How to Use This Toolkit
Table of Contents
This year, Youth Rise Texas is registering and mobilizing young people to Get Out the Vote for the local elections in November–now you can help us too! This toolkit is meant to be a resource for our community to educate themselves and others utilizing the power of social media. Here you will find: a guide to our highlighted issues along with respective talking points, a zine that hosts information about the races to watch and the candidates’ opinions on our core issues, and social media posts, captions and hashtags to share with your followers!
Please contact Bria Virgil and Selasi Tagbor Morales [bria@youthrisetx.org; selasi@youthrisetx.org] with any questions.
Our Highlighted Issues
Police do not belong in our schools! Let’s divest from policing and invest in healing. Let’s put our resources into restorative justice-based models in schools, quality historically accurate education, and mental health support.
Check out our talking points below:
- Policing within schools puts students on the fast track to the school-to-prison pipeline.
- Story after story, including evidence-based research, show that Black and Brown communities feel the brunt of increased law enforcement after a school tragedy.
- 14 million students are in schools with cops but no: counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers.
- There is little to no evidence to support the claim that School Resource Officers (SROs) stop school shootings. School-based arrests, which fall more harshly on students of color, put students in direct contact with the justice system.
- In 2020, Austin spent 14 million dollars in funding for School Resource Officers, a fancy term for cops. That money should be used for counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers instead.
- This ensures that our Young Texans have truly safe schools that allow them to heal.
- AISD holds a ratio of 285:1 students to mental health workers.
- Our vision for the future is an equitable one where Texas lawmakers, school officials, and youth can work together to create conditions where school communities invest 50% more of their resources into restorative and healing justice-based models of accountability.
- We support an immediate future where YRTX and other Texas-based organizations that support youth work together to develop alternatives to policing and engage in community organizing and healing justice work.
Self determination is an essential human right. This looks like freedom of movement, access and opportunity for all youth, centering historically marginalized Texans. It does not look like imprisoning, deporting, separating families and criminalizing young people through surveillance and policing.
Check out our talking points below:
History tells us who will suffer most–women, immigrants, poor people, people of color, and LGBTQ people will continue to bear the brunt of reproductive surveillance and punishment (Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz).- The expansion, investment, and technological capacity of modes of surveillance and policing create a disturbing pattern of state abuse that especially targets women of color, immigrants, and low-income women for pregnancy criminalization and punishment.
- The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) now investigates caretakers of trans youth, providing them with gender-affirming medical care as child abusers. Using such policing is a slippery slope to parental removal and excessive attack on the Black and Brown young Texans.
- By mobilizing youth and registering Texans to vote in November, we can elect representatives that truly embody our values and support our bodily autonomy. Reproductive surveillance, coercion, and control are durable and devastating patterns.