WS Chronicle

Lit City Freedom School, in partnership with Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools Program, and in solidarity with Winston-Salem Freedom Schools, is participating in the National Day of Social Action (NDSA) Project to “uplift the good in public education and encourage further investment at the county, city, state and national levels.” 

The initiative encourages local and state entities to evaluate the positive economic and social impacts of investments made in education and to listen, respond, and act on students’ wishes for programming desires to help prepare them for successful passage into adulthood.  

Sixth-12th grade scholars and community members from the Lit City Freedom School will host a press conference at United Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, 450 Metropolitan Dr., calling for maintaining and increasing public education investment levels, dismantling anti-Black disciplinary practices in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System, developing culturally affirming curricula that teaches the true nature of the U.S. empire and our history as Black/African people, and calls the Black village to organize toward self-determination and community control of our educational experience. 

The tragic – yet perhaps opportune – irony of Children’s Defense Fund’s national call to action around “education as a public good,” comes at a time locally when an already unjust local educational system is hemorrhaging funds, as a result of the mismanagement of over $42 million dollars. The budget cuts that are already in motion will exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Classroom sizes will increase, programs are being cut, WSFCS employees are being laid off. 

This is unacceptable and the negative reverberations will be felt primarily by Black and brown students. Calls for the county to cover this deficit have to date gone unheard. As programs that nurture and develop the minds of students are being cut, student resource officers – whose presence is criminalizing – have received a larger contract for the 2025-26 school year. To riff off Martin Luther King Jr. who maintained that “budgets are moral documents,” we believe that budgets are “power documents.” They demonstrate who has the power to exert their will in harmful ways, and who must suffer the consequences. 

At Lit City Freedom School, one of our most important focuses is reading and literacy. We – along with our sites in Winston-Salem – are committed to disrupting the summer learning gap. As we approach the final leg of our Freedom School, we have already been given quantifiable proof of our scholars’ reading levels increasing. We celebrate that and offer it as proof of the power of culturally affirming curriculum. However, for us, literacy is not just about being able to read and understand sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. It’s about a deep education that builds the power within students to “read themselves AND the world around them,” with the aim of transforming it.  

In other words, we engage with a culturally affirming curriculum that is coupled with a healing justice-centered pedagogy. Honoring the lived experiences and power of our scholars, we have facilitated discussions that served to generate a scholar-created “theme” and list of demands. As a localized subtheme to CDF’s “Education is a Public Good,” Lit City Freedom School scholars raise the question: “Where is the bag?” – referring to the funds and resources needed for a rich education. This precious, priceless, and powerful group of 70 Black 7th-12th grade scholars has put together the following demands in their vernacular: 

Demand 1: JUST GIVE ME MY MONEY! 

We demand that county officials create a plan that shifts funds to cover the gap in funding. 

Demand 2: BE CLEAR! 

We demand accountability and transparency from current and past leadership who mismanaged $42 million of our dollars. 

Demand 3: WE WANNA SEE OURSELVES & LEARN OUR HISTORY! 

We demand a “Black-out” of the curriculum that teaches our true history. We want to see ourselves and our hopes reflected in what we learn in school. 

Demand 4: FREE BLACK AND BROWN YOUTH ‘TIL IT’S BACKWARDS! 

We demand that schools stop “tutoring” us for prison with anti-Black disciplinary practices. We demand an end to the racist practice of punishing and suspending Black students at higher rates than our white peers for the same behaviors. We want mentors, mental health support, and conflict resolution circles, not suspensions and more SROs. We want schools that protect brown youth from ICE while in school. 

Finally, we, the scholars and staff, call on the Black village, grassroots organizations, institutions of faith, and non-Black folks who have our backs to show up for our press conference as we raise our voices, tell our stories, and fight for freedom. 

Lit City Freedom School is part of a powerful tradition of community-driven education designed to empower marginalized youth.