What started as a challenge to effect change, ended with a program that helps students district-wide ...every month. The young women behind the project are this week's KRLD Difference Makers.
Brooke Lopez is the school liason for a program called IGNITE, which is a non-profit dedicated to building political ambition in young women.
Lopez has been working with a group of young women from Skyline High School in the Dallas ISD for the past four years, meeting with them once a week after school teaching the students about civic engagement, politics, and government.
She presented her students with a challenge.
“We started talking about how do we make some type of policy that’s going to affect others and leave a legacy for students to come,” Lopez said. “Ultimately the students came up with trying to effectuate menstrual equity on campus by providing free pads and tampons. I was really excited to help them get this off the ground.”
Jeorgina Gonzalez, 17, is a senior at Skyline High School and says it’s a big issue for female students.
“There’s, like, a lot of incidents where girls are on their period and they don’t have the right resources or they have to skip school to go to the store or to go back home because the school doesn’t provide those resources,” Jeorgina said. “So the absences accumulate and they might fail classes.”
Former DISD board trustee Bernadette Nutall heard about their project when she joined the group from IGNITE as a guest speaker.
“She immediately said, ‘I love this idea. I’m taking straight to facilities and we’re not only going to try to effectuate this idea at Skyline, we are going to do our best to effectuate this across the Dallas ISD district as a whole,” Lopez said.
It started with a pilot program and the students gathered research for a year.
“We would divide the work. We would stay after school constantly to make sure that we were getting the right numbers so we could provide the right facts and statistics for our campaign,” said Vanessa Medellin, 17, a senior at Skyline.
The pilot program lasted a year and then the students presented the results of their research to the district.
“About two or three weeks ago we got a call from the district. They told us [this program] is now been installed in all of the high schools. All secondary schools have it in their new build blueprints and [the district] will be working on middle schools in the upcoming year,” Lopez said.
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For these students, it’s just the beginning.
“IGNITE helped me find my passion in government and law and about injustices,” Jeorgina said. “This program really helped me.”
Jeorgina plans to study political science at UNT after graduation.
We're proud to call IGNITE and these students this week's KRLD Difference Makers.
If you know someone making a difference in the community, send us an email at differencemaker@krld.com.
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