The One Land One People Youth Center Collaborative at Skyline high school produced some amazing work this year. We served over 200 students daily and upped our work with parent engagement, our after-school programming, youth leadership program and worked to build stronger community and school relationships.
Parent engagement this year added a couple more projects such as a parent-teacher summit which facilitated a conversation between parents and teachers on relationships and consistent support to help students achieve their academic goals. We also added a stronger youth team that participated not only in the parent convening but in All City Council and school based leadership. A Mother’s Day celebration program was put together to honor all of the mothers at Skyline but with a direct emphasis on our cafeteria and custodian mothers who are often overlooked. To wrap up the year we celebrated with parents and students with a nice fun trip out to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk!
The after-school programming has succeeded in academia, enrichment and leadership. At the beginning of the year, the athletic study hall was able to help over eighteen student athlete’s obtain a grade point average over a 3.25 and helped get more eligible players than previous years! In driver’s education we handed out over 75+ safety permits and helped students become safer and responsible drivers. Break dancing had an increase in enrollment and participation plus they received a lot of recognition in a variety of community spaces as they either performed or entered a competition. Cash for College night with collaboration with East Bay Consortium, Early Academic Outreach Program, and Educational Guidance Center had over 100+ parents and seniors receive support as they completed online applications to receive federal grants to attend colleges next year. Student music artists learned how to use software to create, produce, and engineer some of their own music. And graffiti arts was led by a student who taught other students the techniques to the hip-hop art form.
The Youth Action Team was selected from many to produce an A through G media bit as well as a resource map for the state of California. Students underwent a long process of figuring out how to put the media pieces together by integrating their ideas and vision for the A through G video. Like many high school students that we had interviewed, A through G requirements was hard to understand including the purpose. The project is wrapping up and YAT is focusing next year on more site based projects.
