The idea isn’t that any one parent group or school would do all of these activities, rather think of this as a menu of options to meet parents and educators where they are at and letting them choose what they think would excite and move their school communities to action.
Friday Night Lights
- Parents organize around football teams(and other sports) to support COVID safe protocols for the purpose of playing the full season. This could include vaccine clinics outside of games, school systems requiring players to be vaccinated. Notably, 75-80% of students participate in at least one extracurricular activity.
Walking School Bus
- Parents work with the district and school staff to organize students to walk to school using the walking school bus model. This could be a one time event for fun and link to a #RedForEd walk-in, drawing attention to COVID safety or academic freedom, or it could be an ongoing, district sanctioned way to get students to school with the support of staff working to alleviate bus driver shortages and promote health and wellness.
Eat Outside / Learn Outside
- As the Delta variant disrupts in person learning, parents can mitigate that disruption by working with schools and districts to promote effective COVID protocols like eating outside and learning in outdoor classrooms. This could start as simple a service project to build picnic tables for individual schools and work up to organizing school districts to pass outdoor eating policies and/or vaccine requirements for students participating in extracurricular activities.
Freedom Friyays / Teach Truth
- Parents and students could join in with the social media selfie #FreedomFriyay campaign as a way of showing visible solidarity with educators committed to anti-racism and social justice overall. When the inevitable attacks come on educators teaching the truth, these parents should be quickly mobilized to defend teachers as truth tellers both online and in person in public spaces like school board meetings.
- We need support educators working every day to #TeachTruth. Take a selfie that shows one TRUE thing you learned at school that shouldn’t be illegal to teach our kids.