At 5 in the morning, when the moon was still out, we began our trip to Albany. After driving to One Metrotech and walking around in the freezing cold, we were finally able to board the bus. We were some of the first people on the bus, and we watched as people with a wide range personalities filed through to their seats. It was still pitch black outside so no one felt like talking. Anna and I reviewed notes and wrote blog posts, across from us Aditya was fast asleep on his armrest and Oliver was on his phone. We spent most of the four hour bus ride exactly like this. I remember one lady on the bus for one of two things, one, she seemed to have an entire kitchen in her purse, donuts, apples, coffee, you name it, and two, she was passing out scholarships. I don’t mean literally passing out scholarships to the few kids on the bus, I mean she was talking to us about an organization, it was unclear what her relationship to it was, that gave out scholarships to kids in need. After a grueling ride and some well appreciate food, we arrived in Albany. We rushed off the bus and were ushered into a huge conference room. It had a podium in the front with a woman talking about what we were there to accomplish that day, we came in late so we arrived towards the end of her speech. The second speech was from a student, a teenage girl who was telling her story about being in public school. The last speech was a man from AQENY. After the speeches we all stumbled out of the conference room. Green balloons started spreading across the small hall, they read “stand up for kids.” We followed the crowd to security, a sea of green. While we were in a security line, although it was more like a security mob, the crowd chanted chants from the packet we were given. Our personal favorites were:
“Money for jobs and education, not for banks and corporations.”
“Education is a right, fight, fight, fight.”
“Get that money or shut it down. Say wha?”
“The people, united, will never be defeated.”
“Hey Cuomo, whaddya say? How many schools have you failed today?”
“Education is for the masses, not just the upper classes.”
“Hedge funders are rich and rude, we don’t like their attitude.”
“Help our students, help our schools, fund our dreams, give us the tools”
After what felt like another hour in the security line we were in the main building. We had heard we were supposed to go up to the war room, which took us a few minutes to find. When we did find it, a circle of people from AQENY were spread across the war room, which was a beautiful historical looking room. It was amazing when you looked up to see this fancy caved ceiling that was covered in green balloons. There was a young boy passionately yelling in Spanish and waving an AQENY similar to the ones used at City Hall. After the crowd dispersed to go to their lobby visits, we sat in the war room for a bit figuring out what to do. Eventually we saw that a woman was handing out envelopes to groups of AQENY people and directing them to certain floors where the legislators worked. We walked up to her and asked us what we could do. She told us to bring these buttons that stated how much money the schools in a district were owed, and hand them out to the corresponding legislator asking if they would wear them at the State of State the next day. We headed off to the legislative offices, retracing all of our steps until security and turning left. In the lobby of the offices they were setting up a State of State news booth. When we reached the office floor, it felt like a doctors office and had that particular doctor smell. We each took 2 envelopes and found the corresponding office. We didn’t talk to the legislators themselves, sometimes they were in actual lobby visits with people from our group, we handed them to their assistants and told them what it was about. We also gave them an informational packet. After we handed out all of the pins, we took a small break in the lunch room. Then we found our contact person, Maria, who told us that we could sit in on a lobby visit at 2 with assemblywoman Cathy Nolan, who represented Long Island City in Queens. We met up with the people who had arranged the visit and waited for two o’clock in the seating area. We noticed that Cathy Nolan was actually the Chair of the Assembly Standing Committee on Education. Her office was larger than the others, and had a very official archway that read her education title. Nolan had actually spoken at the City Hall protest the weekend before. We heard that Mrs.Nolan would not be able to make the meeting, so people began to tell their stories to her assistant who took notes vigorously. One woman had headphones in and her translator, who had a headset and leaned against the back wall, spoke Spanish quietly into the microphone. They all had stories of how their schools had fallen apart due to lack of funding. In the middle of one story, Mrs.Nolan walked through the conference room door. After taking time to introduce who she was talking to, she sat down at the table and told everyone to tell her their stories again. She took a considerable amount of time to talk about how amazing Aviation High (a school in her district where one girl in the group attended, and apparently so did Nolan’s infamous son, Nicholas) was. Aviation is a school that appears to teach about, well, aviation, on top of other main core. Then, instead of responding to the stories told to her, she took us on a tour of her office. She talked about how lovely it was to have such a nice office, showed us awards she had received and pictures drawn by children in her district, and of course more pictures of her son. She dodged most questions asked to her, and by the end we had accomplished nothing except telling her a story she didn’t listen to. Once she had completed her office tour, she sent us all away with a picture and a quick sentence about how great it was that kids were getting involved in educational issues. I can’t imagine what the other lobbying groups went through if that was our meeting with the chair of education. We boarded the bus hurriedly, with Anna leaving her phone inside the building and realizing it as we were about to leave, running back into the building. We almost left when they came back in the middle of me trying to hold my dad’s seat from two people who were arguing over who sat there. We left at around 3:30, not arriving back home until somewhere around 8:50. What I’ve learned from Albany is that sometimes, people avoid big issues because they don’t like to admit what they’re doing wrong, which does more bad than good.
