Released in January by the Sonoma County Office of Education, the 82-page literary magazine includes dozens of poems from students at the local juvenile justice center where the COE operates the educational programming for grades 7-12.
Pamela Michael of California Poets in the Schools, who had been working with the teens, and Angela Scardina, the COE’s director of alternative education, were inspired to highlight their compositions and connected with Jacob Ramirez, Sonoma COE’s social justice and equity project coordinator (and the project’s editor), to make it happen.
“My hope is that some of them will take this and use this as a strategy when they need to reflect or process what’s going on and ways to help deal with that,” she continued. “My biggest belief is you try to expose children to a lot of variety of ways [to do things], and if one sticks, then great because we want people to be successful and everybody’s different and everybody connects with different methods.”
They typed up poems that the students wrote and sent them to Ramirez, a poet and longtime English and English language development teacher, for consideration when they learned he was working on a project to amplify the voices of youth around the county.
“I’ve always loved Poetry magazine and I really wanted to create a publication that was sort of rooted in the community and something that kids always knew that they could send their work to, whether through the classroom or independently, where their voice could be heard and be amplified in the community,” Ramirez said. The opportunity to uplift the sentiments of this specific student population was the perfect fit.
The magazine, which includes translanguage pieces that flow between different languages, has been well received by the community and there is interest from other education leaders in replicating the idea.
Both Scardina and Ramirez were looking forward to celebrating the issue’s release with students in the near future and Scardina had recently shared a copy with a young person who was no longer in the juvenile justice center.
“He was very excited to have it. He put a lot into that and he was happy to have it and thanked me,” Scardina said. Care was put into every detail of the project, including ensuring that copies were made with materials students are legally allowed to have with them on-site.
Scardina added that the board of education has been a great support and that they enjoy seeing the student engagement and equity across programming.
An end-of-year creative writing workshop for some students who are published in the magazine is in development where students will likely focus on a prompt and work alongside a poet to develop a theme for next year.
“I think that we’re in a moment right now where we have an opportunity to just invest in our kids and really that investment is just giving them an opportunity to write freely and write about their experiences and really listen in,” Ramirez said. “Something that we talk about so often in education is we need to listen to our students. And it feels like giving kids an opportunity to write creatively is a scary venture when giving them essay prompts, [but it] can be something that’s more foundational and something that feels safer and more controllable. I just believe so strongly in our ability to give kids freedom to write. I think we’re going to learn a ton about what they need and also how we can make their education more dynamic.”