Youth Mandate for Education and Liberation: A Mandate to Guide Us from Crisis to Liberation

For more than three decades, Black and Brown youth, parents, educators, and communities have organized to dismantle the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline. As a core feature of that fight, Black young people have relentlessly called for police-free schools. Their experiences have made clear that police do not keep them safe.

The Youth Mandate for Education and Liberation, endorsed by more than 150 youth organizations and their allies, articulates young people’s mandate to their government - local, state, and federal - to permanently end the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline and build a liberatory education system based on principles of inclusion, equity, and racial justice. We believe in police-free schools.

Visit Youthmandate.com for more information and to support young people's vision.

At this moment, the federal government has a particular opportunity to change course, repair harm, and act decisively to advance this goal. Through voting, protesting, going to community meetings, showing up at school board meetings and outside the White House, young people have delivered their mandate: begin by permanently ending the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline. We want education and liberation, not police and incarceration.