Our Mission:
We believe that all students have a right to a safe and comprehensive education, free from the threat of physical violence and the stress of potential danger. Our schools should be a safe place for students to focus completely and fully on learning, developing life skills, and growing into productive members of society without worrying for their own safety or the safety of those around them.
As ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have shown time and again that they have no such reservations about the safety of our younger generation regardless of immigration status or the sanctity of our school system, and as immigration enforcement operations have begun being carried out across Georgia, we cannot blindly trust that schools will remain a safe place for our students.
This petition was created as the logical end to this line of thinking. If we wish to claim that our students have a right to education and a legal and moral responsibility to learn, we must ensure that schools remain protected from any and all threats of violence and outside disruption. The goal of this movement is to secure a statement from the Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) guaranteeing the safety of our students in the face of an ever-increasing ICE presence within the state of Georgia.
Our Message to the GaDOE:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
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Equality, Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness: In the words of our forefathers, these are self-evident, inalienable rights, the protection of which is the very basis for the formation of governments. Governments which, as our founders stated, derive their power from the consent of the governed. Should there come a time when the government fails to protect these rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
We, the students of the Georgia Department of Education, find that the Government of Georgia is failing to protect these rights. Our right to Equality is threatened by racially biased legislation and policing. Our right to Liberty is threatened by the political oppression and racial profiling being undertaken by the Department of Homeland. The pursuit of Happiness is a dream achieved only by the wealthy, who alone can be sure of their safety and the safety of their associates, while ICE operations force local ethnic communities to live in fear. The very Lives of any who oppose the actions of ICE, and of the multitude of non-white communities within Georgia have been threatened and even ended by DHS operations.
The time has come to exercise our Right to alter the governments in place. We demand that all public offices of the Georgia Department of Education be free from any and all ICE presence, and for these institutions to release a plan detailing how any students, teachers, administrators, or other inhabitants of these places should behave, and how the State of Georgia plans to protect these inhabitants, should ICE appear in these locations without a warrant. We also demand a written and enforced statement by the Board of Education stating that the State will protect any and all students from illegal ICE operations within Georgia's public schools.
Should these demands fail to be met in a timely manner, the Student Body will be forced to acknowledge that the Department of Education has failed to protect students' right to an education free from threat of outside harm and that schools cannot be trusted to ensure the safety of their inhabitants should ICE operations commence in the area. In this event, the Student Body will take the only logical step to ensure our own safety and the safety of our classmates, and begin a strike, until such a time as the Department of Education and the State of Georgia can provide for the protection of our students.