Activist Elisabeth Ortega, a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Photo courtesy of Elisabeth Ortega.

The Unlikely Activist : A High School Drop Out Fights for Students’ Rights
By ELIZABETH MENDEZ BERRY

Elisabeth Ortega remembers being bored in primary school because she had already finished her work—so she’d stand up and walk around the class. Her teachers were not impressed. They considered her disruptive.

“She was a bright kid. She always talked real fast, and asked a lot of questions,” said Ortega’s mother, Lisa Ortega. “They told me that she was hyper, and that she needed to be medicated.” Her mother disagreed with that assessment and did not put her daughter on drugs, but that was the beginning of Ortega’s unfortunate history in New York City public schools.

It culminated in her dropping out of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx last year. But instead of abandoning an educational system that she felt had abandoned her, Ortega, 18, became an educational activist. She had also earned her GED and just started studying liberal arts at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Ortega, who still talks as if her vocal chords are sprinting to keep up with her brain, volunteers with two groups that fight for students’ rights. One, Sistas and Brothas United, was a source of support and stability during her own high school troubles.

Sistas and Brothas was a founding member of the other organization, Urban Youth Collaborative, a city-wide group aimed at injecting youth voices into the debate on how to improve public schools. Interested members from Sistas and Brothas cycle in and out of the collaborative, and Ortega tries to be part of it as often as possible.

To Ortega, the very fact that she didn’t graduate from high school is the reason that she should be organizing students.

“Most of the students on student government have high averages. A lot of times the students who participate in that kind of thing are nominated by the administration. The system is working for them,” she said. “What about the people who are struggling? If anything, their voices need to be heard more.”

The energy that her grade school teachers didn’t appreciate is still there, and Ortega uses it productively, to energize meetings, and to encourage quiet youth to speak up like she does.

Ortega is from a family with a history of raising its voice. Her mother was a lead organizer for Mothers on the Move, a Bronx parents’ group that fights for better schools. Her older sister helped found Sistas on the Rise, a Bronx organization for young women, particularly teen mothers.

Lisa Ortega remembers taking her daughter to Mothers on the Move meetings when she was a child. “She would fall asleep, but I guess some of it sank in,” said Lisa. “She was really clear on the haves and have nots. At protests, my daughter was no joke. She just lit up.” Lisa Ortega gave Elisabeth the silver Che Guevara necklace she wears proudly.

Elisabeth Ortega’s own activism was awakened while she was in high school. DeWitt Clinton is an overcrowded, 4,500-student school with a clear class system: its elite Macy program provides college preparation for 1,200 advanced, college-bound students. But the 75 percent of students who aren’t part of that program—like Ortega—often feel left behind.

Ortega remembered her first day at Clinton was tough. The school was so big that she couldn’t find her classroom. As a freshman, she was mistakenly placed in “Math A,” for students who had done badly on their eighth-grade math tests, though she had done well. When she told her guidance counselor, he told her to stick it out. She did and was bored for the year.

Over her years at Clinton, Ortega says that she had little good instruction. She remembered a gym teacher who insinuated she was fat. There was a biology teacher who was also the dean of discipline, who was very strict. “She yelled at a girl because she didn’t file her papers right,” said Ortega.

Ortega never made a conscious decision to leave school. But in her final two years, when her school day was supposed to begin at 9:45 a.m. and end at 4:20 p.m., she began cutting class, ending her day at 3:40 instead—and then progressively earlier.

“I was unmotivated,” she said. “I just got tired of going.”

In the last six months of her final year, Ortega attended just one class: music, where she played the saxophone. She stopped going after the final concert in May 2006.

“I was miserable in school,” she said. “I failed a lot of classes. My teachers were boring and it was like they didn’t care, so I felt like, ‘Why should I?’”

While her mother, who has a ninth-grade education, had hoped that Elisabeth would go further, she couldn’t force her daughter to go to school.

“I was angry that the cycle was continuing,” said Lisa Ortega. “But parents can’t always figure it out for their children.”

But while Elisabeth Ortega wasn’t doing well in school, she did discover something she excelled in: activism. In January 2005, she got involved in Sistas and Brothas United, a youth organization located close to DeWitt Clinton High School in the northwest Bronx.

A friend was going to a meeting there after school one afternoon and Ortega tagged along. She was immediately impressed that the group was led by youths. After school, the group’s office is crammed with young people.

“When Elisabeth started she was really eager,” said Mustafa Sullivan, an organizer with Sistas and Brothas United. “She didn’t want the spotlight, but she wanted to look into all of the issues.”

Ortega kept participating, and eventually spent more time at the organization’s Kingsbridge offices than in school. During the time that she has been there, Sistas and Brothas United has conducted several campaigns. They are currently fundraising to build an “Art and Tech” center that would provide art and film classes for youth in their northwest Bronx neighborhood.

They had a campaign to give new teachers tours of the Kingsbridge neighborhood so that young people could forge stronger relationships with their instructors, and teachers could get to know the communities in which they were working. Ortega conducted several. SBU also opened its own small school, the Leadership Institute, on Fulton Avenue. Ortega has trained students there in activism.

In addition to such community work, Sistas and Brothas United also provides academic support for its members. The tutors and the academic advisor tried to keep Ortega in school.

“Elisabeth struggled with a lot of issues,” said Ginette Sosa, her academic advisor. “Once she was in the class, she could do the work. I talked with her about making the commitment to herself to finish school.”

Sosa met with teachers and guidance counselors at Clinton to see if there was a way for Ortega to graduate, but there wasn’t. Besides, Ortega was hoping for a fresh start. Meanwhile, Ortega’s mother was trying another approach.

“I was like, ‘Oh well, you might as well work at Dunkin’ Donuts,’” said Lisa Ortega. “She was like, ‘Hell no!’”

With Sosa’s help, Ortega decided on the CUNY College Prep GED program, and after completing it last December, she went on to Borough of Manhattan Community College.

At the same time as she was dealing with her own high school issues, Ortega was contemplating the big picture as a member of Urban Youth Collaborative, a collective of several New York City youth organizations—including Sistas and Brothas United—that aims to become a city student union.

As a member of Urban Youth Collaborative, Ortega has been part of several campaigns to improve New York City schools. She visited Philadelphia, where she met with a citywide student union, and visited its Student Success Centers, which provide counseling, health resources, and college information in one location. The Urban Youth Collaborative has proposed creating similar centers in New York schools.

Last fall, the Urban Youth Collaborative presented its students’ bill of rights at a conference attended by 400 including Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee of the New York City Council, who offered to introduce the bill of rights as a city council resolution. Jackson’s staffers are currently working with UYC members.

Last May, members of the collaborative, including Ortega, met with Chancellor Joel Klein about school safety. The group presented him with almost 4,000 postcards from students around the city who were unhappy with the increased number of police, scanners, safety agents and metal detectors in schools.

Klein defended the increased surveillance. Over and over, he noted the number of weapons confiscated as a result of the interventions. “You have to look at the data,” he insisted.

A frustrated Ortega responded, “But we are the data!”

For Ortega, being part of Urban Youth Collaborative has meant analyzing her own educational experience. Ortega says that having better relationships with teachers would have changed things for her. Of the 28 or so teachers she had at Clinton, only four impressed her as being invested in their work. She also stresses the need for college preparation—college dreams—for average students.

These days, Ortega the college student is at Sistas and Brothas United’s offices on 196th Street every afternoon, after she finishes class. She is now the co-president of the group.

“Elisabeth is an all-around leader,” said Hector Gerardo, a youth organizer with Sistas and Brothas United. “She’s hard working, and she’s very loyal.”

“She’s been on every single campaign, and now she’s looking at how she can mentor and train other people,” said Sullivan, an SBU organizer.

To Ortega, the work she is doing with both organizations is crucial.

“Urban Youth Collaborative is giving youth a voice,” said Ortega. “It forces us to set the agenda, to do the right thing, which is fixing our schools.” She hopes to graduate from college and get a full-time job with the group.

“My brother’s in the seventh grade,” she said. “I want to have an impact so that when he gets to high school, something will be better.”