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Who would you consider your role model and why?
I think that my dad is probably my role model. Especially during the pandemic, I got to see firsthand how hard he works and how much he cares about his family. He’s a public defender and represents death row inmates. I’m sure all of my friends will roll their eyes reading this because of how much I talk about it, but it’s a hard and noble job, and I really look up to him,
What will you miss most about Masterman? What are you looking forward to most?
I think I’m going to miss how tight knit Masterman is; I’m really going to miss my friends, especially going to the Comcast center after school. I don’t know, I guess I’m going to miss Philadelphia in general. In college, I’m excited to study what I want to study. Classes that I’m not interested in will be replaced by more in-depth classes, and I’m definitely excited to study history on a deeper level, and to really learn it for a reason. I think that I definitely got that at Masterman, but I think that state requirements make it hard in high school.
How did you get involved with the Philadelphia Student Union? Can you tell me a bit about what PSU does?
Photo courtesy of Aden Gonzalez (12-2)
In 10th grade, I just found Student Union in the enrichment catalog. That summer, I had done a program called math corps, where I found that I really liked teaching and talking about education in Philadelphia. I found PSU completely by coincidence, but it really aligned with my interests, so I decided to stick with it.
PSU does a lot of different things. On a Masterman level, we talk about issues at school and in the district, and we talk about how we want to get more students talking and thinking about education reform. We did an information session on toxic school tradition and asbestos in Philly Schools, which was fun and a lot of people came. The citywide PSU meets in West Philly, where the Student Union office is, and we talk about issues in the School District as a whole. We’ve had police for school campaigns, where we had organized protests and speakers at an education board meeting. We’ve gotten meetings with the head of school safety in the district, Kevin Bethel, we’ve had interviews with Dr. Hite, and a few other members of the school district staff as we try to figure out how we can have the school district invest in preventative measures, like guidance counselors, nurses, school psychologists, rather than police officers. More recently, we;ve been doing more statewide things, working with other districts who also don’t get the funding that they deserve.
What is the Bullhorn? How did it come about?
The Bullhorn is Philadelphia's first student-led newspaper independent of the actual district. It started in early 2020, out of the Masterman chapter. Last year, we realized that we had a lot of ideas about how we could work with other schools, but not many ways to reach them. We figured that we could create that platform, and spent a few weeks researching different contacts across the district. We asked around 200 teachers Philly-wide to recruit students, and began meeting on Zoom. We started writing articles and figuring out how to organize ourselves. Right now we have around 40 students from 15 different schools writing for the Bullhorn, and we’ve done work with a group called Nonsponding to Grief, an organization for grieving mothers, and Penn for PILOTS.
Favorite Cheesy joke?
I used to be obsessed with this one. What’s brown and sticky? A stick! What did you think I was going to say?
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