About 150 students from the San Diego Unified School District have accepted the Aspen Challenge. The annual national academic competition allows young people to work together on solutions to some of their community’s most critical problems.
This is the first time the challenge has been done in San Diego. It is a program of the Aspen Institute, founded with the Bezos Family Foundation.
The international nonprofit collaboration is challenging high school students to design solutions to problems happening in their communities. Immigration is one of those problems for many of the ninth through 12th graders participating.
“My grandparents both came to this country illegally," said Xoey Ordóñez, 16, a junior at the San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts (SCPA). "One of the things they faced and I face personally is the feeling of not belonging and people saying 'go back to your country,'" she said when given the microphone during a question-and-answer session.
The students from 19 campuses across the district participated in an all-day informational forum at the Prado in Balboa Park on Wednesday. They learned about all of the challenge opportunities they can investigate over the next 10 weeks, hearing from what the Institute called "expert challengers," who laid out the problems the students might tackle.
One of those challengers was Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego. “Politicians are using the border as a scapegoat and they see the border as their pathway to power," she told the students.
Guerrero spoke on the current gridlock and political fighting happening in Washington over asylum seekers and record immigration at the U.S.-Mexican border, and challenged the high schoolers "to center migrant and immigrant populations by creating a program aimed at educating your community on human rights and promoting human dignity, regardless of immigration status."
Each school has a team of eight students and two of their teachers as coaches. They can also design solutions to problems with homelessness in San Diego, climate change, and its impact on the ocean and the Southern California weather. Mental health support for students is another option.
The team from Lincoln High School is made up of seniors.
“Most of these problems were created before them, and really are not theirs to solve. However, this is their chance to understand these problems and to find a way to find solutions," said Sam Litvin, one of the teachers coaching them.
"(I hope) we can just come together as a huge community, not just San Diego, but a worldwide community being able to help each other when we’re in need."Nicholas Lopez, Lincoln High School senior and Aspen Challenge participant
Despite the tough talk and topics, there is hope for the future.
San Diego Unified’s own Superintendent, Lamont Jackson, gave the students encouragement and an apology in his opening remarks.
“The first thing I’m going to say is ‘I’m sorry’. I’m sorry we have not been able to solve some of these challenges, but I hope that you do better than we did," Jackson said.
Nicholas Lopez, 18, a member of the Lincoln High School teams said he accepted the apology and the challenge ahead.
"(I hope) we can just come together as a huge community, not just San Diego, but a worldwide community being able to help each other when we’re in need," Lopez said.
All the teams return on May 1 to present their solutions to a panel of expert judges. The top three teams selected will then travel to a national competition in Colorado at the original Aspen Institute headquarters.
The first Aspen Challenge was launched in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2013. Since then it has expanded each year to include partnerships with school districts in Denver, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Louisville, Miami, New Orleans, and Brooklyn.
