When I was in middle school, there was one year where we had multiple furlough days because of teacher strikes; it seemed like we had a three-day weekend every week. I wasn’t surprised by any of this. Despite San Francisco being such a wealthy city, the lack of funding in my majority-POC school was obvious to me the second I began attending it.

I grew up in a family of educators and have always been taught to value my teachers. Good educators not only encourage students to expand their minds, they also stand at the frontline of the fight against economic and racial segregation and provide an essential safe space for the children they serve.

Courses that were meant to hold at most 25 students, were nearly doubled and teachers were placed in a difficult predicament that hindered them from devoting their full time or support to individual students. It became clear that they lacked the resources to sustain and support both students and faculty.

While trying to focus full time on my studies, I have had to have a job throughout all of my university years—sometimes multiple jobs at a time. After leaving the dorms, I have had to pay my own rent, utilities, and groceries by myself without other financial support. Just the cost of living near school is difficult; imagine having to pay high tuition bills on top on that.

Education is more than just sitting in a classroom and memorizing everything the teacher writes on the board. With strong education, our children will be able to continue strengthening their critical thinking, a skill that is applicable to all areas of the world, and develop other important skills that limited education access cannot properly fulfill.

One of the first times I was able to truly identify inequity in education was in my transition from a private middle school to an Oakland public high school. While I graduated eighth grade with only 40 other students, my incoming class at Oakland Technical High School was 800. My first day of freshman year, some of my classes were so overenrolled that there weren’t enough desks for students to sit at and several students were reduced to sitting on the counters lining the classroom.

Our defining years are spent in a classroom, and the inequalities that exist in that space reflect the socio-economic, racial, gender, and other inequalities of the world outside that room. In turn, this deepens their grip on society and societal structures, as those with less privilege get left behind in overcrowded, underfunded classrooms.

We need an education system that will enable each student to reach individual success, while working in harmony for the common good. Education has empowered me to be critical, aware, and eager. My education has encouraged me to be altruistic by igniting my passion for social justice. Education empowered me so that I can work to empower others.

I came from Washington state, which has one of the best public education systems in the country. However, as I am now going through an education program in California and I am distressed and disappointed at the low-quality, often highly racially and economically disparate school system that the "most liberal" state in the country has to offer its youth.

Despite going to private school, I was always very aware of the public school system and the challenges many students and teachers face. Due to the lack of funding, classes are often packed with students, students and staff do not feel supported, and teachers lack the resources they need to give their students the best schooling experience.

I was always told by the people I looked up to that college is always worth the costs. But now I question this on a daily basis of whether it was right for me to take such a big financial risk. I am now considering graduating a semester early to ease some of the financial pressure in the future.

My mom is a teacher, and when it was time for me and my brother to begin school, she recognized that the lack of resources in our St. Louis school district would negatively impact our education. She decided to move to another school district just so my brother and I could have a better education. I am deeply indebted to her for that, but I recognize that most people are not able to do that.

Education has the ability to foster critically conscious students and community members, who not only are conscious of intersecting oppressions in the world but also feel they have the power to change them. When prioritized, education can empower students of all backgrounds and restore some political power to those most marginalized by systems of oppression.

It has been a struggle for my family and I to afford the rising tuition and housing prices, and has only added to my frustration that these rising costs are putting students that are trying to better themselves at immediate disadvantages when they leave college to begin their lives.

I was fortunate enough to go to a private school named Montessori up until 3rd grade, when it became too difficult for my parents to afford any more. So they had to send me to public school after that. From elementary school to the public university I went to, I struggled with the large classrooms, few teachers, and the inability to ask the many questions I had.

The rising costs of even public universities across California has led to unprecedented financial strain for my family. I am fortunate to be able to pay for my school by working three jobs: some of my classmates in high school didn’t even have that option, and instead now attend free community colleges with fewer resources than UC Berkeley, or are unable to attend college this year at all because they instead need to work and save money for tuition.

Every year, my tuition increases, and every year I get nervous I won’t be able to afford it. College seems like a race now, I just want it to be over so I don’t have to deal with tuition, textbooks and school supplies, and housing expenses.

The most prevalent example of Pittsburg High School’s deficient funding was the teacher strikes that occurred during my Junior and Senior year of high school. Teachers were not receiving the salary that they deserved, especially since a lot of them take time away from their personal lives to adequately prepare and conduct their classes.

My time in the education system has allowed me to not only find a career path but also learn how to think about the world more critically. Mainstream thought has pushed the idea that school is meant for bettering oneself and opening someone’s life to new opportunities, but it seems hypocritical when students are put in a place of limited resources to do such things.

The educational part of my high school experience was lackluster. With around 45+ students per class, my teachers struggled to provide an educational experience that resembled the engaging, supportive, and warm environment an educational setting should be. Rather, the classroom felt like a holding cell and the teacher like a disciplinarian.