Roosevelt Students Focus on Key Issues at Teen Summit
Students at Roosevelt held their first Teen Summit on Friday, an all-day town hall to discuss a range of issues to improve their education.
The two-year old Urban Leadership program at Central Campus has spun off an annual Teen Summit that happens in January at the downtown Des Moines Social Club. That event, in turn, is already leading to spinoffs at the district’s home high schools.
Roosevelt hosted its own on-campus version all day on Friday featuring a student-driven agenda of town hall discussions and creative workshops on topics of particular interest to teenagers.
According to teacher Mindy Euken, one of the faculty sponsors of PROUD (People Respecting Our Unique Differences), the summit was open to all interested students in good standing and approximately 70 signed up to participate, most of them underclassmen who will return to build on this year’s inaugural event. Student organizers came from a coalition of school clubs and organizations. One of them is CORE (Committee on Racial Equity), a group with a primary mission of continuing to increase the enrollment of minority students in Advanced Placement classes. During the CORE town hall session one of the group’s exercises was to compile a list of strategies aimed at helping teachers help students. They plan to get it printed and laminated and distributed to the school staff in a spirit of teamwork.
Other town halls dealt with Race & Poverty, Sex Ed, Media Influence and Gender Identities & LGBTQ Discrimination. They didn’t consist of adult “experts” brought in to patronize and condescend. They were student-led, free-flowing conversations and the most adult element of them was the maturity level of the ideas expressed.
To wit:
- Maybe our society should rethink the penalties and stigma that follow felons out the prison doors for the sake of the common good;
- How come sex-ed stops after middle school, just as many teens are poised on the threshold of sexual activity? We don’t stop teaching band or stop coaching football at that stage.
- What are the stereotypes to be overcome if traditionally under-represented groups are to take their rightful places in AP exam rooms?
Afternoon sessions were devoted to workshops in spoken word poetry, music production and street art, the increasingly powerful media for the expression of what used to be dismissed as routine teen angst but, at least in this increasingly enlightened district, is being heard more and more as constructive criticism.
Thursday’s half-pint poets at King Elementary in combination with Thursday night’s third annual poetry SLAM finals and Friday’s Teen Summit at Roosevelt constitute compelling evidence of a phenomenon (something such as an interesting fact or event that can be observed and studied and that typically is unusual or difficult to understand or explain fully; someone or something that is very impressive or popular especially because of an unusual ability or quality, according to Webster’s) that grad/dropout rate and test score trend lines can only hint at.
Or, more simply, there’s phenomenal stuff happening here.
