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Summer 2006 Newsletter Online
The Jubilee Newsletter from the Summer of 2006 is now online. It can be viewed here. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Civil Rights Day
An amazing event took place at Jubilee on March 24. We called it Civil Rights Day.The idea for a Civil Rights Day celebration came from students in the 5th and 6th
grade class. The class decided that they wanted to invite veterans of the Civil Rights
Movement to a ceremony in which they could learn from their activist elders, and
honor them for their accomplishments. They took the responsibility for organizing
the program themselves. At the ceremony, a group of nine civil Rights workers
were introduced with these words from a student: "We're here today to honor these
people who have looked segregation in the eyes with courage and determination and
refused to be treated unequally." Then, each of the veterans was introduced by a
student, who gave a brief summary of their work in the movement. After the
activist spoke, the same student presented him or her with a medal which the
students had designed. The medal said “You gave us a better future.
Children's Anti-Gun-Violence Campaign
In January, 2004 a former student from Jubilee was shot and killed. He was the third
former student to die from gun fire. When Jubilee students were asked what they
could do to change the high mortality rate from gun violence in our city, there was a
discussion, out of which came the students' plan for a children's campaign.
Students spoke in schools, led discussions with students about guns, drugs and
violence, and collected signatures for anti-gun-violence petitions. They presented
the petitions to Governor Rendell, City Council, and State Representative Jim
Roebuck. In the spring they also spoke at a City Council meeting on gun violence,
and organized a Children's March Against Gun Violence, which took place in June.
Perhaps the highpoint of this project was when the students were invited to speak at
a Small Arms Conference at the United Nations on June 29. The students were
invited by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to make a
presentation on their Children's Campaign Against Gun Violence. The students
had the use of a conference room, where they spoke to representatives from Ghana,
the Fiji Islands , the Philippines , Haiti , Guatemala , Switzerland , Burundi and
the United States . The response to their presentation was overwhelmingly positive.
The students were asked to write a report for a United Nations publication on gun
violence around the world, due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2007.