The feeling in Senora Carmen Wilson’s fifth hour is one of seriousness as she has her Advanced Placement Spanish Language class work on WE Learning Surveys. WLS are where the students learn about the effects of poverty and education. The students are coming up with their own national projects. It’s where they can advocate and they can go into Geary County to work in a kindergarten class and help the small students who speak English as their second language. They’ll be there for about twenty hours helping the kids there that are in poverty.

“I think it’s helpful for the kids to put into practice for what they’re learning, and how they learn about the poverty here in the United States,” Wilson said. “They’ve done a lot of research about here in Kansas and how poverty has affected here as well. They were really surprised to learn about that, and how worse it was in Latin American countries. It made them aware of what’s going on and the importance of education so that they can stop the cycle.”

She is having the class work on this project so that the students can further expand their views of how poverty and education mix, and what they can do here in Kansas to put an end to it.

“I’m going to mentor a Hispanic selective mute, because I feel like since I’m an outward person and I really like to socialize I feel like I can help teach this kid how to socialize as well. Not cure his mutism, but help further his thinking and benefit from my personality. It will also help further my understanding of the language and the culture,” senior John Domingo said.

Domingo is just one of the many students that are going to be volunteering with the children in Geary County.

Senior Juliana Schwartz has taken Spanish since her freshman year, and has always been interested in the language.

“I think it’s an awesome thing what John is doing,” Schwartz said. “I think it will be really beneficial, and I wasn’t aware those opportunities existed. I’m glad he’s taking advantage of them, and I would definitely love to get involved and instead of just learning about poverty and actually taking action against it. That would be awesome.”

Schwartz wants to be an architect when she graduates and wants to go overseas and be able to communicate with the local people there.

“I think it would be really helpful to know the language and be able to communicate with other people because people over there think they need to learn English so that we can communicate, but if you make an effort to learn someone else’s language it shows you care more about people and you build a stronger bond that way,” Schwartz said.