For the second year in a row, freshman students competed against each other with their social justice presentations.

In January, freshman students started a group project on something they thought needed awareness and needed to be talked about. They were told to do extensive research on their topic and that they would compete with their projects in the black box.

“ We thought it would be cool to incorporate a large project that gave the students some autonomy and some choice in what they do. With my class, we did one day a week for a long time, and then after spark week, I had a couple solid good weeks where they worked on it every single day. And then we had a final competition in the black box,” said English teacher Amy Alderson.

The idea of the project was teach students about topics that need to be more talked about. They encouraged students to pick a topic they could relate to.

“Choose what you’re passionate about and do that,” said freshman Jasmine Monda.

During the competition in the black box, the students would present their project to other students from the seven freshman English classes, and then the judges would decide a winner or winning group.

“It was just the freshmen because the teachers on the freshman team that did it,” Alderson said.

The winners were Arianna Knowles, Chloe Dones, Kayla Keaskowski and Amber Lehman for their presentation on mental health. It was about struggles of having anxiety and ADHD.

“I chose mental health because I suffer from anxiety and a lot of my friends have depression and anxiety, so I had a lot of knowledge on it. A lot of people here don’t know about it and a lot of people get bullied because of it. Everytime I see people get bullied, it hurts me as well because it’s not their fault; they had no choice,” Lehman said.

Along with learning about topics, students also got to learn a lot about how to cite sources and how to present for something like this.

“It definitely taught me how to present better. My teacher gave me some tips on how to present myself, how to I should talk and stuff, and I think I’ll be able to talk a lot better,” Lehman said.

This project has also prepared them more for later in their high school career for things like History Fair.

“I do think that it will be less of a shock when they get to History Fair or some of the other big research things they have to do later on,” Alderson said.