Bruce Randolph Students ready for a Busy Year

Project VOYCE has continued doing its work at Bruce Randolph High school with a chapter team of 5 Youth Trainees who went through the Summer Leadership Program to lead the after school programing. The start of the school year allowed us to continue our work with the school and staff. We asked our chapter team to identify specific areas that needed growth in their community and school and we asked them to address these areas with the work we were going to continue to do.

The first area of growth they identified was school culture. The students want to ensure that the culture at school is a positive one and that student enjoy being at school and feel comfortable with what is going on. They want to make sure the students feel like a part of the community and that their voices are being heard and that they matter. The students plan on creating a student advocacy group that would be embedded into the staff. This group would serve as a liaison between the students and the staff.

The Area that the students identified for growth for the community was gang reduction and community engagement. The students want to engage the community in different student led events. We have partnered up with Manual High School, DSST Cole, and Potentially East High School. These schools are all part of the same community and we wanted to work with them so that we could create a sense of community. The students are planning on engaging businesses, schools, parents, partners, etc in the community and find engaging ways to present social justice issues in our community and ways that we can all work together to improve the community and address these issues.

Furthermore, we plan on using these events as exposure to Project VOYCE in the hopes of recruiting for our after school program at Project VOYCE. We will be focusing 2 days out of the week for project planning for these projects, but the other 3 days will be focused on the training for our new students and planning for the lessons. The students who went through SLI will now be leading the after school program at Bruce. They will be creating lesson plans, leading the lessons, debriefing the lessons, and training the students in the after school program. They will be using the skills they learned in the summer to train the new youth on leadership development, action research, community partnerships, public speaking, project planning, non violent communication, etc. We are currently in the process of recruiting more students for the program but we have already had a few students attend. We plan to have a consistent number of students attending every day once we are introduced to the staff, we execute our first project, and get exposure in the school so that students sign up for our program.