Please click the link below and take a minute to answer this brief two question survey as we begin to create a mission statement for Hudson High School. This mission statement should succinctly define the purpose for our existance. Thank you.
Please click the link below and take a minute to answer this brief two question survey as we begin to create a mission statement for Hudson High School. This mission statement should succinctly define the purpose for our existance. Thank you.
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Last Saturday night, I had the privilege to attend The State of Our Community, the inaugural event of the Staley B. Keith (SBK) Social Justice Center at the Shiloh Baptist Church. Growing up around politics in Hudson during the 80’s as my father was Hudson’s Democratic Chairman and Youth Commissioner, I vaguely remember Staley, but can remember my father working with him as one of the key black leaders in our community. In his memory, SBK was formed last year by some of his descendants and other local African Americans in Hudson with the sole mission of “empowering young black male leadership and improving our neighborhoods through advocacy and community service.”
The event contained nearly a dozen guest speakers, ranging from Larissa Parks, who spoke about business opportunities and “creating your own economy” to Kamal Johnson and Pamela Badilla, who spoke about the role of family and community involvement in raising children and parents doing so through leading by example to Selha Graham-Cora, who spoke about the role of education and creating learning opportunities to create a 21st century workforce in our community. There was so much information shared that keynote speaker Dr. Alice Green, Director of the Center for Law and Justice, was humbled with the wealth of facts and ideas that were shared by all the speakers before her. She did speak about ways to improve our community such as rebuilding the black family, providing black boys with strong, positive mentors, controlling electronic media’s influence on young people, getting out and dealing with businesses to learn the technology and developing mentoring programs for entrepreneurship, business and related fields. Although this event was primarily focused on African Americans, I would like to extend these ideas to all children in our community. All of them spoke passionately and proactively, with an overall tone of “what can we do” not “what has been done.” I had the opportunity to discuss this endeavor with Quinton Cross, chairman of SBK, and Linda Mussman, founder of TSL and supporter of SBK, last week after both attended a school board meeting and spoke against the use of PINS petitions with the youth in our community. It seems we had more in common than I thought. We all agreed that we have a need for young male leadership in our community and that SBK can be the vehicle to deliver the help that the school needs. We also spoke about improving the relationship between our community and the school district and how the school cannot operate in isolation. As we move forward, school staff plans on identifying students who are in need of community mentoring and finding a way to bring these students together with SBK or anybody else who is willing to be a positive, supportive role model to the children in our community. I am proud to see our community come together and am excited to begin a renewed effort of rebuilding the school-community partnership. Please visit www.staleybkeith.org to find out what can be done to support our efforts. |