By Keva Carr, 12th grade student at Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans. 

Note: Students at the Center is an independent writing-based program based in New Orleans.  In the aftermath of Katrina, the program continues to work to engage and empower displaced New Orleans students through the written medium.

I thought I had walked into Students at the Center (SAC) backwards, with a blindfold over my eyes and a false statement of what SAC really was.  But then I turned around and slowly realized this is why I was meant to be here.

The teachers were different: It wasn’t always their input but ours as well.  It was their techniques that raised my hands to remove the blindfolds.  We sat in a circle.  We told stories and discussed real issues that many teachers don’t care about.

They turned some of my inventions into creations.  I love being in class, because it helps make me who I will become.  I also learned that reading can be fun.  I remember it like it was yesterday, reading the book Coffee Will Make You Black in three days.  I was so excited, as if I had written my first book.  SAC gives you a chance to enhance the creativity you have or don’t have.  I remember when I first did my movie that took weeks and weeks to do.  I had accomplished something much more than reading a book in three days or writing a poem.  I had written a script that became a movie.  I love SAC for what it brought to me.  And I love myself for what I brought to it.

I think it’s beautiful that high school graduates are still a part of it.  They are like inspirations to me.  I admire them.  They teach me what I don’t know and help me improve what I do.

We also travel and run workshops teaching teachers to do things the SAC way.  And when we travel, it isn’t all work and no play.  We have a lot of fun.  SAC has an atmosphere that is so comfortable it can be made every time a new class comes.  I remember one year being worried about whether the newcomers would adjust like all my old SAC members did.  But they proved me wrong.  And at that moment I knew not to doubt SAC ways, because they never disappointed me.  I have been a part of SAC for five years.  And I will continue to be a part of it, because I do still have a lot of growing to do, and SAC will help me blossom. 

This essay was published previously in Education Organizing (No. 17, 11/04), a quarterly newsletter of the Center for Community Change.

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