2006 Youth Activist Scholarship -- Kiran Savage-Sangwan

Kiran Savage-Sangwan, a senior at Davis High School in Davis, California, has distinguished herself as an activist through her extensive work at school and with the ACLU. She travels two hours by train every two weeks for ACLU Youth Activist meetings in San Francisco, is a well known speaker, and is described by those at the Northern California affiliate as “a rare talent and one of our foremost champions for civil liberties.”

The following are excerpts from Kiran’s scholarship essay.

I became a member of the ACLU when I was 13, as I watched the degradation of civil liberties following 9/11. I was particularly troubled by the racial profiling that was happening in the name of security, and the ACLU was one the most prominent groups speaking out against it. The following year the war in Iraq started, and I realized that I could have a voice in the world if I chose to. I felt very strongly that the war was morally wrong, and I started speaking out at school, talking to my peers about it. The day after the war started, I organized a protest involving 180 students at my middle school, all speaking out against the war. While the war was not a civil rights issue, this was the experience that taught me how powerful my voice can be when I am not afraid to use it. Also, the protest allowed other students to bring their thoughts and voices together and fight for change, something I have been doing ever since that day.

I feel that it is most important to speak out and fight for the rights of groups that are routinely silenced. At my high school and in this country in general, LGBT people have been and continue to be silenced and discriminated against. I am very involved in my school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, which both provides a safe space for students who need it and engages in activism within our school community. Last year, I organized our first Transgender Day of Remembrance to raise awareness of transgender issues and to remember those who have been killed due to anti-transgender hate and violence. Approximately 60 students wore armbands and stickers, there were posters around school memorializing transgender people who have been killed, and teachers were given a statement about the day to read to their classes. Because transgender issues are constantly overlooked in today’s society, this day was very important in bringing some awareness of these issues to the students at my high school. This year we observed the day in a similar manner, and I also helped another school organize the day for the first time. I have also organized Day of Silence, a national student-led day protesting the silencing of LGBT students. This past year we decided to expand the mission of Day of Silence to protesting the silencing of all marginalized groups because I felt that it was time that all the groups fighting for their rights united at our school. I talked to and involved most of the school clubs and talked to classes about the day. In the end 150 students participated by observing the silence for the entire day, at least 100 more wore stickers of support, 7 teachers observed the silence, and most other teachers and administrators wore stickers of support. It was by far the largest Day of Silence our school had ever had, and our silence was heard much louder on our campus and in our community. The unity of marginalized groups is invaluable because in the end we are all fighting for the same things, and we are a much more powerful force when we can stand up together.

In my junior year of high school, I co-founded a student rights organization after witnessing multiple violations of student rights by our school administrators. This organization is the Davis High School Student Union. It is composed of students from many different clubs and other interested students, all dedicated to protecting student rights at our school. We meet off campus so that we are independent of the school club rules that we often see as limiting students’ expression and ability to agitate for change. We have been growing as an organization, and have gained the recognition of our school administration, the Board of Education, and many community members.

One of the most important issues that the Student Union addressed was student privacy rights with the opt-out procedures. The No Child Left Behind Act gave military recruiters access to student information, but also gave students or their parents the right to deny this access by submitting a written request. In my school district forms were given out to students in large packets on the first day of school, but they required a parent signature. I spent one and a half years researching the law and what other school districts had done, talking to school administrators, meeting with school board members, speaking before the Board of Education, getting support from community groups, and informing parents of their right to opt-out. At the beginning of this school year, the Davis school district finally agreed to change to form and allow students to exercise their right to opt-out themselves by signing the form, primarily because of the work I did in getting the support and information necessary to persuade school officials that students do and should have to right to make their own decisions about the release of their information to military recruiters. I distributed and explained the form to students at multiple school events this year, and we had a record number of students exercise their right to opt-out – over 550, almost one third of our school. I look upon this as one of my biggest accomplishments in protecting student rights, and a local television channel interviewed me about it. Because of the increased military presence and use of dishonest recruiting practices on high school campuses, it is especially important today that students are able to protect the privacy of their information.

Two other school policies that I have, as chair, led the Student Union in opposing are the Controversial Issues Policy and the No Exit Policy. The Controversial Issues Policy is an existing policy regarding the teaching of controversial issues that the school district is currently attempting to revise. The existing policy is fairly broad and reasonable, but the newly proposed policy posed some serious student freedom of expression and assembly issues. It was written in a manner that made it easily applicable to school clubs so that administrators could require a club that wished to bring a guest speaker on a certain issue to also bring speakers of the “opposing view.” We felt that this would infringe on the ability of student clubs to present their views and express their opinions. For example, if the Gay Straight Alliance brought a speaker advocating for same-sex marriage, we could potentially have been required to also bring a speaker opposing same-sex marriage. After I spoke before the Board of Education and met with the committee that writes district policies, I was successful in having the policy rewritten to specifically exclude school clubs and individual student expression and activities outside of class time. While I still do not agree with the policy, it is a significant improvement and will allow clubs to continue their activities.

The No Exit Policy was a new discipline policy that put students with excessive tardiness on a list that was then circulated to all teachers, who were required to prevent those students from leaving the classroom for any reason, other than strict emergencies. My main issue with this policy was that it was not written and students did not have any idea what constituted “excess tardies” for the purpose of this list, or how to get removed from it. In fact, the rules seemed to differ depending on the student. I succeeded in having the district create a written policy that outlined this disciplinary measure so that it would be applied fairly to all students. Because inequities in school discipline are a serious issue that especially affects students of color, having a written policy was important in insuring that all students are treated fairly.

The civil rights activity that has changed my life the most is my involvement with the ACLU Friedman Education Project Youth Activist Committee. I joined the group at the end of my sophomore year by being accepted for the sexism summer trip. The trip was an amazing experience for me because we met many people who are involved in what they are truly passionate about. Although I had always been outspoken about women’s rights and equality, the trip, and more specifically the visit with Chris Daley of the Transgender Law Center, showed me that the issue of sexism in society is based on our reliance on the gender binary system. Because we are completely dependent on distinctions based on gender, we create a system that is inherently unequal. I believe that we can only accomplish true gender equality by abolishing the gender binary system. Following the trip, I prepared the classroom presentation, or report back, curriculum. I also presented to the Northern California Board about the trip and my experience, and was interviewed by the California National Organization of Women for their video about different generations’ views on modern sexism.

I stayed very actively involved in Youth Activist committee, traveling to the meetings on the train from Davis. I was involved in making a video dealing with military recruitment in high schools. The video is meant to inform students about how military recruiters target certain students and to arm students with real facts about the military so that they can make informed choices. We screened the film at the annual Bill of Rights Day Celebration. I also worked on organizing the Spring Youth Conference, which brings approximately 500 students from throughout the region together for a day of education on many civil rights issues. I prepared and facilitated workshops on the draft, military recruitment, and rights with the police. I was also one of the student activist speakers at the conference opening. Youth Conferences are a very important tool in youth activism because they bring together many students from different schools to both share their experiences and collaborate with each other, as well as educate all the students on issues ranging from basic student rights, to the sex worker industry, to the prison industrial complex.

This past summer, I marched with the ACLU in the San Francisco Pride Parade and attended the ACLU Biennial Conference in New Orleans, and even had the opportunity to vote on several resolutions. Following the Biennial was the YAC summer trip on juvenile justice, which was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I had the opportunity to spend eight days with 23 of the most inspiring young people I have ever met, as we explored California’s juvenile justice system. We visited many community organizations dedicated to reforming the system and providing more promising futures for the youth of this state, but we also visited the correctional facilities. I saw one of the most horrific systems in this country, and I saw that the youth who are trapped in it are no different as people than myself, but that they are from very disadvantaged communities. What I saw was an institutional system that has determined the value a youth will have before he or she even has a chance to succeed, and has been very successful in essentially throwing away the lives of youth that are deemed valuable. Because of this trip, I know I will spend the rest of my life working to close all youth prisons and fighting for a kind justice that enables all youth to succeed as themselves and in their communities. After the trip, I wrote a poem for our expose and helped design the classroom presentations. I also attended a protest to close one of the California Youth Authority facilities, wrote multiple letters to the Governor asking him to shut down the CYA, presented to the Northern California Board about my experience, helped create a video poem about the trip, and organized an event in Davis where I spoke about the CYA, showed a short film, and had people write letters to the Governor asking him to close the CYA.

Recently I was interviewed for the ACLU Youth Rights and Activism video. I also spoke about the juvenile justice system at Bill of Rights Day and urged ACLU members to help us in fighting this system. And, because I feel that many kids are forced out of schools and directly into the juvenile justice system, I spoke at an educational equity hearing at the State Department of Education about the High School Exit Exam.

The Youth Activist Committee has given me the tools, experiences, and support that have enabled me to pursue my values through civil rights activism. Activism often becomes a lonely endeavor, so my involvement in the YAC has been the most personally important part of my life for the last year and a half. The other students and staff in the project have challenged my thinking and appreciated my spirit more than anyone else in my life. I have finally found people that share my passions, and together I believe that we have made a significant impact on the issues we have chosen to tackle.

Many people have told me that I am impractical, unrealistic, and a dreamer. So many times I have heard, “but you realize that’s never going to happen, don’t you,” and my honest answer is “no.” The picture of the world I work for is clear enough in my mind, that it seems within reach, and definitely within vision. Maybe it is a dream, but it is better to dream and to fight than to stand by and watch people be marginalized by our society. I have never been a person who can sit by and be content with the status quo, partly because I am upset by what I see, but more importantly because I believe the future can be better if we are willing t o make it so. People such as Rosa Parks stood up for themselves and their civil rights, and thereby started a movement for justice. Too often people think that this movement for justice is complete, that it is now something we only read about in our history books, but it is not. The youth of today were left a legacy, not a perfect world, and it is our responsibility to recognize those who came before us and further the movement through our own actions. Maybe our vision will not be fulfilled in our lifetime, but for our dreams to ever be realized we must start something here and now.