Tenth grade English classes have recently been working on and completing social justice projects. These projects require students to thoroughly educate themselves on specific topics that interest them.

     The Oxford dictionary states that social justice is “justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.” Their topics could be anything from poverty to civil rights.

 The social justice projects have helped students to create their own informed opinions on important current events and topics while learning to acknowledge and respect the opinions of those around them.

   The projects are ran by Mr. James, Ms. Keith, and Mrs. Chandler. Mr. James “ultimately the goal [of the project] is to have students see things beyond their world, and that there is a lot of issues that need people to attend to them”

   This is the second year that Mr. James and Ms. Keith are doing the project and Mrs. Chandler’s first year. Chandler said “you would think that it wouldn’t be super hard to find things that students are super passionate about. But it’s a little bit challenging because they just don’t know.”

   Kenny Todd, a student in Ms. Keith’s class did his project on Feminism and it importance in  society. He commented, “I am passionate about feminism because it is something in our generation that we need to be concerned about.” Todd made a website about this topic to bring attention.

    Three students Elizabeth Maddox, Erin Adams, and Alli Hopkins, decided to focus in on bullying as the topic for their project. The three girls were interested to see if teachers thought bullying was more common than students did. They surveyed students and teachers asking if they have seen bullying within the halls of North Harford and asked if they have done anything about it.

    The girls each focused on a particular topic. The three they investigated were bullying based on appearance, mental health, and sexuality. Hopkins states, “People who didn’t experience it didn’t think it was a problem… but people who experienced it first-hand did think it was a problem.”

    Maddox explains her findings about bullying and says, “We found out that bullying based on these things, people see it a lot more than we thought… we found that bullying based on appearance was the overwhelming majority.”

    Maddox continued to explain bullying based on appearance and noted that it’s commonly directed toward overweight and underweight people, as well as based on hair, and skin color.

Hopkins concludes that she thinks her class learned from their presentation and says, “I think they were more informed and realized that it’s more of a problem than they thought it was.”

    Another social justice project that was performed by tenth grade English students was one based on NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem. This project was called “Taking a stand against taking a knee.” It was conducted by Brett Williams, Garrett Ulmer, and Daniel Graff.

    The group did a poll to see how many people at North Harford supported NFL players taking a knee, and an overwhelming majority did not support them taking a knee. Williams states, “There were a couple people who disagreed with us, but they thought that we did a good job presenting it.”