Raven Report Sequoia High School
Volume V, Issue 3
1201 Brewster Ave. Redwood City, CA 94062
November 10, 2011
FutureProfits brings life skills to the classroom
Africause
raises campus awareness By ANNA DAGUM Feature Editor
By LAUREL DEARBORN News Editor If you are female, please step back. If you or your family have ever used food stamps or received welfare, please step back. If you have experienced some kind of emotionally difficult circumstance, please step back. Vulnerability. Embarrassment. The danger of being singled out. Yet this class was supposedly about money. Out on a broken down blacktop with faded border lines, a class discovered what factors might make them privileged in society. This is just one of many various activities that students involved in FutureProfits, a financial literacy course offered at Sequoia, participate in. “We don’t have anyone else come and talk to us about the economy,” senior Jorge Ferrandon said. “It’s interesting because they point out things in life that you don’t necessarily think about.” Future Profits was started in 2006 when Redwood City resident Jenni Ingram learned that 60 percent of high school students in East Palo Alto don’t graduate. They enter the work force without a diploma and little to no financial knowledge. Ingram thus started FutureProfits in East Palo Alto to teach financial literacy; in 2008 it began at Sequoia. Students are exposed to this curriculum once a week for 50 minutes with Ingram and other volunteers serving as teachers. “When we first started teaching financial literacy, we realized that all the curriculum out there didn’t address the full needs of teenagers,” Ingram said. “If you go into a class with all teenagers and say ‘hey I’m going to teach you about financial literacy,’ most of them would zone out.” “It’s a class discussion the whole time and it’s interactive. We don’t
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PHOTO BY LAUREL DEARBORN
Students in FutureProfits participated in an outdoor activity to explore how finances can change a person’s position in society .
just listen to the teacher talk,” senior cards, and other financial protoGiovanni Luciani said. col. At Sequoia, currently 400 Because the curriculum was de- students are getting this opporsigned by Ingram, it is easily in- tunity, and Ingram hopes it will teractive and is shaped specifically move through all the schools in around student lives. “They ask us the district. Carlmont and M-A questions about are also cur“You really bring your own experiour communities,” rently offerences to the class and its not just a said Luciani. ing the prolecture on history. Its what’s going It provides congram, and text for how and on in the community and it really hopefully relates to you. ” why the students Wo o d s i d e —senior Tori Beene will become need to learn these skills. Luciani said involved as that “It’s fun to be well. able to talk in our class and see how But this is not just about learneveryone else feels about different ing how to manage finances. It topics.” shows students how making one Senior Tori Beene feels the same. good financial decision can im“It’s more reltable and makes it more pact the rest of one’s life. They interesting, “ Beene said. “We can begin to judge what they should bring our own experiences into the spend and what they should save. class.” It sets them up for real life situaIngram wanted to provide easy tions in the work place. access to financial help for students. “It will help us,” freshman BryIt gives these students a place to go an Meza said. “ We will be preto ask questions about banks, credit pared for life and after.”
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While students at Sequoia stress over school work and college applications, the children in Northern Uganda and the Congo have much more to worry about. They grow up in a war zone with the constant fear of being abducted into a rebel army and being forced to kill their friends and families. The Africause club (formerly known as “Schools for Schools”) held an assembly Nov. 3 in Carrington to reveal these horrors to students. The club brought a film and speakers from the Invisible Children movement, which is geared towards high school students wanting to help. The club memebers have been in correspondence via letters with children in Kenya, as well as making and selling beaded bracelets and necklaces from recycled paper, similar to those made in Uganda. They also have been raising money to partake in a teacher exchange program to provide a teacher in Uganda with a scholarship to come and teach at Sequoia in January. Kim Dotts, a college junior and roadie for the Invisible Children Organization, came to the assembly. “When I finally went to Africa and witnessed the injustice, it reiterated my passion,” said Dotts. The roadie process, for students who have graduated high school, lasts about four months, of which two of those are devoted to traveling from school to school in order to spread awareness. “Everyone has their own struggles,” she said. “It’s when you’re willing to put aside those struggles to help others that really matters.” Dotts is passionate about this cause, and longs to see an end to Joseph Kony and the war in Uganda. Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, draws on child soldiers because of their impressionable personalities, and lack of self defense. These children are abducted from their homes and thrown into camps where they are given guns and taught how to fight, taught how to kill.
174 students responded to a Facebook survey:
Twilight: What Team Are You On? 77% Team I Don't Care
16% Team Jacob
7% Team Edward