“I feel happy when I finish a test in school. I am happy that I am going home this year. I feel happy about all the things I am learning and got taught while being locked up. I feel happy that I am going to finish high school this year,” wrote one student whose words were featured in the inaugural edition of Sonoma County Youth Voice magazine.
Released in January by the Sonoma County Office of Education, the 82-page literary magazine includes dozens of poems from students at the local juvenile justice center where the COE operates the educational programming for grades 7-12.
Pamela Michael of California Poets in the Schools, who had been working with the teens, and Angela Scardina, the COE’s director of alternative education, were inspired to highlight their compositions and connected with Jacob Ramirez, Sonoma COE’s social justice and equity project coordinator (and the project’s editor), to make it happen.
Background
Scardina recalled participating in sessions Michael led, saying “I think this was a great exercise … I even wrote a couple of poems … We always talked about how there’s different ways that we can process information and [one] way is through poetry.
“My hope is that some of them will take this and use this as a strategy when they need to reflect or process what’s going on and ways to help deal with that,” she continued. “My biggest belief is you try to expose children to a lot of variety of ways [to do things], and if one sticks, then great because we want people to be successful and everybody’s different and everybody connects with different methods.”
They typed up poems that the students wrote and sent them to Ramirez, a poet and longtime English and English language development teacher, for consideration when they learned he was working on a project to amplify the voices of youth around the county.
“I’ve always loved Poetry magazine and I really wanted to create a publication that was sort of rooted in the community and something that kids always knew that they could send their work to, whether through the classroom or independently, where their voice could be heard and be amplified in the community,” Ramirez said. The opportunity to uplift the sentiments of this specific student population was the perfect fit.
“I think one of the themes that comes up in the poetry quite often is kids wanting to have guidance and wanting to be seen and represented and not wanting to feel like they’re being left behind or left out or sort of having a sense of erasure,” he continued. “And so, I think that they’re thrilled that they just are having their voices heard and their writing read.” According to the COE, this year’s theme for the magazine is “What I Need to Nourish Myself,” and “encourages students to share diverse experiences and reflect on what they need to heal, nourish and thrive.”
The magazine, which includes translanguage pieces that flow between different languages, has been well received by the community and there is interest from other education leaders in replicating the idea.
Both Scardina and Ramirez were looking forward to celebrating the issue’s release with students in the near future and Scardina had recently shared a copy with a young person who was no longer in the juvenile justice center.
“He was very excited to have it. He put a lot into that and he was happy to have it and thanked me,” Scardina said. Care was put into every detail of the project, including ensuring that copies were made with materials students are legally allowed to have with them on-site.
Scardina added that the board of education has been a great support and that they enjoy seeing the student engagement and equity across programming.
Looking forward
Ramirez said the current plan is to publish two issues of the magazine each year. Students from all the county’s public high schools were encouraged to submit their poetry, flash fiction and autobiographical essays through February for the second edition.
An end-of-year creative writing workshop for some students who are published in the magazine is in development where students will likely focus on a prompt and work alongside a poet to develop a theme for next year.
“I think that we’re in a moment right now where we have an opportunity to just invest in our kids and really that investment is just giving them an opportunity to write freely and write about their experiences and really listen in,” Ramirez said. “Something that we talk about so often in education is we need to listen to our students. And it feels like giving kids an opportunity to write creatively is a scary venture when giving them essay prompts, [but it] can be something that’s more foundational and something that feels safer and more controllable. I just believe so strongly in our ability to give kids freedom to write. I think we’re going to learn a ton about what they need and also how we can make their education more dynamic.”
