LYNN — City Hall was filled with Lynn Public Schools students in grades 8-10 on Tuesday morning, presenting civics projects that they spent the past few months working on.
For their projects, students had to identify a community issue, determine the root cause, develop a goal, reach out to decision makers, and then develop and carry out an action plan.
Topics included mental health, substance abuse, school safety, teenage pregnancy, financial literacy and the environment.
The groups were judged by government and community members, and given awards at the Civics Day Celebration after they gave their presentations.
Breed Middle School students Sarah Da Silva, Jessica Rosario and Joshua Cintron had a project on teenage pregnancy and the lack of support pregnant teenagers have. The three students found that 29.2 percent of pregnancies in Lynn are teenage pregnancies.
“Right now in our school during the months of April and May, we already had three teen pregnancies, one in sixth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade,” Rosario said.
This group performed a survey at Breed and found that a majority of students who took the survey said schools don’t have support for those experiencing teen pregnancy.
“We’re trying to get more access for education for the teen mothers,” Cintron said.
Maegan Baker, Gianna Parker, Kanitha Duong and Jenna Deon of Lynn Classical did their project on mental health in schools.
“We believe that drug use and violence roots from mental health, because a lot of people use it as a coping mechanism,” Baker said.
The goal for their project was to make sure students know the resources for mental health in schools, and encourage the expansion of those resources.
Emma Caplin, Julia Baker and Gwen Protz from Pickering did their project on how lockdown procedures affect the country’s children.
“Research also shows that 95 percent of American public schools do lockdown procedures, but no research shows that these actually are effective in the case of an active shooter,” Caplin said.
The group’s goal is to have the lockdown procedures for Lynn schools updated, and group members said the officials they talked to also believe this needs to happen. One procedure the group believes could work is “run, fight, hide,” which members said is the FBI’s framework for lockdowns.
The group also made a petition to update the lockdown drills and, as of Tuesday morning, had collected almost 200 signatures.
This is the second year Lynn Public Schools has held a Civics Day celebration.
Jenny Winter, an eighth-grade civics-project teacher at Breed and one of the teachers who planned the event, said her students that participated in the event were very engaged.
“They volunteered, which is kind of shocking that some of them volunteered, because they’re normally very quiet, reserved students in class,” Winter said. “Through this process, we see students who typically are disengaged in regular classroom activities and curriculum come alive, because this is an opportunity for them to really choose what they want to work on and and has meaning to them.”
The civics projects are a good way for students to learn about how government really works, said Luke Maus, an eighth-grade civics teacher at Thurgood Marshall Middle School and an organizer of the event.
“That’s a pretty big thing, having students understand who we can actually contact and advocate for solving a particular issue,” Maus said.
Elected officials, both at the state and city level, came to talk to students about the government to help with the projects, said Jake Selinger, a U.S. History II and civics-project teacher at Classical. Through that, students are able to see that elected officials care about hearing from people, he said.
“It just shows them, if you want change, you have to speak up, and I think it gives them the voice that they don’t necessarily know they have, and it gives them that option to find that missing voice,” Selinger said.
The groups moving on to the state-level round are: Emily Rodriguez, Plabon Barua and Dylan Florian from Thurgood Marshall with their mental-health project; Kian Grullon Almanzar, Keiri Mauricio Solis, Jhossua Sazo and Gretta Amissi from Lynn Tech with their social-workers project; Emma Caplin, Julia Barker and Gwen Protz from Pickering with their lockdown project; Imani De Jesus, Emmanuel Gonzalez and Dania De La Cruz from Lynn English with their climate-justice project; Gianna Laft, Ewerd Beato and Brandon Cintron from Pickering with their therapy-dogs for teen mental-health project; Dafne Gomez, Kayla Chajon and Sabrina Hong from Lynn Tech with their financial-literacy project; and Ishbel Garcia Granados, Thiara Cleto Galo and Brissia Barrios Lopez from Thurgood Marshall with their vaping project.
The students presenting projects on Tuesday were representing all of the grade 8 and 10 students that have been working on the projects throughout the past few months.
