She’s a 16-year-old single mother struggling to manage school and pay bills. He’s 17 and juggling two full-time jobs. She is also 17 and was born with a disability that requires a dependence on the government for access to medicine. They are 16 and attend a high school in a district that is in consideration…
Reposted from My Unschooling Adventure with permission from the author. As much as I’d like to think otherwise, I haven’t fully recovered from school. Teachers treating me as superior to other students because of my test scores led me to conflate my worth with my achievements. Even now, I have a tendency to think of…
The issues of conventional schooling have harmed our youth in more ways than we recognize, causing unnecessary stress and pain to students throughout the US. With times such as these, where society is changing before our very eyes, we call for the total restructuring of the conventional schooling system that prevails in the US today….
Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Nina Pop. George Floyd. Tony McDade… Say their names and remember them and all the Black people who have lost their lives to police brutality. Say their names and remind yourself (if it was not already obvious to you) that the U.S. is built upon the exploitation of Black and Indigenous…
NYRA is asking Congress to introduce legislation to reform the “Troubled Teen” Industry. Youth can be kidnapped and held without their consent in these camps for “behavior modification”, often suffering severe abuse. Last time we advocated for legislation to regulate the Troubled Teen Industry it passed the House but not the Senate, but the stakes…
NYRA has been forming a coalition of advocacy groups together to free the youth held in abusive behavior modification facilities during COVID-19, and we have just had another eight organizations sign onto our open letter including the International Indigenous Youth Council and the San Francisco Youth Council for Education Policy! The active COVID-19 threat puts…
Schools across the country have closed and millions of students now face unprecedented challenges. For some students, this is a period of stress and dealing with new mental health issues and the effects of ageism. For many, it is a period of adjustment to a new learning process and lifestyle. And for some youth rights…
Every year thousands of young people are sent against their will to facilities designed to control their behavior. This network of private residential programs is known collectively as the “Troubled Teen” Industry and are marketed to parents who feel like they need to change their child’s behavior. These services claim to fix anything the parent…
NYRA has just secured yet another voting age endorsement from the High School Democrats of America! HSDA is the fourth Democratic Party branch to endorse lowering the voting age to 16, following the Fairfax County and Westmoreland County Democrats in Virginia, also the work of NYRA, and the College Democrats of Massachusetts. HSDA is the…
Last week NYRA published our comprehensive section on Medical and Behavioral Treatment rights. It’s the fifth issue section on our website and the second since we unveiled our new site a year ago. Young people are denied the right to bodily integrity, so NYRA believes that medical consent is equally important to other youth rights…
