Aside from site visit days, sophomores spend 40 minutes every Day 2 of the cycle learning about immigration for their all grade Civic Lab. Ninth and eleventh graders do something similar, focusing on Sustainability and Environmental Justice and Citizen and Community Activism. In sophomore Civic Lab, the grade is split into four groups working on various services in immigrant communities plus a Spanish Immersion group made up of Spanish III students dedicated to having more direct contact with Spanish speakers who are trying to become citizens. The other groups concentrate on more general pro-immigrant service work. During site visit days, each of these groups venture into the city for a few hours to collaborate with a different organization that — in theory — relates to immigration. Parker offers this unique program in the hopes that its students will learn about issues the school values and to encourage them to become active community members and advocates for social justice. This program has the potential to not only teach students how to be activists but more importantly improve the outcomes for the people they serve.

Here are four ways to get this program to reach its potential:

1. Make community service hours necessary for graduation

Parker should require a minimum of 20 outside service hours for graduation. Having mandatory service hours beyond an in-school program like Civic Lab would encourage students to make a sustained commitment to one organization and give them the opportunity to make a tangible difference. Many students may be resistant to this plan since it would be another thing between them and graduating, however, in a whole semester, tenth graders had a single site visit day and students cannot be expected to have a deep connection with people or a place that we only spent a few hours with. If students had the opportunity to find a place they could return to and be of service at several times throughout the year, they would become stakeholders rather than tourists.

2. On topic field work.

For the first site visit day of sophomore Civic Lab, the Spanish Language group took a bus to a rooftop community garden in Little Village. At ENLASE (or “Link” in Spanish), the group  prepared 12 or so plant boxes for winter, which provide the surrounding community with fresh produce in the warmer months. Afterwards, students  were given a lengthy presentation in Spanish by a staff member about the gardens and what they grow there, but nothing relating to immigration. This is because ENLASE does not exclusively work with immigration, their official website under the “What We Do” tab has four categories: Health, Immigration, Education, and Violence Prevention. The gardens are under ENLASE’s Health division, so the volunteer work  was not a part of their efforts to help people immigrate to the United States, or the immigration crisis. 

Other civic lab groups had similar issues. “They didn’t really talk about how it related to immigration,” sophomore Eva Brody said. Brody volunteered at The Chicago Furniture Bank (CFB). On CFB’s official website they state their mission is to “provide dignity, stability and comfort to Chicagoans that face poverty,” which is unspecific to the topic of immigration. Brody also agrees that she felt that their work was meaningful. “Some people assembled donated IKEA chairs. I made boxes of donated kitchenware with plates and bowls and things so people’s homes could feel more home-y. I really liked it.” Although the volunteer work the sophomores did does seem as a whole positive, students should do the work they were prepared to do in school. In the course description for Civic Lab, students were promised: “Throughout these in-school meetings and fieldwork days, students read and conduct research on their central topic.” Civic Lab should either stay true to their word so its students can be motivated to help a cause they understand or convert the program into general volunteering on a wide range of issues to educate its students on a variety of topics. 

3. Smaller groups

When Civic Lab groups are 18 or more people, the places they go have to be able to accommodate that many students and faculty advisors. This results in site visit days becoming less about helping a cause and more about finding something that can fit so many students. Even gardening at ENLASE felt like too many chefs in the kitchen – two kids holding either side of a garbage bag while others stood around waiting to be given something to do. The ENLASE staff member leading our gardening kept politely telling us to move faster, I felt the space was overcrowded. 

If groups were shrunk down to six to nine people, they could do more concentrated work. For example, the Spanish Language group could work with Chicago Refugee Coalition’s (CRC) ESL (English as a Second Language) program and do one on one tutoring with Spanish speaking students who are trying to learn the language. Smaller groups do complicate transport, and this can be resolved with chaperones escorting students by Uber to their destination. We have already seen this method’s success through COOKIES. If there aren’t enough chaperones, half of the smaller groups could leave one day and the other half another.

4. More action

I feel as if a lot of our Civic Lab classes, outside of one site visit day first semester, weren’t very productive. A lot of time was spent answering questions on the whiteboard, having smaller group discussions, and listening to presentations from visiting speakers. Most of the time, Civic Lab seemed to be more for our benefit than the people who we were supposed to be helping. For instance, three class periods were devoted to presenters: Father Corey of Viator House of Hospitality, WBEZ reporters Tessa Weinberg and Amy Qin, and 43rd ward Alderman Timmy Knudsen. While it’s important that students learn about a topic before they immerse themselves in it, spending three cycles just learning about how people have already aided the cause is excessive. 

In the future, Parker should cut down on visitor days and instead put students to work. If that isn’t possible, then Parker should trade out some of their discussion periods. Instead of these small group discussion blocks, we could spend the period emailing our representatives and legislators asking them to commit to protecting immigrant communities and to continue to pass legislation that helps fund groups like Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), or find an organization to do phone banking for and ask members for donations. Not all of the work we do needs to be off campus to be valuable, and a lot of it will be more engaging than filling out a survey.