Here's how this 17-year-old New Yorker is changing school safety one borough at a time.
Alliyah Logan may be just 17-years-old, but she's making waves in New York City as she fights to improve school safety for her community. From leading protests to organizing rallies, here is how Alliyah is fighting to limit police presence on schools across her city.
Video Transcript
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ALLIYAH LOGAN: So for me, I've always said this that I've been a leader that my community has been waiting for. I'm looking at the intersections of different issues because it's evident in New York City that zip codes define whether or not communities can be safe or can have access to safety.
Hi. My name is Alliyah Logan. I'm a Jamaican American youth advocate from the Bronx. I focus a lot of my activism on empowering black youth. Even in elementary school or middle school, I was used to, like, people breaking out in fights every day, there being police officers and metal detectors. In middle schools, the amount of violence that we were just used to in our everyday life, like, having a fight was just common. Having your, like, classmates get shot was very common.
But now I go to high school in Manhattan, more specifically Soho, so it was a very drastic change going into a high school that was predominately white and predominantly, like, higher socioeconomic status. So my activism was really driven by just the small interactions with my different peers at school. They never experienced gun violence in the way that I had or in the way that my community has.
So the school-to-prison pipeline is an American-made system that directly funnels young students into prison cells because of inadequate resources in their school. There are specific disciplinary actions that are taken towards students that are way harsher than their white counterparts. But it's just pushing students not to college dorms or not to their success in their later life, but into prison cells and into the criminal justice system.
So what I've noticed is that a lot of schools with predominately Black and brown or students who are part of a low income community, they have metal detectors. All of these are direct ways that students are encountering the prison industrial system without actually knowing it, whereas my school, which is predominately white and has a higher socioeconomic status, they don't have metal detectors.
A lot of times, students don't have access to understanding their rights. We're also doing school-to-prison pipeline town halls throughout New York State. So the first one was in Brooklyn, and we did it at a high school that had metal detectors and school resource officers.
CARLOS TORRES: As a society, we're so quick to judge and punish our young people, right? Maybe it's just time to start listening, right, and not put a label, right? In schools and NYPD training, maybe they need to start teaching conflict resolution.
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ALLIYAH LOGAN: Hello, everyone. Thank you all for having me. My name is Alliyah Logan. I'm a Jamaican American youth advocate from the Bronx.
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So I work heavily with the NYCLU, the teen activist project, alongside Babu, and we do a lot of work centering educational disparities and focusing on how can we make education throughout New York State equitable for our people. You can actually have a yearlong suspension. When you're having suspension, students are not given adequate resources to be able to actually understand classwork. The NYPD has not released any information on metal detectors in schools. So we've found that this specific bill provides data so that we'll be able to understand how and who the school-to-prison pipeline impacts. Thank you.
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[LAUGHS]
The power of young people is just so strong and so motivated to make change. And I think a lot of time, people see us as uneducated, or they even see us as naive to believe that we can change the status quo and change how our country and even how the world functions. But I'm just so proud to be in a generation of people who are just so motivated and so driven to be able to directly change their communities.
