Citizen Schools students take initiative on drug awareness

This month, Citizen Schools students at Joseph George Middle School in San Jose, California created a drug awareness campaign on campus. Staff and students worked with the Leadership Academy, a group of 30 seventh and eighth grade Citizen Schools students responsible for promoting school spirit and bringing attention to school-wide issues.

Lily Rodriguez, an eighth grader, is the President of the Student Council at Joseph George. She took the initiative to utilize Citizen Schools’ after-school program to help create posters on substance abuse and jumpstart further conversations about middle school drug use.

While working on the campaign, students learned the art of problem solving and teamwork. They put their heads together and developed a system to efficiently design and create the posters in order to accomplish all they had to do between school and the campaign. Learning from the past, students decided not to choose overly-complicated images. They had the opportunity to critically analyze the benefits and limitations of student-made posters:

“It might make a difference to students that their peers are sending them the anti-drug message, and I think it’s a good idea,” said Mya Cuevas, a 7th grade student who was working on one of the posters, “but I know that posters are not enough to stop drug abuse.” 

After the posters were created and showcased around campus, Lily Rodriguez and the student council ran discussion groups on the topic of drug awareness in several classes. Rodriguez said, “We know that this is just the start of a longer conversation about drugs. The student council just wanted to begin by making sure that there was an awareness of the problem. We’re going to bring more speakers and other ideas to our school. We just want to make sure that we are talking about this big issue for our community.”

We are proud of our Citizen Schools students for taking the initiative to address important issues like this one.