Teens Against Eric Adams

As they rounded the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway a little after 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the 10th graders from Leaders High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn, appeared as a  solid mass. 

"Hey hey, ho ho, these budget cuts have got to go," the dozens of students chanted as they arrived at Tweed Courthouse, where the City's Department of Education is based. Holding signs reading "Stop Cutting Student Futures" and "Protect the Families in This City," they and some of their teachers were there to protest years of inadequate funding for public schools, in conjunction with the group People's Plan NYC, which has been protesting Adams's austerity measures since his first term. 

For many, it was their first rally. At times, they cracked jokes and screamed at the top of their lungs. "We're in the front, bro," said one teenaged boy to another, as they grinned and mugged at the base of the stairs. 

As the rally was about to start, an NYPD officer came over and told organizers that they'd have to put away their bullhorn. "That's fine," one of their teachers said. "We'll just have to shout really loud."

To be a teenager in New York City right now, especially an immigrant teen, is to face a series of threats—a federal government that is trying to foreclose their futures through diminished education funding, attacks on trans young people, climate arson, and a mayor that isn't only capitulating to the Trump administration, but engaging in his own form of diminishment. Adams claims he isn't cutting this year's education budget, which is only true because he's already lowered its funding baseline in previous years of his administration. 

But the teens on Tuesday morning were not morose, or angry—they were fed up, to be sure, but they were there with receipts about what Adams has done to them. They listed a series of demands—$100 million to protect immigrant New Yorkers, $61 million for mental health services, and finally funding arts programs in all public high schools.