If you had a chance to propose an idea to improve the community somehow, what would you say?

This is exactly the opportunity ninth graders were presented with for their new Civic Engagement program. Both gradeheads, upper school English teacher Cory Zeller and upper school science teacher Ryan Zaremba, have been working alongside the upper school’s Civic Engagement Director, Shanti Elliott, to make the program beneficial to the Parker community.

In the beginning of March–to intentionally line up with the college basketball “March Madness” tournament–the freshman grade was split up into sixteen groups of four people to brainstorm ways to improve student life. They wrote proposals and were directed to think deeply about their ideas and how they could contribute to the community in a positive way.           

This change differs from the previous freshman civic engagement programs. “In the past,” Elliott said, “ninth grade students used to go on field work days several times over the course of the year, just like eleventh graders.”

After the 16 groups submitted their proposals, the three judges of the newly created “Freshman Civic Engagement March Madness Bracket” took weeks to deliberate.  

Then in early April Zeller, Zaremba, and Elliott determined  their “North Carolina team.” There were a wide range of ideas proposed, from vending machines in the hallways, to S’well water bottles with the Parker logo provided to all students, to charging stations. In the end, the idea that won was the “Summer Jobs and Internship Fair,” a way for ambitious high schoolers to interact with organizations and businesses.  

The concept of this fair is similar to one planned by the previous Dean, Edward Amos, last year for high school students.

“The one in the past was more of a bringing in of organizations that were more summer experience, things such as studying abroad or hiking,” Zeller said. “The new idea created by the students focuses on summer jobs and jobs and internships.”

The idea came from emails that the freshmen received from Elliot about summer job opportunities, according to Lauryn Rauschenberger, one of the four students who came up with the idea. “We realized that yes, while Parker does offer summer opportunities for us, they are not presented in a way where students can actually interact with the people representing these businesses and organizations and learn about what we’re signing up for,” Rauschenberger said.

Together with Rauschenberger, Avani Kalra, Nariah Thimote, and Ian Shayne comprised the winning team.  “I’d been looking for volunteer opportunities, and Lauryn specifically had been looking for a job over the summer,”  Kalra said, “and as someone under the age of sixteen, it’s obviously been very difficult to find something that I might be interested in doing.”

The team put it this way in its original proposal: “We think that these internships/job opportunities would be extremely beneficial to both students applying to colleges as well as high school students, so they can have a substantial amount of workplace experience.”

Now that the bracket is over, the entire grade is beginning to plan the job fair that is scheduled to take place before the end of the 2017-8 school year.

“I would love for this to happen next year in April, possibly in the courtyard,” Rauschenberger said, “in a similar format to how Democrafest runs in the high school Student Government.”

Once the dates are set for the event to occur, students and teachers should start reaching out to people for available summer jobs and internships.

“We really want to have several different ways of recruiting people,” Rauschenberger said. “Us students plan on working with College Counseling, Parker parents, Mr. Belizna, and Ms. Elliott to find businesses and organizations around the city with available summer internships and jobs.”

During the rest of this school year and into next year, the four students who created this idea plan to work out how this will be implemented.

The future of this new March Madness Civic Engagement format is yet to be determined.

“There were a lot of great ideas and a lot of energy to go out and talk to people,” Zeller said. “I’m not sure if the actual bracket was the best part of it, but leading up to it, the students were very engaged in the whole process. A lot of students came up with cool ideas. There’s been a lot of positive feedback from the students about this.”