Passion Projects Producing Purposeful Community Change
From popular media to conversations online, opinions about the values and behavior of teenagers are as different and wide-ranging as every person who utters a position. Meanwhile, developing Engaged Citizens is one of the top five priorities of the LaRue County Schools Learner Profile. In Summer Garris’ classroom, she is teaching her students how to take on the responsibility of positively impacting the world by serving their local community - engaging in ways they perhaps had never considered.
Garris’ class has recently been focusing on their “passion projects”. In this project, two students have risen to the challenge of engaging their passion by being mindful of those around them, Lesly Rosales and Jastyn Sweet.
Rosales chose to assist Spanish-speaking students at Hodgenville Elementary School for her passion project. Each week, she spends time with students, helping them with classwork, translation, and simply being a positive influence, “I enjoy helping the elementary students at HES with learning anything new that they need help with. I want them to feel comfortable in this community having, at one time, been in their place.”
Similarly, Sweet identified a need she could meet in the Upton and Bonneville communities, “I recently had the opportunity to help get a Narcan box placed in the Upton Fire Department. Having seen firsthand how bad the addiction is within our community, I knew there was a need and people could benefit from this resource.”
Rosales and Sweet are two students out of many who exemplify what it means to be an engaged citizen. Specifically, these are students who make a positive impact on the community by being service-minded. Their choices, as illustrated in their passion project focuses are safe, legal, and ethical. Best of all, they recognize how their personal decisions and actions have an impact beyond themselves. Rosales and Sweet, along with their fellow students, can accurately be described as world-changers starting here in their local communities.
