When Ayleen Serrano returned to school after the recent winter break, the 15-year-old came back to nearly empty hallways, absent classmates, and what she describes as a “lifeless” atmosphere. As the days passed, fewer of her peers showed up at MetWest High School in Oakland, California; her teachers and classmates were testing positive for Covid-19, or had been exposed and were waiting for tests, or simply feared for their safety.

Serrano and her friends decided that if the school wasn’t going to take steps to make them feel safer coming to school, like providing regular tests for all students, they would have to demand those measures themselves. Serrano and her classmates Ximena Santana, 15, and Benjamin Rendon, 15, decided to start a petition on Google docs. Maybe, said Rendon, they would get “a couple of students” to sign it. They did better than that. The petition drew so much attention, it became a story on the local TV news. Rendon recalls: “I went to watch it when they aired it, and I was like, ‘Damn.’”

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