Checklist for organizing your district, building, or worksite

District-Level Structure 

Take good care of yourself, your kids, and your co-workers

• Breathe, stay hydrated, eat regular meals, and take care of your physical/mental health
• While the need for action is urgent, the conditions that created this crisis are not going away anytime soon and we will continue to need each other for a while. Think marathon, not sprint.

Identify an organization that has been working on immigration issues and reach out 

• Find out what they are already doing and plug in!
• Discuss opportunities for:
  • Us to plug into actions/plans that they are already leading and recruit our co-workers and families to join 
  • School-based collaborations (before/after school patrols, “sidewalk solidarity” actions like CTU’s listed below, etc.
  • Mutual aid→ providing food and other resources for families in crisis right now 

Identify a district-level captain of building captains 

• Help coordinate information coming from/going to building level captains and moderate the text thread

Recruit building captains 

• If you are a local that has an organizing structure, activate that structure. Focus energy on buildings with greatest need for two-way communication or action.
• If you are in a local that does not have well-developed structures, use this as an opportunity to recruit some new potential building leaders (or at least to identify new contacts in buildings that are cold)
  • Use a variety of communications to recruit people to an in-person meeting or zoom call 
    • Decision-point: Are you opening up this space to all school workers, or just members? An all school workers approach allows us to spread, connect with new people, and ideally recruit new members and leaders. A members-only approach allows for the potential for more data security and predictable discipline.

Hold a district-level in-person or zoom meeting 

• Orient people
  • Create space for people to talk about what they’re seeing and feeling
  • Share “just the facts” and ask others to share any factual information they have to develop a shared understanding
• Name, or develop together, a plan for what kinds of activities you want people to get involved in:
  • What do we want to accomplish? How will we know if we have done it?
  • Are there decision-makers who can make something happen that we can’t, i.e. new school board policy? If so, how can we appeal to them or apply pressure?
  • Are there efforts that we can accomplish on our own i.e., food collection and distribution to families?
  • What steps can participants take, immediately or the next time they are in their buildings? 
• Discussion, questions, time to refine plan
• Create two district-wide Signal threads 
  • Building Captain thread→ should be moderated with discipline 
    • For sharing daily updates, direction/guidance, requests for information 
    • Reports back from buildings with respect to questions asked or sharing best/worst practices 
  • Questions and discussion thread→ can be less moderated 
    •  For questions, resource sharing, and less targeted/actionable information 
• Make public commitments 
  • Create a google form or some other kind of mechanism where people can sign up to play a role during a period of time 
  • Close the meetings with people sharing what they intend to do next to move forward the plan that we created together

Follow up with building captains

• Use text threads to have: 
  • Daily check-ins and two-way opportunities for learning and accountability 
    • Captain of building captains thread should be very active
      • Offering daily guidance on things that people can do 
      • Asking for reports on conditions and/or relative success of efforts
• Hold periodic meetings in person, or on zoom
  • For Building Captains→ training, debriefing, learning together
  • Mass meeting→ way to draw in new and excited people 

Print your own Red Cards

• Or get a similar resource from a local partner organization and make them available for building-level leaders 

Building Captains Structure

• One-pager for Charlotte-Meck building captains
• The tasks are similar to those above, just at the scale of a single building 
  • Communicate with your co-workers that you are going to help lead coordination of building-level activity through: 
    • Existing relationships and communication structures i.e. call/send texts to all of your co-workers that you think would be interested and visit people before/after school or during any planning or unstructured time in your day
    • School-level communication structures (use discretion here based on the conditions in your building/district–we should avoid using school emails for “political” work, but as this effort is built to support our students, there are ways to frame our efforts that could be sent over school listserve, for example)
    • Building-level meetings for co-workers to gather before/after school and discuss our efforts
  • Build your “connections” list 
    • Recruit co-workers to join the text thread that you create through any of the means above
  • Utilize text thread to encourage co-workers to share information and take action 
    • Daily or weekly “assignments” or tasks that they can take up

Examples of Building-Level Actions

• Take a patrol shift with community organization before or after school
• Set up a building-level “Sidewalk Solidarity” action to support students before or after school 
• Organize building-level Red 4 Ed and hold signs that share messages of love/support for our students or resistance to federal forces invading our spaces
• Distribute “red cards” to families and make sure that they are informed of their rights
• Organize delivery of food/resources/etc. If students are absent for extended periods due to threats

Resources for action 

• “Sidewalk Solidarity” actions from our friends at the Chicago Teachers Union→ members gather before/after school to welcome students and/or conduct security checks around schools in connection with broader networks 
• Red 4 Ed “How To”