ID scanners. Assigned locks and lockers. Coordinators of Student Affairs. Hallway restrictions.
Despite the students’ objections to these impositions and our numerous staff editorials condemning the administration’s policies and lack of communication with students, almost everything administrators have wanted has come to pass.
The few exceptions to this rule are cases when the students have threatened massive action, such as the defeat of the proposed college office/Studen Union (SU) space switch in March 2006 and, just a few weeks later, the defeat of the proposal to use ID scanners throughout the day. Both student victories were accomplished by threatening a student walkout.
But only two years after it was mutually agreed upon that scanners would not be used throughout the day, administrators have decided to require their use for students going out to lunch. There may not have been a legal document, but in breaching an agreement with the student body, administrators have lost our trust.
Why are they allowed to get away with this? Because no one is holding the administration accountable for its actions. The faculty has shown little or no resistance to any of the administration’s policies, the parents seem to be either ignorant of or indifferent to the erosion of student rights at Stuyvesant and the students have displayed no desire to take radical action to change the situation.
This hasn’t always been the case. In February 2003, SU members handed out pamphlets to protest a new hallway restriction proposal that would have denied students the right to “sit or congregate in the hallways” (”Hallway Restrictions Stir Student Passions,” February 13, 2003). Students then organized a sit-in to protest the proposal. Though some thought the sit-in was ineffective, including Principal Stanley Teitel and several students, it demonstrated the unity of organized student action.
Students have also held governments outside the school accountable through action. In 2002, students from Stuyvesant and City University of New York marched on City Hall to protest school budget cuts. A year later, more than a hundred Stuyvesant students walked out of school to join an anti-war protest in Union Square.
If we wish to alleviate our current situation, we must hold our government to their word. The student body must unite—by communicating not only with parents but also with each other—or the administration will continue to erode our rights.
Stuyvesant students have done it before. It is now up to us to hold the administration accountable.
