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“Submit Application!”: Youth Coach Their Peers Past the College-Access Potholes |
| On this bitter late-December day, students are streaming into the “Student Success Center” at Bushwick Campus High School in Brooklyn. At every computer station along its walls, two or three students gather, eyes fixed on the screen as one of them punches information into the online Common Application for four-year college admissions. It’s not the winter break that these students are counting down to: College application deadlines are coming up on them fast—and they need help. Helping them are classmates who have been trained as college advisors. | |
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Shifting Perspectives: Youth Activism and Immigration |
| For 10 years, immigration has been a contentious issue in the United States. In the early part of the decade, the Bush administration was prepared to offer mass amnesty to illegal immigrants. As governor of Texas he’d long been friendly with Mexico, and both he and then-Mexican President Vincente Fox supported a big amnesty and guest worker program. On Sept. 11, 2001, all of that changed—and so has youth activism around immigration. | |
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Bike It: How Students at One School Are Reducing Their Carbon Footprint |
| Founded in 2004, the Samohi Solar Alliance (SSA) is a student-run, grassroots organization working to inspire environmental awareness, education, and tangible change at Santa Monica High School in California and in the greater community. On its regular “Bike It” days, 40 percent of the student body use alternative transportation—most often, bikes—to get to school. | |
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Radio City Works: Students Investigate Personal Truths on the Air |
| Radio stories with extraordinary personal voices are emerging at City High School in Tucson Arizona, in a classroom outfitted with bare-bones recording equipment and a $150 annual budget. Teacher Sarah Bromer recruits students to produce three radio stories. Then, she says, “I tell them what I know, I help them get through blocks when they’re stuck, and besides that, I let them discover it.” The results are extraordinary. | |
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Free Dance: Philadelphia Youth Create the “Hidden City Festival” |
| Walkers in downtown Philly must have been astonished. On a rainy day in May, the streets were alive with dancing teenagers. Sixty-five students in teacher Joshua Block’s English classes at Science Leadership Academy teamed up with Leah Stein Dance Company, to “make dances spontaneously, rigorously, on location, in collaboration, in connection with the moment.” The equation was simple: site + sound + movement = dance. | |
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Urban Youth Take Up the Cause of Healthy Eating |
| “My favorite food? I like sushi, California rolls,” declares Tyler Wallace, a seventh grader. “My least favorite food, I gotta say, is macaroni and cheese.” He is taking his turn to be quizzed by classmates with a Flip video camera, answering questions about what he eats. Families at Lighthouse Community Charter School have long had trouble finding affordable and nutritious food in their low-income Oakland neighborhoods. |
