By: Vivek Sharma, Ian Marwong, and Karen Chen
Survey Responses from Kacey Yang's AP Language Project (Source: Kacey Yang)
Every year, students taking AP Language and Composition at Evergreen Valley High School take part in creating a project to make a change at school. Using language skills and argumentative strategies, students are able to address and attempt to fix an issue on campus through designing a year-long initiative.
While there are new issues and ideas being introduced on campus every year, it can be difficult to decide what students want to focus their attention on. Possible ideas and advice from administrators are supplied to students. However, it can be hard to determine if different projects would be feasible within a year’s time.
Students this year have focused on making resources more accessible to the general population on campus. Kacey Yang, a senior at Evergreen Valley High School taking AP Language and Composition this year, is working with her partners to establish an exchange program for prep books to increase the accessibility of study materials and to reduce environmental harm at the same time.
“Our project is to essentially bring a prep book exchange system to EV, so this is where students can donate their old prep books and exchange them for like a newer one so that the prep books that they currently have don’t go to waste,” said Kacey.
The whole process will be in two stages. The first step will be the collection of prep books, bins will be set up in AP classes for students to donate books. The second step is distribution, Kacey and her group are planning on making the books freely available to students after they have been collected. To coordinate this whole process and to store the books, Kacey and her group are planning on using a room to organize everything.
Initially Kacey and her group planned on creating a continuous library of prep books which would continuously be available for students to exchange their prep books. However, they later realized that this would take significant effort to maintain, and a single event would be significantly easier to maintain.
Joshua Ng is another senior working to improve the traffic around campus. Joshua and his team are hoping to develop an app called CommRoute that will help coordinate carpools for students who live near each other.
“Building a new school is a lot harder than getting people to carpool,” said Joshua.
The idea for CommRoute began with school concerns regarding the traffic in the morning and during pick-up hours. Students stuck in traffic are often late to class. School administrators were hoping to add more bike racks to reduce congestion. However they also reached out students in AP Language to create possible solutions.
Outside of developing an app to help coordinate carpools, Joshua’s team is also interested in producing brochures to inform students on other forms of transport and providing service certificates or prizes for students who decide to walk or bike to school.
The project will be carried out in the second semester and clubs such as Forevergreen may partner with them to help reduce carbon emissions from transport. The app will allow students within three to six miles around campus to discover others near them within smaller area zones. Joshua’s team is also looking into different ways to maintain privacy within the app. To prevent excess information collection, they are looking to only use contact information without collecting any identification or addresses.
Tavleen Hayer, a senior taking AP Language and Composition this year, is working to provide free menstrual products in classrooms and in campus bathrooms.
“Our project is called Period Forward. And we are expanding on an AP lang project done last year called Project P… Although Project P made a lot of progress… The main thing our project focuses on is creating a sustainable system to keep menstrual products stocked on campus in our classrooms and in our bathrooms,” said Tavleen.
Alongside making products more accessible for students in classrooms, Tavleen’s group is also hoping to reduce the stigma on campus surrounding menstrual products and hygiene. While developing the Period Forward’s plan to continue the distribution of products, Tavleen’s team decided to expand upon distributing educational resources.
“The issues that we came up with were accessibility, sustainability, and stigma. The first two are pretty easily addressed with the system we came up with, but the stigma was something a lot harder to approach. However, we felt that it was worth it to try and make that change. The best way you can address stigma is through education,” said Tavleen.
Period Forward’s mission is also extended to other clubs on campus. Girl Up is one of the clubs that will be partnering with Period Forward to help supply menstrual products to classrooms on campus. Students interested in joining Period Forward’s mission can sign up through Girl Up or other partnering clubs to aid in Period Forward’s mission.
As of this month, Period Forwards is also looking to expand their efforts in collaboration with the custodial staff on campus.
“We are currently trying to establish an open communication line with the custodians on campus because we want to get menstrual products into bathrooms as well. That’s part of the accessibility aspect. We understand that custodians have a lot to do on this campus as they’re running and keeping this campus going. We don’t want to add another thing onto their plate… we want to take on this responsibility to make it easier for them… and to help out our student body,” said Tavleen.
While many aspects carrying out an education campaign may be difficult to manage alongside student responsibilities, school events and more, the Period Forward team is pushing forward to make a change in their senior year.
Ngan Nguyen and Diana Le are working to bring ROAR lessons on the topic of gender, sexuality, and pronouns.
“When we interviewed and surveyed a lot of students in the community and the LGBTQ community on our campus, there’s a large number of students who feel unsafe or discriminated against from very subtle homophobia or more harmful homophobia, like using slurs or misgendering,” said Ngan.
To combat this issue, they hope their lessons, created in conjunction with other students and faculty, will help create a better environment at EVHS where people take a more active role in including those who identify differently. They are looking forward to teaching their fellow students about these topics and are pushing forward despite the potential controversy it may cause.
“The hurdle that we worry the most about with our project currently is the reaction of teachers and students to the Roar lesson because as we see is that there's an amount of homophobia at our school and this roar lesson might receive backlash from us, from certain people. It might kind of prevent the school from deciding to publish it, to prevent conflict between the groups in our school,” said Diana.
Moving into the second semester, students with successful project proposals will continue to implement their project. As other students have done in previous classes, seniors this year are continuing to look for new avenues to address problems on campus and advocate for the movements they care for.
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