By Sara Ballenger
Glen Singleton, of Pacific Educational Group, asked, “How many of you think you will go to college?”
The majority of students in the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program at Los Altos High School attending the 10th annual AVID leadership conference Friday raised their hands. AVID is a secondary college preparatory elective program for students underrepresented in the higher level high school courses.
Singleton then said that seven out of every 100 Native American students graduate from college. He noted that for every 100 Latino students, only 10 graduate, and for every 100 African- American students, only 11 graduate.
The conference, “Voices, Diversity, Expression, Equity and Tupac,” was the first to be led by Singleton and associate Jamie Almanzan. The theme was to find one’s own unique voice as a student of color in today’s school system, which is one way, Singleton said, students can combat the statistic mentioned at the beginning of the conference.
“Our success as a human race depends on you all being able to find your voice and being able to lead with that voice,” Singleton said.
Singleton had previously worked in the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District doing diversity training, which motivated some of the AVID teachers to coordinate a way for Singleton to talk to students.
“We wanted Glen to come because of his voice, of his message to students that they need to start speaking out about their own experiences,” said AVID teacher Roma Hammel. “The purpose of this is for the five different AVID classes to have a shared experience and to build a sense of power and leadership,” she said.
“This is a chance for students to get together and have the conversation about often being racially isolated in school so that they can feel validated and not feel an independent power loss,” Singleton said.
The students were given a worksheet with four different boxes in which they were asked to write words that represented their lives and culture and what they were proud of, Singleton said.
After they finished writing in the boxes students were asked to put their words together to write a poem, which they will continue to work on in their AVID classes.
“This is meant to examine the way we are, how to be OK with the way we are. The first step is to talk about it and acknowledge institutional racism exists,” Almanzan said.
The students were read poetry by the late rapper Tupac Shakur for inspiration. Shakur’s words, “It can get better but you’ve got to make the change” sum up the theme of the conference and the battle against institutional racism, Singleton said.
“During school we don’t talk about diversity too much,” said AVID student Yuliana Hoyos. “To hear what other people thought took us out of our comfort zone, it was a powerful experience.”
Fellow AVID student Angela Arellanes also had a powerful experience.
“It’s good for schools to have conversations like this for everyone to understand what each person has to go through and that there are a lot of differences in society,” she said. “I came away inspired. It encouraged me to strive for more and to beat their statistics.”
“It made me realize that there is a lot more to life than what we see or what we are taught,” said student Wynnon Parker III. “I am looking forward to next year to see if we are doing what we are talking about today.
