Seaver Chen describes race-based bullying and need for restorative justice
Seaver Chen, a senior at Curtis High School and ASAP youth advocate, says being targeted by racist jokes in middle school was brushed off by faculty. He argues schools need restorative justice and culturally responsive adults so students feel safe and can become effective communicators.
Good afternoon.
First, I want to thank Chair Dinowitz and the rest of this council for allowing this conversation.
My name is Steve R.
Chen, and I am a senior at Curtis High School.
I'm also a youth advocate with the Asian American Student Advocacy Project, ASAP, which is CACF's youth leadership program.
To me, being academically prepared goes beyond knowing the answers to pop quizzes.
It means to be able to go to school knowing you will be given the tools to learn to your fullest ability.
It also means to go to school knowing you have an environment where you feel safe physically and mentally.
A student's learning environment is important as it shapes social and communication skills as well.
But in order to become an effective communicator, students need a space where they are able to express themselves freely without any sense of judgment.
And as of today, this is just not the case in a lot of our schools, therefore making it more challenging to become academically prepared and an effective communicator.
On a personal note, I experienced this feeling in middle school.
As an Asian student in a predominantly white school, I was the target of many discriminatory jokes, met left and right with comments about my eyes and my expected grades in math.
It felt like a hopeless and lonely situation, and part of the humiliation was due to not having an environment in my school where I could talk about these issues along with my feelings.
This was especially apparent when I brought up being the target of a racist joke to school faculty.
They simply brushed it off, gave me some tissues for my teary eyes, and assured me I would be fine since the student who called me that would be moving anyways.
A few weeks later, he moved away.
And we had a generic assembly slogan, stop bullying.
I wasn't seen, my feelings felt invalidated, and my true needs weren't met.
What happened to me has been lived by countless students, especially from the Asian American community across generations.
When students feel that they don't have anywhere or anyone to turn to in their learning environment, they continue not to speak up about it.
In my situation, I left the office thinking, what good did speaking up do?
And this further causes race-based bullying and harassment to persist in schools.
In order to combat this, we need to invest in giving students a space where they know that incidents such as these will be responded to with empathy, communication, and accountability.
Restorative justice programs implemented in schools provide students the space that they're looking for, along with the culturally responsive adult that they can feel free to talk to.
A simple conversation focused on my feelings and the impact those words had on me with the other student would have meant infinitely more to me than a broadly centered assembly.
We need to ensure that more schools continue to embed restorative justice programs into their school culture in order to create a space where students can arrive every day academically prepared and ready to learn to effectively communicate.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I do want to highlight that in the administration proposed a budget that actually
Hutt were sort of justice programs, and it was this council that got, there was a sort of justice programs funding restored, along with, you know, the mental health continuum.
And I appreciate you talking about the bullying and race-based bullying, because it's something that we don't have good reporting on, something we have brought up with the DOE and work that continues to need to be done.
But I appreciate you bringing that up.
Thank you.
Thank you.