D14 Town Hall - SOMOS student activists

Our D14 Virtual Town Hall last week was a conversation with student advocates called SOMOS, students at Baltimore City College (in D14) who have been advocating for students and non-English speakers. Here is the full video.

SOMOS stands for Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society. It was started by Yaslin Machuca (who is on our D14 Staff now) while she was a student at City College. We heard from her, as well as current student advocate Kimberly Vazquez, recent graduate Scarleth Aleman, and their advisor Spanish teacher Franca Muller Paz.

Kimberly outlined the work SOMOS is doing now: organizing students to demand a safe return to school, and working to ensure that students have internet access for virtual learning - and even after virtual learning. They recently won a huge victory by convincing Comcast to double the internet speed for their Internet Essentials program which is their least expensive to help address the digital divide.

Scarleth talked about the issues with the composite scores and entrance into high school. The PARC (not MCAP) tests are in English, there was no way for anyone to take it in a different language or get help. So while they were unable to take the test, their score was Zero rather than accommodating them. So many students did not get high scores on those tests and could not enter some of our elite high schools. SOMOS continues to work on this issue, and has a diverse set of students working on it.

Yaslin talked about how SOMOS started, with gathering of non-English speakers at the school to share their culture with other students. Then they got to be advocates when they discovered this problem with testing as described above. Yaslin as since graduated from University of Baltimore and works in my office.

Franca Muller Paz talked about student activism and her role as advisor helping the students. She added a bit about how teachers are feeling coming into in-person learning options.