#StuVoiceStories – Expanding the Chicago Student Union
Israel Munoz was born on the south side of Chicago to immigrant parents from Mexico. He has attended Chicago Public Schools his entire life and is a co-founder of the Chicago Student’s Union. Currently, Israel is a student at Fordham University in New York City, majoring in International Politics and Economics.
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It is the early morning of September 4th, 2012: the first day of my senior year at Kelly High School on Chicago’s south side. Pushing aside the heavy and windowless steel doors, I enter my school and I am greeted by security guards yelling “all metal off!!!” The sounds of clinging metal fill the room. I follow order and remove my belt and place my clear plastic backpack onto a conveyor belt which leads to an x-ray machine. I then walk through a metal detector; there are no beeps so I walk into a musty, overheated and overcrowded broken-down auditorium and wait about fifteen minutes until security allows students to enter the hallways: a typical morning at Kelly High School. Thank goodness this was my final year.
However, when I entered school that day, things were different. Some teachers were telling students that a strike was imminent. I took it as hype at first, thinking that the days of workers strikes were long gone, imprinted only as text on the worn out pages of our American History books. But on the Monday of the next week, I saw what very few students have ever seen before: a mass mobilization of teachers – a sea of red shirts and chants surrounding every public school in the city. The unimaginable had happened and I, like thousands of students across the city, joined and supported our teachers on the picket lines in front of schools and throughout the streets of downtown. After all, we the students attend those schools every day and must hold it in our responsibility to fight for a higher quality education.
But during the aftermath of the strike, once things had calmed down and the typical “Kelly routine” took hold again, I had more time to reflect on my experience of the teachers strike that shook the nation. I noticed that countless students were on the front lines in full support of our teachers during the strike, but whenever the strike was mentioned on the news or even in conversations it was always about the teachers and never the students. Not that I wasn’t in full support of my teachers – their courageous stand for justice would change my life forever – but for me the strike was much different. For me, this strike was as much about the students as it
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