Reflection: Eduardo Ramirez

A famous quote says, "it takes a whole village to raise a child."

I never thought about the quote thoroughly, but when I sat down and really reflected on how I've been raised, I realized that our school community is the reason why our students are successful.

I really started to become interested in educational equity when I visited a lower-income school for soccer. The student proficiency levels were very low compared to our school. I researched and found that some of these children come from low-income families, classes have many students per teacher, and the school lacks resources.

I then thought about the major problem that the United States currently faces; educational inequity. This brought certain questions to my mind, such as why did this become a problem, and what does it take to solve it? Therefore, when we started Project Citizen, I knew exactly what I wanted to research.

Throughout the process of Project Citizen, I have improved several skills such as time management and teamwork. I have learned a lot throughout my research and have been able to create an important opinion over education matters. I have learned the history and current situations of the education system in the US. I was able to learn how I am able to contact my representative and policymakers of New Jersey. Being able to understand the current situation of the school system in New Jersey and being able to reach out to my representative has improved me as an active citizen. I understand what it takes to come up with a valuable opinion on a certain issue. Understanding the process of lawmaking and the importance that our representatives have on such a process has shown me the importance that it is to write to my representative. By writing to my representative about certain topics that I am interested in, I demonstrate active participation and show that I am an active citizen. These skillsets that I have acquired from working on Project Citizen will certainly help me through my college career and later on in life.

In addition, I recently wrote a letter to my representative, Tom Malinowski. I demanded that students across the country should have access to a safe school environment and that we should fund afterschool programs to create a bond between the students, the school, and the community. Representative Malinowski responded to my letter with kind words and agreed to the ideas I had to share with him. This really showed me the importance of voicing my opinions, and that our representatives are there to hear us.