You’re never too young to think beyond class president.
City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and a handful of student activists visited a lower Manhattan high school Tuesday to promote voter registration and preach the importance of political activism.
“If you don’t speak up, if you don’t vote, you might as well sit back and let what happens happen because you don’t have a voice,” the first-year chancellor told students at City-As-School high school on Clarkson Street. “You have to be a part of it to be heard.”
The ballot-boosting initiative was part of National Voter Registration Day, and came with the midterm elections right around the corner.
Carranza, who stressed that he didn’t care whom voting-age teens supported as long as they went to the polls, was joined at the event by civic-minded voters including Parkland, Fla., massacre survivor and gun-control activist David Hogg.
“There are people out there who don’t have a voice,” Hogg, 18, told an audience that included many teens. “That’s why it is so important for young people to get engaged.”