Thank you to all of our Ethnic Studies Now Coalition members who responded to our text message to call the LAPD Chief's office to demand Dr. Melina Abdullah's immediate release. Dr. Abdullah, a key leader of the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition is also a leader in the Black Lives Matter LA movement. She was a part of the OccupyLAPD encampment at LAPD headquarters across from LA City Hall in Downtown Los Angeles. Today the LAPD decided to clear out the encampment and Dr. Abdullah and Sha Dixon were arrested while trying to simply deliver a letter to the LAPD. We sent a text blast to our network and many of you responded that you had called Chief Beck's office --Thank you! Black Lives Matter - LA confirmed via a tweet today at 4:30PM that both Dr. Abdullah and Sha Dixon have been released. BLACK LIVES MATTER! BROWN LIVES MATTER!

UPDATE: Both @ShaDixon & @DocMellyMel have been released. Stay tuned for next steps folks. This isn't going to stop us! #BlackLivesMatter

— #BlackLivesMatter-LA (@BLMLA) January 6, 2015

In case you missed it, you can watch the video of the historic December 9, 2014 SFUSD Board Meeting in which Ethnic Studies was institutionalized!

Ethnic Studies as a Requirement

By Tatei Torres Thomas. Image credit: Revo Grafia

Hamilton High School is located in West Los Angeles just on the edge of Los Angeles and Culver City. The demographic of the school is mostly Latino and African-American students with a small population of White, Asian, Middle Eastern and other ethnic groups. Hamilton High School sits on South Robertson in a neighborhood of mixed family incomes: from middle class families living in apartments and houses to wealthy families living in larger houses or multiple story houses to poorer families renting houses or apartments. Hamilton High School is made up of six academies: Math and Medical Science, Business and Technology, Communication Arts, Global Studies, Music, and Humanities. The Humanities Magnet is well known for producing elite students with high test scores and grade point averages, who get in elite schools. But as a junior in the Humanities magnet I now realize the Humanities magnet is not all it's cut out to be.

We congratulate the San Francisco Ethnic Studies Collective and all those who organized for the victory to institutionalize Ethnic Studies in SFUSD! Check out this very cool crowd-sourced video.

Below is a victory photo (via Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales) from the day the SFUSD resolution passed unanimously:

The Ethnic Studies Now Coalition congratulates the San Francisco Ethnic Studies Collective and all those who fought hard in the successful campaign to make Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement in SFUSD!  Tonight the SFUSD Board of Education voted unanimously to make the change!

Great to see so many familiar face tonight at the fundraiser for Bennett Kayser organized by Ethnic Studies Now Coalition!  Many teachers, professors and public education advocates made this event a success.