A Florida high school student is alleging school officials violated her rights when they banned her from participating in an anti-bullying observance and then suspended her from school. In April of last year, DeSoto County school student Amber Hatcher, then 15, was making plans to participate in the National Day of Silence. The event is [...]
MAY 15–Two parent chaperones at a Colorado high school prom sprayed Lysol on students engaged in “dirty dancing” and called several teenage girls “sluts and whores” for making it appear “they were advertising butt sex,” according to cops. The bizarre incident last month at the Manitou Springs High School resulted in harassment charges being filed [...]
Fun fact: Florida is one of 19 states where hitting kids who are participating mandatory public schooling with a paddle is completely legal in some districts. While some schools seek parental permission, those signatures—or lack thereof—may not hold much weight when a principal gets peeved: Last year, the principal at Joyce Bullock Elementary sent home [...]
BOSTON (AP) — Massachusetts high school students would be required to stay in school until age 18 under a bill approved Thursday by a legislative panel hoping to reduce the number of students who drop out of school. The compulsory school attendance age in Massachusetts is currently 16, with certain exceptions for children as young [...]
14th February 2012 Student Press Law Center http://www.splc.org/wordpress/?p=3199 Unless an outbreak of common sense sweeps through the Statehouse, Indiana is about to become the most frightening place in America to be a kid. House Bill 1169, pushed by the special-interest lobbyists for school administrators, would unleash school principals to control essentially anything their students [...]
The Hazelwood School District near St. Louis, Missouri is known to youth rights activists as the district that stomped on a school paper’s First Amendment rights and led to the Supreme Court’s notorious Hazelwood ruling. But more recently, this district was the site of a youth rights victory. NYRA-St. Louis, headquartered in Hazelwood West Middle [...]
The waltz it ain’t. Raunchy and about as subtle as “Jersey Shore,’’ the sexually charged dance style known as grinding is more popular than ever, and feeding a wave of dance cancellations, angry protests, and tensions between school administrators and students. A growing number of schools in New England have banned the explicit gyrations, saying [...]
Perhaps due to our animosity towards older adults who have oppressed us and perhaps due to our desire to forge our movement’s identity in a context in which senior citizens already have a powerful movement to protect their rights, youth rights activists have often refrained from discussing the parallels between ageist oppression against youth and [...]
Recently, I’ve been giving some thought to the capabilities of the human mind and the meaning of intelligence. The common perception is that human intelligence grows as we age, that young children start off stupid and it is adults’ job, through the various institutions of education, to implant the right “knowledge” into children’s brains until they’re intelligent like us. I think that’s very, very far from the truth.
NYRA’s mission centers on challenging age discrimination against young people, both in law and in attitudes and supporting the basic freedoms afforded to young Americans in the Bill of Rights.