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Friend,
Maariya Sheikh is just 16 years old, but every day at school she gets a lesson in inequality she says the adults around her should heed.
Drawn by a specific academic program, Sheikh chose to attend high school outside the affluent, majority-white area of Cobb County, Georgia, where she lives. Her new school is the most racially diverse in the county. It is also significantly less resourced than her middle school. Students, many from disadvantaged neighborhoods, see the difference. Her high school teachers often pay for class materials out of their own pockets. More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, they are short of hand sanitizer.
Now, efforts by local and state lawmakers could entrench that inequality by gerrymandering school board member districts – in Cobb County and around the state – to maintain razor-thin white majorities.
Sheikh is one of a growing movement of high school students in Georgia fighting back. Armed with sophisticated organizing techniques and driven by a legislative onslaught from state lawmakers who seem determined to undermine Black representation at every level, they are juggling homework and exams with testimony at school boards and state legislative sessions, betting that by injecting youth engagement into politics run by adults, they can change their own world.
“Crazy things are going on in Georgia,” Sheikh said. “But people are beginning to realize how influential student voices can be. We’re hoping that we can start paving the way for other students to know that they can actually take action about the issues that affect them.”
Students find their voice
A raft of legislation currently on the table in Georgia appears designed to stifle the voices of a student population that, particularly in Atlanta’s metropolitan area, is undergoing rapid change. The Cobb County redistricting proposal, which would entrench a white majority of school board seats in an increasingly diverse county, is one of more than 85 local redistricting bills that have been introduced in the current state legislative session. Separately, conservative state lawmakers have introduced four bills that would limit how race is discussed in schools around the state.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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