A Mad Tea Party Part I

Today we begin a two day marathon of PA events, first the PA Summit and then our last PA day at Manual where we are implementing our project. The PA Summit brings our PA students to the University of Denver to meet other students from other schools and celebrate the various different projects that each group are working on. Hopefully, our students from Manual will actually be able to come and participate in this event and meet the other students from KIPP and South High Schools. The exciting part about the Summit, is that it will expose the students to some of the opportunities of higher education that are available to them. They will learn about normal things like college food, dorms, and life, but also will encounter a culture of empowerment and privilege vastly different from at least Manual High School. That is not the say that these students should be pulled away from a high school environment and want to rush off to college, as many aspects of our college campus are sickly sweet, naive, and indicative of an unequal privilege in society, of a fragmentation of America by class, culture, race, heritage, and circumstances, and a hundred other different divisors. But college, fundamentally, is a place of opportunity and as I mentioned before empowerment where students from any background can develop an awareness of how they can change the world. College is a place where the empowerment we talk about in Public Achievement is visibly demonstrated. Hopefully, the Summit will provide the students with a chance to see that.