There's a radical - and wonderful - new idea here . . . that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world." - Deborah Meier, Educator
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Minnesota Students Take Aim at Ebola by WKCD|February 12, 2015
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—Senior Isaac Frans was looking forward to joining his school's service trip to Sierra Leone last summer when the Ebola outbreak dashed all plans. “We were going to see what grassroots charity is all about,” Frans told a reporter from the local newspaper, the Star-Tribune. “We wrote letters, learned about this community and this country.” It was hard, he said, “to watch a small outbreak turn into this huge outbreak.” It was harder, still, “to realize that I lived in a place that cared, but people only cared when they thought it would come here.” Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Frans set about organizing a summit to raise awareness about Ebola’s impact and the local response to it. The effort was part of a new course at the Blake School, a 115 year-old private school in Minneapolis with a long tradition of educating students to be global citizens. The course, "Global Theories, Local Realties," designed by Dion Crushson, director of international programs at Blake, had no curriculum. Instead, Crushon charged Frans and his classmates with developing action plans to confront global problems. For Frans and project partners Austin Echtenkamp and Eli Makovetsky, few global issues seemed as urgent as the Ebola epidemic, even if optimistic projections that it would subside—in the short run—proved true.
In November 2014, the students invited politicians, health care experts, and African community members to take part in a panel discussion. With the help of fellow classmates, the pair hosted the public event at the University of Minnesota, welcoming a number of prominent panelists including representatives from African Immigrant Services, the Minnesota Hospital Association, the Metropolitan Airports Commission, and the nonproft OneVillage Partners which works on economic development in West Africa. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken ‘66 and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison sent in pre-recorded videos. For senior Eli Makovetsky, building empathy, at the conference and person-to-person, was crucial. “Ebola is not here and, because the United States is a First World country, it’s not going to spread here," he told the Star-Tribue. "But what can we do to help West Africa? We [need] to decrease the idea of separation and apathy.” On February 5, 2015, an article in The New York Times reported the first weekly rise in new Ebola cases this year, countering the downward trend in the disease that has ravaged three West African nations. The 124 new cases—39 in Guinea, five in Liberia and 80 in Sierra Leone for the week ended Feb. 1—amounted to a relatively small increase from the 99 new cases the week before, and paled in comparison with the hundreds of new cases per week that traumatized those countries and alarmed the world in the later months of 2014. Still, it alarmed the experts. A representative from the World Health Organization told the Times,"The virus has told us this week, loud and clear, ‘I am not going away the way you’re expecting me to.'" Isaac Frans and his project partners know their work sustaining local awareness is not done.
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