National Youth Rights Association,
North Dakota Chapter

We are working to overturn laws that discriminate against youth because we believe that anything that adults can do legally should be legal for everyone - age should not be a limitation.  Age-based standards are arbitrary and inherently unfair; they ignore the best and brightest by focusing on the dull and irresponsible - all the while ignoring the ignorant and apathetic among the adult population.  It is unlike America to restrict human rights in such a fashion as we do now - but America has a great tradition of rectifying these errors in judgement as exampled in the steady march of voting rights - white male landowners over 21, white males over 21, males over 21, people over 21, people over 18, all of which were followed by the endowment of civil rights to new categories of voters.  NYRA's goal is clear - to see the day when schoolkids can visit the polls as they learn about our unique system of government - and the defeat of the apathy that has mired young voters in the past.

Our Long Term Goals

NYRA is currently organizing a bipartisan committee to circulate a petition to lower the voting age.

Things we will be focusing on are lowering the current voting, drinking and smoking ages. We plan to remove curfew and status offense laws, any other law that deals directly to certain age groups.

Our Short Term Goals

Our Primary Goal is to fully organize, a track that is almost complete

Our Second Goal is to get people interested in youth rights and join NYRA - NYRA-ND Secretary Chelsey Honcharoff can help you out if you want to join.  Our meetings are free and open to the public; Official members pay the national organization only $5 in annual dues but you aren't obligated to sign up.

We want to remove web filters and other limitations on youth youth expression and free speech in public schools, including in-school drug searches will out a warrant.

NYRA-ND is only a few months old and we are already making an impact on the community.   We stuck up for the ill-fated dance proposal from the "O"riginal and we're planning to protest the school's invasive technologies like the web filter and various spyware programs.  We will fight any invasion of the civil liberties of youth, and are especially concerned where the nation's attitudes are heading, given the Supreme Court's recent ruling that random drug tests on all school students are legal.