Balmville's "Kindness Crew" presents on Environmental Justice at Youth Symposium

Tucked away in a quiet corner of Balmville School, a fifth grade class known as The Kindness Crew, has been busy learning and discovering along side their classroom teachers and two student teachers about the umbrella topic of Environmental Justice. Through picture books, maps, data, non-fiction reading, and videos, these twenty fifth graders set off learning about the once young people like William Kamkwamba, Greta Thunberg, Isatou Ceesay, and Wangari Maathai who brought awareness and change to environmental injustices in their own communities and spread their message throughout the world. The idea of young activists led this class to discovering intentional injustices to communities of poverty and color in the United States and the government's failure to protect these communities. A quiet classroom no longer! Now, the room is bustling with excitement, passion, and thirst for uncovering why and how environmental factors are affecting low income communities more, and drawing parallels between their own Newburgh and surrounding towns communities. The Kindness Crew explored the need for green space in cities and urban areas, food injustice related to lack of green space and the intentionality of not building large grocery stores in cities, government's knowledge of lead pipes poisoning the citizens, lack of clean water access to some U.S. cities and land reservations of Indigenous People, water and land pollution, and environmental racism. This learning empowered the students to want to read more, produce writing to express their ideas, questions, and concerns, and listen more intently to their teachers, student teachers, and peers. 

 

The culminating project brought this crew of young activists to design their own call to action. These projects were presented and displayed at the Transformative Classroom Learning Youth Conference held at Marist College on May 23, 2023. The conference was an awesome and mind-blowing display of a year-long Culturally Relevant Education cohort learning guided by Dr. Jevon Hunter, the Woods-Beals Endowed Chair for Urban Education at SUNY Buffalo. After hearing so much about Dr. Hunter from their teachers, the Kindness Crew was able to meet him while engaging in conversation and excitement for their learning and projects.

 

Story and photos submitted by Crisan Crozzoli