Tahyira Savanna is a first generation American student. Her family is from the twin islands of Trinidad & Tobago. She holds a Masters in Public Administration. She became an after school dance teacher in Los Angeles’s unified school district in 2017 after moving from New York City. She worked with high school students facing possible deportation under former President Trump’s DACA rules. The dreamer community included the children of parents being detained at the southern border. In 2018, she launched a non profit organization For Us Nation in California with a fellow activist when the duo hit red tape while attempting to throw a Juneteenth kickback at a park. For Us Nation strives to bridge a culture gap between education and mental health. They recently launched their #DOWEMATTER campaign fundraiser to support a program for 5,000 American students across the fifty states in specific regions where the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag had to be implored to bring public awareness to violence by the hands of the government. Tahyira is also an artist, under the moniker ‘Tee Slaves’ whose music touches on the realities of the current generation. Her latest single ‘Rags Up’ is out now.
Dear Children of the Future,
You’re going to be okay kiddo. In reality, there’s never been a more exciting time to be alive. Unfortunately, it’s extremely hard to make the World seem that way. I’m 37. I’ve been alive since 1987. In the 1st grade, I had a computer class. It was a Macintosh. My job was to take the floppy disk holder to the teacher’s desk. It might seem foreign but my generation is the first one to experience the use of internet connectivity. By middle school I used MS-DOS to help me do my vocabulary definitions. We are the technology generation. By high school I was burning bootleg cds in my hard drive for my family and friends. They used to call it, America Online. So much has changed since I left college in 2010 with a Facebook account. Mainly, a Black looking President was sitting in the White House. It set in motion a change of events. This brings me to your daily student life. Malala Yusafrai is my leader. As a young girl of 11, the Pakistani student wrote an anonymous diary about what life was like under the rule of an extreme group called the Taliban in north-west Pakistan. In the diary, she talked about how she wanted to stay in education and about how girls should be able to go to school. The Taliban wanted to ban girls’ education. Lots of people read the diary all over the world and she became well-known for fighting for her right to an education. (BBC World News U.K.)
I would of never imagined in my 37 years that I would have to be a voice for education in the United States where we rank around 20th. If Donald Trump wins the American election on November 5th, the first thing to go is going to be the US Department of Education. I won’t be a teacher because that job would be canceled. In the 1950s, other people like me who were activists worked tirelessly to gain access to free and fair education in Brown vs Board of Education, the government said that separate but equal is illegal when it comes to education. Our current atmosphere sounds more like Malala’s reality in Pakistan. So, that means, we need you to be loud about your needs as a young mind. We need the future leaders to fight for their own leadership. We need the history that so many have fought and died for (Martin Luther King Jr’s dream could be fulfilled in Washington in January 2025 when Kamala Harris gets sworn in by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson) to be preserved. It was all for you. Now, they want to take away all those years of equity work. I won’t give up without a fight. And we show up as teachers to not just pay our bills, but to mainly pay our dues in society. Someone’s gotta open the school house doors. I love being an educator. I love helping people explore new pathways for thinking. I’ve lived long enough to understand that KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. Continue to share your light with us all. Continue to focus on the tricky stuff. Continue to create art the way you see fit. We’re all counting on you to be great. The future is YOU. Thanks for the memories friends.
-Miss Tee
