Teachers’ unions and local governments are in a tug-of-war over remote learning policies, but little attention has been given to students’ preferences, instead putting youth in the middle. Recent days have seen a resurgence of student organizing in response, specifically to accommodate online learning amidst the omicron variant and spiking COVID spread.

William Hu, a senior at Boston Latin School, launched a petition on January 4 to push Governor Charlie Baker, who has been resistant to remote schooling despite the rise of the omicron variant, to permit online school as an option. Hu’s petition is approaching 5,800 signatures as of this writing.

“Just before winter break began on December 23rd, 2021, my senior class consisting of 370 students alone had over 30 confirmed COVID-cases. Even over the holiday break, it became a common occurrence to see fellow peers post on social media saying that they tested positive for COVID-19,” Hu alleges in his Change.org post. “No one is requesting a complete turn to remote learning, just an option so that kids can stay safe and still maintain their education.”

On Tuesday morning, students in New York and Michigan walked out of school over COVID-19 policies. Students across two of New York City’s specialized high schools coordinated Tuesday’s walkout after feeling unsafe at school. “We are the people who have to go to school and risk catching COVID-19 and bring it back to our families. We don’t have a say as to whether we could go back to school or if we had other options,” Samantha Farrow, a student organizer, told AM New York.

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While much of the last few years’ labor energy has focused on those in frontline positions like healthcare, manufacturing, and the service industry, students at U.S. universities nationwide have been organizing since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic for protections in schools for teachers and workers–not to mention themselves. Resident assistants, dining workers, and student researchers have all made strides towards unionization on campus. The largest strike in America until last week was at Columbia University, where student workers recently suspended their strike in response to a new contract.

Young people broadly have been leveraging strikes in support of social issues, like those who went on hunger strike outside the White House last fall to pressure the Biden administration to protect his Build Back Better Agenda, or those who walked out of school in solidarity with a trans classmate allegedly denied locker room access.

Meanwhile, conflict between teachers and governments continues. Last week’s school cancellation by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot led to several more days of disagreement, with school only restarting the following Tuesday and set to return to in-person instruction on Wednesday. But the student responses are also in solidarity with their teachers. Students in Oakland, California announced they’re prepared to go on strike next week if the school district doesn’t respond to calls from both teachers and students to provide KN95 masks, more testing and outdoor options for eating during in-person learning–or to go remote. Their petition for students has over 900 sign-ons as of this writing.

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