THE
HARBINGER
issue five october 30 2006
Shawnee Mission East 7500 Mission Rd. Prairie Village, KS 66208
BECOMING MEMBER SUBJECT PE
COMMONER CIVILIAN •
AVERAGE COSMOPOLITE COUN
an
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Students and teachers recount their journey to citizenship and experiences with immigrations
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CITIZEN DWELLER TAXPAYER DENIZEN FREEM •
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...AMERICAN
NATIVE OCCUPANT NATURALIZED PERSON CIV •
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VOTER INHABITANT HOUSEHOLDER URBANITE •
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by [sylvia shank]
WHAT’S INSIDE... TEEN VOTING Students were surveyed to see whether or not they’d vote, who they’d vote for, and what they know about Kansas politics.
PAGES 12-13
2 ACHIEVEMENTS FALL BLOODPAGE DRIVE outside the sports world at East
From debate to theatre, East has been successful in other arenas than athletics deserving of recognition.
PAGE 14
Sixteen-year-olds will not be allowed to donate blood at East, even though it is now allowed in Kansas.
5MORP
Left: Senior Sean Kennedy in debate
DAYS TO
1988- it’s 3 p.m. on a chilly Halloween. French teacher Laure Losey takes a seat in the courtroom. She’s one of only two white females among the 300 taking the oath to become a US citizen. Of the 17 countries represented in the historic Wichita County Court House, the majority are Asian. Losey knows that her husband and 6-month-old son Matthew are in the audience. She knows her in-laws are there, sitting next to her “American parents,” who hosted her for her first years in The United States. She doesn’t yet know that everyone at Coleman Company, where she works as a sales consultant, has been given the day off to attend her oath of citizenship. They have come to celebrate the beginning of her life as an American. The judge stands. “He made us swear we’d tell the truth,” Losey recalled. “We had to deny our citizenship to our country of origin and say that we’d obey the laws. Then he swore us in.” Losey takes her citizenship seriously. She loves voting in American elections, her American husband, and the way Americans are genuinely happy for her when she succeeds in something. It’s a quality specific to Americans, that she says the French do not have. After going through the process, she has developed strong views on illegal immigration: she’s against it. Other East students are going through the citizenship process and it’s giving them perspective on the subject as they remember their own adjustments to American life. It’s been 18 years since her citizenship was granted, and though Losey still misses her Mom’s specialty Sauerkraut and sausages, she’s learned to appreciate a good Houlihan’s cheeseburger. “Not the fast food kind,” she specifies. Losey doesn’t eat at McDonald’s. Losey was born in Gray, a town in southern France. At age 17, she had her whole life planned out: go to America to improve English, go back to France, move to Paris, work for American embassy in Paris, drive a Jaguar. Losey smiles, a familiar expression for her. “I had such a plan!” she says in her lightly-accented English. She laughs each time she brings up the Jaguar and her teenage ambitions. “It would have been so cool.” Yet Losey is in Kansas, not Paris. Her father put his foot down, reasoning that Paris was unsafe and he didn’t know anyone there. Robert Losey was an engineer for John Deere’s branch in Gray, France, and happened to know people in Wichita, Kansas where John Deere has a production plant.
continued on page 11