Fourth-grade teacher Samantha Pietenpol, top center, stands with her students at the Wisconsin State Capitol, where they advocated for a Juneteenth national holiday.
I SCHOOL FEATURE STORY
Juneteenth Advocacy Takes Atwater Fourth Graders to the Capitol BY KATELIN WATSON | PHOTOS BY PATRICK MANNING
“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.” — Quote from W.E.B. Du Bois, civil rights activist, that guided Atwater fourth-graders in their project to advocate for a Juneteenth holiday.
12 SHOREWOOD TODAY FALL 2021
t’s a surreal moment for Atwater Elementary fourth-grade teacher Samantha Pietenpol: She is inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda on June 18, watching her students address the crowd at the Wisconsin Legislative Black Caucus’s Juneteenth celebration. This is the culmination of her class’s Juneteenth Day Advocacy Project, and Pietenpol could not be prouder of these kids. She reflects back to a day in February when her class watched a video of Frederick Douglass’ descendants delivering his famous 1852 speech that called out the hypocrisy of celebrating the Fourth of July while slaves are not free. An idea was sparked. “The day our Juneteenth project was born was probably my favorite day as a teacher, ever,” says Pietenpol. “It was so beautiful and so amazing. We had a class discussion on the speech, and one student said, ‘You know, Mrs. P, why do we celebrate the Fourth of July but not the day that the people were freed?’ That small question hit our classroom and exploded. It was mind blowing how hundreds of Juneteenth’s origins: years later, the issue was Black Americans in Galveston, still relevant. Texas, celebrated on June 19th, We dropped 1865, when word reached everything and started them that slavery in the U.S. writing things down in note- had been abolished. books, on the whiteboard and into a Google document. We thought about how we could spread awareness about Juneteenth, which a ton of Americans have never heard of.” From there, she says, the project took off and was completely student-driven: Kids crafted a persuasive letter to accompany a petition they created to make Juneteenth a federal holiday and even designed their own marketing materials to share with the community. “We made it our own responsibility and used our free time to make posters to spread the word about Juneteenth,” says student Charlie Calton. “We had a poster showing information about Frederick Douglass, a poster uniting two flags
