Student activism
Houston high schools embrace chance to get involved in the community
New data released this summer found that, on average, about 5.5 percent of high schoolers are engaged in volunteerism and activism.
The data comes from Opportunity Insights at Harvard University and looks at the share of former students who are members of certain groups on Facebook. And while Texas high schools generally lagged behind the national average, several schools in Harris County bucked that statewide trend.
Local schools in the top spots tended to have the idea of community involvement baked right into their mission statement.
Stratford High School in Memorial has a civic engagement rate of nearly 8 percent, which makes it the second-highest rate in Harris County of schools with over 1,000 students, according to the data.
Stratford’s motto, “Stratford, America,” represents the school’s commitment to fostering involved citizens, said Principal Raymorris Barnes. “Part of that mission is also believing that our students have a civic responsibility to better their community.”
“For us, the expression is ‘tikkun olam,’ which is a Hebrew expression which means ‘repairing the world.’ And we talk about it all of the time,” said Stuart
Dow, head of the Emery/Weiner School in the Willow Meadows/ Willowbend area. “Then, of course, it’s not enough to talk about it, right? You have to enable it.” Emery/Weiner has about 300 students and a civic engagement rate of 12 percent.
Building a culture of service and involvement is an active focus at their schools, said Barnes and Dow. And both schools share a common method of building that culture: school days devoted entirely to community projects. At Stratford, they call it “the big day,” and their most recent one saw nearly 600 students volunteering across different communities in the city.
Volunteering and community improvement can be part of service requirements built into school curricula, but administrators find it just as important to empower the students to lead their own projects.
“Any kind of art that you have, whether that’s dance or visual arts, theater, that’s a platform in and of itself,” said Priscilla Rivas, principal of Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) in downtown Houston. “The nature of being an artist already sets them up for understanding that platforms give you a voice, and platforms are an agent for change.”
HSPVA allows students to see how civic engagement is directly tied to the democratic process, too — the school has active chapters of both young Republicans and young Democrats and a large Junior State of America program. Students can even elect to miss a day of school to volunteer as election workers. HSPVA has about 750 students with a civic engagement rate of 12 percent.
Jennifer Chase, a social studies teacher for 10 years at HSPVA who focuses on many of these initiatives, said her students, over the years, have only felt the need to get more involved.
“They feel deeply, and I think part of that is because many of them are artists. They recognize the power of community and the power of their art to change,” Chase said. “The students see more of an opportunity — or see that they have a place — in the civic process, in a way that maybe they didn’t 20 years ago.”
Rivas noted that encouraging students to take ownership of causes can drive a student to carry a mentality of involvement throughout their life.
Mandy Stein, a former student of Emery/Weiner “fell in love with the idea of service,” Dow said. In 2011, she volunteered at an orphanage in Tanzania while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2012, she founded Neema International, a nonprofit that provides education, health care and other basic needs for over 250 children as well as jobs for nearly 50 adults in the country. Now, every summer, Emery/ Weiner students go to Tanzania to volunteer with her organization.
The reason these schools believe they are at the top of this list compared to their counterparts is ultimately because they have — and actively work to foster — a conviction in the idea of volunteerism and activism in their students.
“It starts with commitment and with the belief that the schools have a civic responsibility to educate and empower our students to be good stewards of the community,” said Barnes. “We’ve got teachers that believe in our civic responsibility, and we have the support of our parents and the community that invest in us to make sure that we do that job.”
“We don’t care where kids come out politically, but we want them to recognize that American society is far from perfect,” said Dow, “and their responsibility — and opportunity — is to fix it.”
“When you have a group of kids who have a strong conviction, no matter where the root of that conviction is,” said Rivas, “there’s a sense of right and wrong. There’s a sense of wanting to perpetuate goodness in the world.”