By rssfeeds-admin The group of five Clovis Unified and two Fresno Unified students call themselves Justice for the Voiceless.
Carolina Ferreira is a Clovis Unified School District student and one of the founding members of the project. She said the whole idea started back in October.
“We had to choose a topic that we wanted to advocate for and then build a team. So, we built this team of seven and we chose human trafficking. Basically, we wanted to advocate for human trafficking, education in schools. That was like our main goal,” she said. “A lot of people get trafficked locally in Fresno and like, we didn’t know any of that. So, I feel it was I feel like it was a learning opportunity. And that’s kind of what drove our passion to it.”
Clovis Unified student Kelsey Lyles is another co-founder of the project and said the team grew more passionate when finding out about AB-1227, an Assembly Bill passed in 2017.
She said, “California Bill 1227, that basically states that all schools in California should give students a basic understanding of human trafficking. But after we thought about it, with most other students, no one has received any education on human trafficking. So, that was a big step in our proposal and why we kind of came up with a lesson instead of doing something else for the cause.”
Rachel Von Dohlen is also one of the project’s co-founders and echoed Lyles’ sentiments.
“We realized we didn’t receive any human trafficking education when we were in school. With the help of the California Assembly Bill, we were like, ‘Wow, like this needs to happen.’ We worked with our nonprofits, and we realized there’s not a lot of resources out there,” she said.
According to Fresno Unified School District student and co-founder Arturo Barela, the group partnered with a nonprofit in order to create their resource.
“We partnered with the Shared Hope. They offer a 30-minute video. It talks about in-person human trafficking and online human trafficking, It’s called ‘Chosen,'” he explained. “We got approval from them to use [a] lesson plan.”
Clovis Unified co-founder Grace Escobar said the plan the team created with the help of Shared Hope is geared towards education surrounding social media exploitation.
She explained, “Obviously, all teenagers are on social media, on their phones, but [the plan] also goes over like in-person because it’s still a problem. But, we mainly just teach students the signs of if you’re about to get human trafficked.”
Their project’s lesson plan has already been piloted at Edison High School with good results. Another recent accomplishment the team members are proud of was being invited to speak about their idea with local school representatives at a wellness meeting hosted by Clovis Unified.
“After our presentation, we had multiple people come up to us and personally ask for our lesson plan. There were even representatives from Bakersfield that wanted us to give our lesson plan to them,” Lyles said excitedly. “So, basically our next steps are just to connect with all of them and see where it can go from there.”
The students have officially pitched their idea to Clovis Unified and Fresno Unified school districts with the goal of their lesson plan eventually being implemented in schools across the valley.
“The idea is to get it to peer counselors so then they can teach it to fellow students in an English class once a year,” said Von Dohlen.
A billboard is now on Clovis Avenue near Shields in Fresno, representing the group and shedding light on what their project stands for.
Discover more from RSS Feeds Cloud
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.