On a January morning at Durham’s Hillside High School, more than 100 civics students presented possible solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time: gun violence, the housing crisis, climate change, criminal justice, and education.
The students, who spent the last month dreaming up these solutions, filled the entrance hall with tri-fold poster boards and presented their ideas to peers, teachers, and community leaders. The idea for the expo came from Hillside teachers in 2019 but didn’t start in its current form until 2021, following the outbreak of the COVID pandemic.
At stake were grades, glory, and a $100 cash prize for the winner, to be determined by a popular vote.
Students Karma Livingston, Niya Shands, and Dorian Vaughan stood in front of “Can’t Stand the Rain,” their project about rain gardens featuring colored-pencil illustrations of weather patterns, an umbrella, and a house swept up in waves. They were inspired to look at the issue of flooding because, well, it’s something they see a lot around Durham.
“Every time it rains you get a flash flood and you can tell that it’s a major issue,” one of the group members tells the INDY. Their project also pointed out that annual precipitation in North Carolina is expected to rise over the next 20 years.
The “Can’t Stand the Rain” team laid out the process for building rain gardens, bowl-shaped areas “designed to capture and soak in rainwater.” They would need to find sites, check the soil, and select plants that could withstand a deluge.
The students also identified some of the stakeholders to consult, such as the City of Durham Watershed Special Projects and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension. One stakeholder in attendance, Durham City Council member Javiera Caballero, says the rain garden project stood out to her because of its eye-catching illustrations and intriguing title.
Another project that Caballero liked was designed to reduce accidental gun violence by increasing access to secure storage options for firearms.
“I told them to figure out participatory budgeting,” Caballero says, referring to the city process that allows residents as young as 13 to decide how to spend $2.4 million of city money. “Those are the kinds of projects that we can fund, right?”
But she had to tell students that some ideas—like raising the age to purchase firearms—would be impossible for a city government to implement.
Frances Starn, a Hillside teacher who organized this year’s expo, says that some of her students ran into that bleak reality of American policy.
“Gun violence in particular, is something that they do not feel optimistic about changing. Especially because it affects some of them so deeply and closely,” says Starn.
Last year, 17-year-old Hillside student Anthony Feaster was shot and killed near the school by another teen. Avoidable deaths like Feaster’s, combined with the constant drip of headlines about school shootings across the country and a state and federal government that seem to be paralyzed and apathetic, make it hard to convince teens that they live in a country that cares about their lives and their futures.
Still, Starn says it’s her job to teach her students how to imagine a better world. As a lifelong Durhamite, the project, to her, is about getting “the kids thinking more about our place and why it’s important and how they can affect it.” So she asked them to “just pretend like we’re in an alternate universe where things could be different.”
“There is some future in which things are different. Can we imagine a future that is better? What got it there?” she says.
Another project about gun violence called “Got Shot? Get Help!” looked at how to reduce rates of recidivism among victims.
The authors—Diamond Hodges, Emily Ugalde Rodriguez, Abigail Armas, and Karen Campos—displayed on their poster board that “being the victim of gun violence also increases chances of the person becoming the perpetrator of violence,” citing statistics from Everytown for Gun Safety and news from WRAL.
In response, they proposed increasing hospital victim intervention programs in Durham to help break that cycle of violence, a solution that could save money and lives.
The students are upset about gun violence but not entirely disheartened.
“You should never give up,” a group member tells the INDY. “It’s all about your mind-set and how you work on it.”
Other students were well aware of the potential for star power to attract attention. One project, “Get You a Job Guaranteed” by Christopher Mason and Janiyah Thorpe, featured a photo of a smiling Mayor Leonardo Williams, who was in attendance. Their project included a plan for job fairs to help people who don’t want to go to college.
Thorpe says that making change in a community is possible. But only “if everybody wants to.”
And while the board featuring the photo of Mayor Williams didn’t win, Starn says Williams did invite the authors of the winning project, “Can’t Stand the Rain,” to present to the city council.
To Starn and other teachers, the project is about showing their students that student’s voices do matter in the community; a civics education, after all, is about exploring the relationship between an individual and their civilization.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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