Thursday, December 1, 2022 Volume 17 Issue 11
At Thurgood Marshall, one of our goals is to help students develop skills to be well-rounded citizens. Being able to navigate systems and to use your voice to speak up are essential to having the courage and ability to advocate for important causes. Elementary school is not too early to learn the building blocks of these skills.
Our students regularly advocate for causes that are important to them. This could be something like campaigning to have a particular food offered in the cafeteria, organizing a Gay Pride celebration, or a march for climate change. Recently, a small group of 4th and 5th grade students organized a petition after we told students they could no longer play tag in the Big Toy area as younger students had been run over by older students who were running through the play area. The older students got about eighty signatures on their petition and then created a PowerPoint presentation with their ideas for how to make tag in the Big Toy area safe. With a little negotiation, we came to an agreement that would allow the older students to play tag during a recess where only the older students were outside so there is no danger to the younger students. Carl Persak, Roman Miller, and Cora Ledgard are to be commended for their efforts in speaking out for something that they felt was important to them and their classmates.
Solving problems like this that our students are passionate about require a variety of skills that will help prepare our children to take on bigger problems later. When the students disagreed with a rule, they needed to find an acceptable way to protest (the petition). They needed to encourage other students to join in their cause by signing the petition, which took some skills of persuasion. The students identified a classmate with strong skills in creating PowerPoint presentations, which meant they can recognize strengths in others, which requires intrapersonal skills. The students need to collaborate to design the PowerPoint and to present their case to me. Finally, the students needed to be able to negotiate when I did not readily agree with their first solution. You can see there is a lot wrapped up in this!
While we encourage student voice in projects students are passionate about, we have not been able to provide systematic, ongoing leadership opportunities for our students in the past few years as we were before the pandemic started. I am so glad to tell you that under the leadership of Ms. Sorenson and Ms. Jensen, student council has now resumed! Our 4th and 5th grade classes recently held class elections to choose representatives to student council for the first half of the year. These students will help make decisions on a variety of topics, will encourage school spirit through events such as Spirit Days, and will take on service projects. Some of our classes voted for student representatives for both terms, but some have only voted for the first term. We will let you know who the representatives are one term at a time.
Representatives for our first term are: Mattea Borghesani, Elliott Sullivan, Siddhy Dewan, Teddy Wright, Skye Nelson, Jay Jorgenson, Victoria Duong, Shea Lawson, Sana Ahmed, Alexie Low Desales, Samira Yusuf, Alex Wall, Zemra Mayton, Nancy Cao, Dylan Hardeman, Olive Dameron, LC Hwang, Henry Woo, Eliana Benyam, Serenity Soto, Miles Rogers, Maddy Murphy, Owen Nelson, Elizabeth Ackley, Marco MacDonald, Nicholas Schluep, Helena Kassahun, Felix Blyth-Braun, and Clementine Suri. Alternates who will be helping when needed are: Miles Rogers, Opal Mueller, Roman Miller, Dylan De Fermin Cortes and Adele Schneider.
Congratulations to our student leaders!
A Note from our School Nurse
As the colder weather continues and indoor gatherings increase please take care when around others. COVID is still prominent and very infectious. Additionally RSV and the flu are hitting our region (and the country) hard and emergency rooms are continuing to operate over capacity with extremely long waits. Please get the latest COVID booster and the flu shot to help keep yourself and our community safe. To keep everyone healthy, we continue to encourage visits to the nurse’s office only when absolutely necessary. Parents and staff should keep in mind that the nurse’s office is for the sick and the potential always exists that a minor visit to the nurse’s office puts one at risk for catching a virus. To that end, we are ensuring that students can come to the office for a band-aid for minor cuts or scrapes.
In health, Nurse Colima
