High school students from Brooklyn and San Diego were in Aspen last week to present projects they’ve developed to address their schools’ challenges with chronic absenteeism, mental illness, and plastic waste, among others.
Aspen Institute’s Aspen Challenge program mentors students from select partner cities every year while they develop change-based projects that address issues in their respective communities.
A few student teams are selected each year as winners who get to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival and share their progress with attendees.
On June 27, students from San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts told festival goers that their classmates who are chronically absent from classes don’t show up to school, because of mental health and transportation barriers.
Their team met with nearby universities this spring to try to partner with psychology departments, so that graduate students could receive practice hours while providing free mental health services to high schoolers.
Xoey Ordoñez, a junior, said they also launched a campaign to add a dedicated bus route in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city, since kids there face a lot of obstacles in getting to school.
“This means walking five miles one way from these neighborhoods, walking under and over freeways, through homeless encampments, and more,” Ordoñez said. “This is not what we want for our students.”
Katie Fitzgerald, the director of Aspen Challenge, said the program helps empower young people to value their own ideas and take action to better their communities.
“And if we don't start paying attention to some of our young voices and our young minds of today, the world's going to be a very different place tomorrow,” Fitzgerald said.
Other projects featured in Thursday’s presentation included students from Mira Mesa High School in San Diego who established a youth-driven web platform linking visitors to students' video stories and wellness resources.
San Diego’s Madison High School students developed the SPORK team that has reduced the consumption of single use plastics in their school and in neighborhood businesses.
High school students from Brooklyn’s Multicultural School created a new school program called “IMMIGR8T,” where they hosted events and creative spaces for students and their families to honor the diversity of their majority immigrant school community.
One event, “IMMIGR8T Day,” provided immigrant families opportunities to share their stories by painting pictures about what immigration means to them.
