On Friday, a virtual middle school assembly celebrated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the assembly, a series of grade 7 speakers delivered calls to action on issues important to them in recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day’s designation as a day of service.
The activity was directed by English teacher Rebecca Williams, who asked her students to be “voices of change” by bringing awareness to issues they felt were important.
Linda Zeng spoke on the pressure felt by students preparing for standardized tests and offered some ways students could alleviate stress. Ritik Raman and Rahul Sundaresan spoke on the danger posed to aquatic life by pollution and how people can contribute to a more sustainable world. Disha Gupta offered a passionate plea for the community to find ways to end bullying, which she said creates “a never-ending cycle of abuse.” Savitha Satish talked about the discrimination faced by sufferers of mental illness and encouraged people to educate themselves and others on mental health. Elie Ahluwalia and Myra Thakker talked about how stereotypes can lead to discrimination and explained the difference between being a passive “non-racist” and an active “anti-racist” who analyzes their own stereotyping thoughts and works for a more equal society. Finally, Sofia Shah talked about gender inequality in the workplace and how norms that keep women at home and in a narrow set of jobs must be rejected.
Following the student talks, seventh grader Tanvi Sivakumar announced the Blessing Bags service project, which will provide basic necessities such as water, food and toiletries to the homeless.
The assembly ended with Williams challenging the attendees to find issues they care about and learn how to become an agent of change, followed by attendees announcing the issues they chose in the Zoom room’s text chat.
On Dec. 12, a special online charity concert will be held to raise funds for the families of firefighters who lost their lives battling the deadly wildfires that have burned across California since August. The concert, organized by Nathan Liu, grade 9, will be broadcast on Facebook.
“As we navigate these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued wildfires in California, I just want to contribute my time to host an online music concert to pay tribute to those fallen heroes [and] also to raise funds to provide emotional and financial assistance to families of fallen firefighters,” Liu said. Last week, independent TV station KTSF featured Liu on a segment about the concert.
The performers include veteran professional musicians, including Sandra Wright Chen, a highly regarded concert pianist and Steinway Artist; bassist Joshua Thurston-Milgrom of the department of music at Stanford University; and violinist Kei Obata. Student musicians Callie Yuan, Shayla He, Ella Yee, Jerry Li and Vardaan Ghai, all grade 9, also will be featured, and Liu also will perform. “The fact that a concert consisted of mostly my peers from Harker proves how talented our Eagle community is,” said Liu. “Due to the pandemic, we were not able to practice together or have an in-person concert, therefore, we heavily rely on remote communication technology to collaborate, such as emails, chat, Zoom and cloud document sharing to brainstorm about the concert.”
The concert is scheduled to go live on Saturday at 7 p.m., and Liu advised those who wish to attend to like the concert’s Facebook page and keep an eye out for a notification when the event is live.
Harker has partnered with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) to conduct an Assessment of Inclusivity and Multiculturalism (AIM). The survey will be administered to all of Harker’s constituents in January and will “evaluate the culture of our school so we can create a strategic action plan based on the findings, to help us continue our work to ensure we are an inclusive and equitable community,” said Head of School Brian Yager in a message to the community.
Topics covered by the survey will include the climate of the school; its handling of issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion; and multiculturalism and multicultural education. Data from the survey will be evaluated by NAIS to create a report that will detail areas of potential improvement and the school will develop strategies according to these data points.
“We encourage the entire Harker community to participate to help us gather as much information as possible,” said Yager. “Your voices will help Harker continue to be the best it can be for our students and community.”
In the segment, Lu shares his motivation for co-founding YAPA, which stems from his own love of learning and the desire to foster that love in younger kids. “I’m someone who really enjoys learning, and this would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t do something like that,” Lu told CBS.
In August, sixth grader Neel Kumar launched a series of free educational videos called “Effortless Java,” which are designed to help younger students learn how to code. He was partially inspired to create the series after completing an online course only to find out he was too young to receive certification. In addition, the platform he had planned to use to host his course disqualified him as a teacher on the basis of his age. Kumar hopes his videos will reach children around the world and give them a means to escape poverty. To support this effort further, he launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Children International, a long-running humanitarian organization that works to help impoverished children.
Along with thousands of families throughout California, some of Harker’s faculty and staff also have been impacted by the devastating fires in the state. Many have been evacuated and are still working through the process of returning to their homes. Others have lost their homes. Please continue to look for community updates on fundraising efforts that support our Harker families. Two current efforts, organized by family and friends of impacted staff, are raising funds to help upper school English teacher Beverley Manning and lower school academic counselor Patty Marsette. Questions or other information on fundraising efforts can be sent to communications@harker.org.
Last week, third graders held a fundraiser for the Epilepsy Foundation’s Lemonade for Livy program, raising more than $2,000. The students had read the novel “The Lemonade War” by Jacqueline Davies in their summer classes, and lessons and activities also were designed with a lemonade theme. Fittingly, students also participated in a lemonade-themed service project, creating a virtual lemonade stand and promoting their effort by passing out lemonade.
Students also enjoyed interacting via Zoom with Olivia “Livy” Scheinman, for whom the program is named, and her family, and speaking to Maile Chung ’17, who was diagnosed with epilepsy during her freshman year. “It has been wonderful working with the summer school third graders on this,” said Kathy Ferretti, grade 3 English teacher. “They learned a lot and had fun doing it.”
Yesterday, students and faculty contributed to the Palo Alto Black Lives Matter street mural, painting the first letter “A” in the mural, which now appears on Hamilton Avenue in front of Palo Alto City Hall. Elliot Kampmeier, Arya Tandon, Maria Teplova and Natasha Yen, all rising seniors, and rising sophomore Ally Lee, accompanied by art teacher Pilar Aguero-Esparza and history teacher Roxana Pianko, were one of several groups selected to help paint the mural. “Elliot had communicated with me early this summer that he wanted to create a mural in San Jose and I began to ask art friends I know in the community and one of them forwarded the call for artists from the Palo Alto Public Art program,” said Aguero-Esparza. “They pursued it after they got the clearance from Palo Alto staff that they could submit if they had an adult sponsor.”
Artists were required to submit an application containing both a statement detailing why they were interested in the project and samples of their work. In their statement, the students noted their intent “to stand up against systemic racism and show our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.” Upon being selected, the students were assigned a letter and asked to submit a sketch of their idea. “The call for art submissions and the process has been very fast paced,” said Aguero-Esparza. “I am super proud that they got excited and worked within the constraints of the call.”
Rising freshman Kabir Ramzan and rising sixth grader Ameera Ramzan have been working to raise funds in support of Black Girls Code and Second Harvest Food Bank. To encourage donations through their GoFundMe page, the siblings created a virtual music concert featuring themselves playing various pieces on piano, flute and violin. Two of the three instruments featured in the concert were taught to the Ramzans as part of the Harker music program. In addition, their company, ArtShackCrafts, will send a gift of an artisan bracelet for all donations over $50.
The two created ArtShackCrafts to sell artisan crafts to support philanthropic efforts about which they are passionate. These causes have included assisting detained immigrant children through the ACLU and aiding California wildfire victims through the American Red Cross.
Sometime soon, an array of teenagers in Africa, with lovingly packed boxes of K-5 math textbooks hoisted on their shoulders, will complete the final steps of a journey that started with a Harker student’s efforts to blend sustainability with service to the world’s poor.
Driven to find ways to propel positive change, rising senior Sachi Bajaj started a nonprofit entity called Me2U Foundation last year focused on reclaiming various items for use abroad, setting in motion of a chain of events that, among other things, diverted nearly 1,000 used textbooks from the waste stream for the use of mostly rural libraries serving an estimated 45,000 African children.
“I want to show people that anyone can do this, even if you are just in high school like I am,” said Bajaj. “We truly can make a difference, and the results are right in front of us. It is unbelievable to think that 700 books, which possibly could have reached the landfills, went to children who do not have sufficient resources to even learn, something that myself and others may take for granted.”
The difficulty of transporting learning resources to remote communities disadvantaged by lack of access to textbooks was overcome in large part by The Harker School’s contribution of funds to finance the shipping of the books, first to New Orleans and then most likely to Malawi, but possibly instead to Ghana, depending upon available space on a July trans-Atlantic container ship. More than 200 additional textbooks were sent free of charge to Thrift Books, a socially conscious, for-profit organization that re-sells books on the secondary market.
Harker library director Lauri Vaughan, who has overseen other efforts to connect books with readers, proclaimed the arrangement “a win for the environment and for all those readers who will use these books to learn valuable skills.”
Claire Hubel, container manager for The African Library Project, designated Bajaj, Me2U and The Harker School global literacy champions, noting that the Bajaj was “absolutely instrumental in making all this happen.”
Bajaj’s foundation got its start in 2019 as a project aiming to reduce waste and share resources such as clothing, shoes and toys, then grew this year to focus on books, 320 million of which are estimated to be wasted annually.
“Over the course of five months, I worked very closely with Ms. Vaughan to make sure that these books would be redirected from landfills to the underprivileged in a sustainable manner,” Bajaj said. ” I would send lists and lists of updates to Ms. Vaughan about possible organizations, but many of them simply would not work out. At this time, my organization did not have sufficient funding to ship over this many textbooks.”
Finding the African Library Project in May revived Bajaj’s hope that the books would find a proper home after all. The African Library Project distributes books to libraries across Malawi and six other countries in Africa. It does so from the Port of New Orleans, however, so the not so small matter of transporting the jumbo load of elementary education materials remained a hurdle. Harker stepped in with $960 to finance the books’ voyage.
Harker sustainability czar Greg Lawson called the project “a remarkable undertaking by Sachi and Lauri,” adding, “It is noteworthy that this undertaking began as Sachi’s brainchild, but that Lauri saw the vision and helped her do the work within the administration of the school to bring this to fruition. Hopefully these texts will land in the lap of a student whose curiosity will be piqued and will endeavor to learn and grow because of this exposure. These books may become ‘a gift that keeps on givin’’ and if they do, all the effort will be worthwhile – and that’s not even taking into account the sustainability element here!”
Bajaj distinguished herself through her perseverance amid the numerous obstacles attending such enterprises, Vaughan said. “Where others have good ideas, but struggle to implement them, Sachi stayed with this and I am so happy with how it is turning out.”
Hubel, who brought her daughter to campus to help Vaughan pack the volumes, worked with partners in Malawi to plan distribution of the gently used tomes to 45 libraries in the landlocked southeast African nation, where literacy has been on the decline, currently falling below 70 percent for males and at just 55 percent for females.
“There is a very small chance that this collection of math books may be held until our Ghana container (which will be shipping in the fall) on the off-chance that the Malawi container is full,” Hubel said. “The container is going to be very full, and these books may be loaded last, since they represent a supplement for many schools, and we don’t want to send these at the expense of a single school getting their full library.”
Regardless of which destination the books reach, they form a foundation of hope that acquisition of STEM skills can help lift poor children from poverty, enabling them to contribute to the development of their homeland.
“Our procedure is to fill a shipping container for each country we are working with, and the container to Malawi will already be carrying 60 libraries of 1,000 books each,” Hubel said. “Luckily we have just started adding STEM supplements to many of the libraries that we send to, so we decided that this donation would comprise a one box STEM supplement to each of the 45 primary grade schools in this container. In order to qualify for a library from the African Library Project, a school has to fill out an application demonstrating its need. Most of the schools we work with are in rural communities, and many do not have any books at all. Each box of textbooks that we packed at Harker was sorted to contain a full, leveled math curriculum from K-5th (or 6th) grade. As such, each box will be a valuable resource for the school receiving it, and will likely be used by teachers in support of their math instruction.
“The books that Harker donated so generously were almost new and very well-made. They have many years of use in them, in the careful hands that will receive them. These books will be used by teachers in 45 schools, reaching 45,377 students in all … and will then be used by each incoming grade as well. Using books this way will touch an immense number of lives!”