Blog

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

So much is happening inside the schools at our Health as Right Program this month that there often doesn’t seem time enough to write it all down.

One of our Health as Right teams is at Yorktown High School, VA. They are an ESOL class which has integrated the program into their class curriculum rather than doing it as an after school activity. Their service project is to film a video to raise awareness about the experiences of immigrants and prejudice. This week, the Writing team sat down and drafted a thoughtful story that they cared about. In one scene, student actors will hold signs that read, “I am Muslim,” “I am Christian,” “I am Jewish,” “I am Buddhist,” “I am Hindu”, and others. They will then turn the signs around to show the words, “We are all the same.”

Another of our teams is at the International High School in Langley Park, MD, which has a student body of 100% immigrants and refugees. This team would like to provide a service to local refugees for their service project. This week, they wrote a letter to an organization that helps refugee families connect to housing, work, and legal services once they arrive to ask if they have any needs our students can assist with. In the process, our ESOL students learned about letter-writing conventions in the US.

The newest addition to our program is Liberty Middle School, VA. This week they decided their service project: a clothing drive for local children in need. They also started our Health as Right curriculum, which teaches them about health and human rights and empowers them to cultivate their power of expression to talk about the kind of world they want to create. “I like this curriculum because it asks us about our ideas for the world, and it makes me smile,” said one of the students Tori afterwards with a big smile on her face.