“Occupy your school; don’t let them appropriate you for their pro-grammed dilapidation. Paint the walls, make them beautiful and to your liking, because beauty incites creation and love, and ugliness attracts hate and annihilation. Transform the schools into creative workshops, into meeting places, into parks of attractive intelligence. Let’s make the schools into fountains of happy knowledge, following the example of the vegetable gardens that the homeless, jobless, and the most deprived have occasionally had the imagination to plant in the big cities, after they’ve smashed up the asphalt and concrete.”

• Take up space at your school, make it a community space. A place of vulnerability and acceptance - a place where all people are accepted and encouraged to thrive.

“Education’s goal, after all, should really be nothing but autonomy, independence, the creation of the self – without which there are no such things as true mutual aid, authentic solidarity or collectivity without oppression.”

• Students should feel safe at school and be free of forms of policing to encourage their learning and development. Safety is created by the community and must be reimagined.

“ A SCHOOL THAT HINDERS DESIRES STIMULATES AGGRESSIVENESS:

The ancient school walls never seem to stop evoking the walls of penitentiaries. The high- placed windows make sure that the student sees nothing but a little bit of the sky, a unique space reserved for the happiness of souls, if not bodies. The body, immobilized in a study hall that quickly turns into a torture chamber, suffers its earthly destiny in the ordinary style… The pedagogues have always affirmed that discipline and the maintenance of order were the necessary conditions for all education.”

• We cannot expect students to succeed in an environment where they are constantly over policed and discouraged from showing up authentically. Policing as a form of discipline should not be implemented in a place that requires vulnerability to learn. Schools should be a place of complete autonomy and liberation.

“HOW CAN ONE GET TO KNOW THINGS WHEN OPPRESSION EXISTS?:

Maintained by the fear of having to get around in a prison of tetanus-ridden muscles, com- pressed emotions install between the oppressor and the oppressed a logic of destruction and self-destruction that breaks all forms of enlightened communication.”

• Our students come from a variety of backgrounds and life experiences -- many have had negative experiences with authority, police, and/or ICE. Students cannot succeed in an environment where they feel they are being policed or surveillanced. When we bring police on campus, students feel they must behave a certain way, someone that is not themself.

“How can one excite curiosity when there are so many beings tormented by the anguish of guilt and the fear of sanctions?”

“What despotic and outdated spirit do the pedagogues claim autho- rizes them to erect a tribunal and then cut into such vibrant, lively flesh with the double-edged blade of merit and demerit, honor and dishonor, salute and damnation? What personal neuroses and obsessions do they obey when they dare to blemish with fear and the menace of suspen- sion from school the progress of children and adolescents, who only need attention, patience, encouragement and that affection which carries the secret of obtaining so much by demanding so little?”

“Isn’t it true that the educational system persists in basing itself on the ignoble principle, de- scended from a society which assumed that pleasure only exists on the screens of a sadomasochis- tic relationship between masters and slaves, ”I’m only punishing you because I love you. . . .”?... Judging prevents one from understanding the person one presumes to rehabilitate. The behav-ior of judges, who are themselves scared by the fear that comes with being a judge, redirects to their own ends some of the convicted student’s indispensable qualities, which would have helped the student in his or her long, poetic journey towards autonomy: that is, obstinate determination, a sense of effort, an awakening sensibility, a nimble intelligence, a constantly trained memory, the perception of the living in all forms, and the attentive hold over his or her own conscious-ness that allows the student to perceive what helps in his or her progress, what slows him or her down, what his or her errors are, and what their corrections would be.”

“Each individual possesses his or her own creativity, and that creativity is suffocated when mistakes are treated like punishable offenses. This must no longer be tolerated. There is no such thing as guilt, there are only errors; and errors correct themselves.”

- Raoul Vaneigem

A Warning to Students of All Ages

BIPOC: Black, Indigenous and People of Color

CBO: Community Based Organization

RPD: Renton Police Department

RSD: Renton School District

SRO: School Resource Officer