The Providence Student Union Is an inspirational group of high school students who have shaken up Rhode Island. Due to their creative protests against high-stakes testing, especially the use of a normed, standardized test for graduation, they won the support of the Boston Globe and then the state legislature, which declared a moratorium on using tests for high stakes purposes.

Take a moment and help PSU organize other high school groups.

This is a letter from Aaron Regunberg, one of the PSU leaders who just won the Democratic primary for a seat in the State Senate:

“PSU was nominated for an award from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation for $100,000 dollars. Here’s all the information:

http://www.rifuture.org/help-the-providence-student-union-win-100000.html

And here is the award site:

http://www.nmefoundation.org/grants/larry-o-toole-award.aspx

As you can imagine, $100,000 would be game-changer – not just for our organization, but really for the fight for public education across our state. Everything we’ve been able to do has been on a shoestring budget; with that level of resources, we could create a student union in every urban district in Rhode Island and really change the power balance for public ed in RI.

In order to win, we need to get more online votes than the 5 other nominated groups. We’ve had a really late start – as we’ve been working on the actual state elections until this last Tuesday – and now need to kick into high gear.

If you could encourage your loyal readers and fans to vote (takes 10 seconds) and spread the word, it truly could make a radical difference here in RI. You can use the language from the post on RIFuture above.

–Aaron”