School Staff Against Sexual Violence centers its praxis for disrupting systems of oppression in the K-12 context around teacher agency, self-possesion, and expertise. We see that the structural sexism baked into our profession from the beginning has placed teachers into highly paternalistic systems which demean their knowledge, exclude them from the leadership of their own profession, and prevent them from engaging in a critical discourse with the status quo.

We leverage teacher/counselor tenure, and understand that school principals and other leaders have lost this job security, and are tethered to the convoluted, piecemeal, and highly political systems of K-12 governance which are poorly understood by the general public, lacking in oversight, and run by people who have little to no experience with, or knowledge of education. The result of which is widespread institutional indifference, arrogance, and apathy from our leaders.

We seek to explain this world to outsiders, and warn the nation that our leaders are exceptionally adept at the art of making superficial and inauthentic implementation efforts look very convincing on paper.

As insiders, we clearly see the nuanced ways the K-12 complex subverts their responsibilities, and know that outsiders are unaware of much of our esoteric and counter-intuitive world—making it imperative that teachers be a part of the leadership of this work.

We also see the reasoning behind this subversion of the law is connected to the fact that K-12 Leadership is riddled with conflict of interest. They are under tremendous pressure to paint a rosey picture of the status quo, because property values are tied to our school ratings. Implementing Title IX polices and regulations would mean that our leaders would finally have to confront the reality that our schools are saturated with sexual abuse. No one in our leadership stays in their position long enough to be called to account for their mistakes, so the entire K-12 world is involved in the hoop jumping, stagnation of ticking bo

Additonally, only people who’ve worked on the ground floor of schools, and who’ve attempted to interface with our broken and absent systems, know the nuanced ways that K-12 educational leaders spin narratives which allow them to get around implementation. It’s all extremely esoteric, steeped in “edu-speak” and more bizzare and pervasive than outsiders could possibly imagine.