The following is an excerpted speech given by a PL high school student at a rally in front of the Chancellor of NYC public schools home to a crowd of hundreds demanding that NYPD (New York Police Department) be removed from all public schools.
I am a junior at a mostly Black and Latin high school. My school has had metal detectors for decades, so I am no stranger to the racist over-policing and criminalization of Black and Latin youth in public schools.
I get to the front of the line with all of my metal items and electronics in a basket and when I have to get hand-wanded, I know that I have to stand with my feet shoulder-width apart and my arms out. I don’t need to hold onto something when I have to lift my feet up so they can scan the bottom of my shoes. This is because I have been doing this every day since the 6th grade.
The DOE (Department of Education)  has perpetuated into my daily life since I was 11 years old, that I am a suspect before I am a student. School safety tells me to remove metal items from my body before a teacher tells me good morning. I have to explain that I am a student at the school and have been for 6 years to reenter for volleyball practice before my coach tells me to run a few laps. I have to put my phone and jewelry in my bag before I can take a pencil out of it.
They claim it is for our safety and protection. They claim my classmates are the dangerous ones. They try to make us scared of each other, but the only people I am scared of are the ones wearing the badges.
Racist incidents at school range from extreme ones like my friend getting tackled, bruised, and arrested for using a safety pin to hold his glasses together to something as seemingly small as not being allowed to bring an iced coffee because of the claim that there could be alcohol in it.
The NYPD and DOE work side by side to help funnel innocent working-class Black and Latin kids into prisons by familiarizing us with the police from a young age. But at my school we fight back!
My volleyball team went to one of the city’s “elite” high schools to play a game and got yelled at by school safety and were forced to walk in a single file like we were at Rikers Island [prison]. The white team we faced got none of that. We were accused of stealing from their gym inventory and racist remarks like “looks like they went on a shopping spree” were murmured between school safety agents as we left.
My school rallied teachers, students, and parents to collectively fight back. We made phone calls, we wrote letters, we threatened a sit in, and in the end, my team got the head of school safety along with the perpetrators to come to our school and have an in-depth conversation that ended in genuine apologies. Now every time our volleyball team walks into that school we are treated with respect.
When the working class unites, changes are inevitable!
However, just because we won that fight does not mean racist policing has stopped in schools. We still have to get the NYPD and its racist, toxic murderous culture out of our schools! And more is needed!  This entire school system under capitalism teaches a toxic ideology; only some kids are meant to make it. This is a school system that teaches us that in every graduating class there are a few winners and many more losers.
Everybody wants to talk about systemic racism without mentioning the system—capitalism, the profit system—that treats most of us like waste. For me the systemic change that is needed has a name—communism.  
In our segregated system, from elementary school, students and parents buy into this idea that going to a Black and Latin school equates to failure. The real failure is being won over to racism, the real failure is pushing your kids into schools that fuel elitism by allowing them to think that they deserve to be there because they are better.
This capitalist government needs to maintain this superiority complex in order to stop the working class from realizing that if we unite as a whole, NOTHING can stop us!
The very multi-racial, multi-generational unity that we see right now to get these kkkops out of our schools is the very unity that is needed to smash this racist, capitalist system.
High schools and colleges have trained us to hate communism, the same ones that tell most of us we have no worth. Do you trust these institutions of oppression to teach you the truth about your own liberation?
We cannot trust the very capitalist system that needs racism to thrive to fix systemic racism. This is not a broken system. It is working exactly how it was built to work.
Removing NYPD from schools will not fix segregation, it will not stop failing the majority of its students, and most importantly, it will not fix the racism that is taught in our schools. My classmates, your students, your children deserve more; so, we have to fight for more!
We have to abolish the NYPD and this racist, capitalist system once and for all! SAME ENEMY,  SAME FIGHT,  WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!