- Hispanic Heritage Month kicked off at William Allen High with a flag raising ceremony on Friday
- The Allentown school is 75% Hispanic, and 25% exclusively Spanish-speaking, according to the principal
- Hispanic Heritage Month runs Sept. 15 to Oct. 15
Dozens of students gathered outside William Allen High on Friday to see a kick-off event for Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.
The school has an estimated 75% Hispanic population, according to its principal, and 25% of students speak only Spanish, with little English.
Two students were chosen to introduce the ceremony: Aury Furnear and Santia Dominicci, both seniors at William Allen, and both Hispanic.
"We feel proud to be Latino," Dominicci said. "It doesn't matter if it's September or the month, there are people who feel good with being Latinos, and I'm part of that."
"I feel like a tree is a place where people grow and everything comes together, you know, like family trees, and different things like that. So it's where everybody comes together at a tree, sometimes you will see people, you know, taking a break under a tree reading a book or whatever, are gathering under a tree. And the leaves of the tree are each flag from a Hispanic country. So that's why we picked this flag, there was major flags that we could pick from, but I just think that it symbolizes how we are growing within our Hispanic community."Nicole Singer, assistant principal at William Allen High School
Growth
The specific flag that was chosen depicts a tree with dozens of leaves. Each leaf is illustrated with the flag of a different Hispanic country or territory.
According to the organizer of the flag raising, Assistant Principal Nicole Singer, it was chosen because it represents growth.
"I feel like a tree is a place where people grow and everything comes together, you know, like family trees, and different things like that. So it's where everybody comes together at a tree, sometimes you will see people, you know, taking a break under a tree reading a book or whatever, are gathering under a tree," Singer said. "And the leaves of the tree are each flag from a Hispanic country. So that's why we picked this flag, there was major flags that we could pick from, but I just think that it symbolizes how we are growing within our Hispanic community."
Both students who spoke at the ceremony expressed that they had experienced acts of racism — frequently and sometimes overtly.
"It's everywhere," Furnear said. "It's not like I can even say it's only here, because it's everywhere in the world."
Progress and potential
One of the barriers some Hispanic students at William Allen High face is language, Singer said. But she added that it's improving — one of the silver linings of education during COVID-19.
"It's easy for teachers to accommodate their students," Singer said. "We also just partnered up with a place called Brainfuse, which is an online tutoring service, and that comes out as well in like 145 different languages. So we are getting the students the resources, to be able to understand the education that we're giving them in their own language."
Principal Frank Derrick agreed, and noted the curriculum content is also designed that way.
"The newer online instructional resources, it allows the teachers to, it gives a lot more opportunities, because everything now is at your fingertips to find, so whereas before you were kind of beholden to whatever was in the textbook, and that textbook company was more probably geared towards middle America," Derrick said.
Singer also highlighted their efforts on assigning works written by Latino authors.
Both administrators said that there is still room to grow a more diverse curriculum, and that their approach is improving but not perfect.
National Hispanic Heritage Month is designed to "pay tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society," according to the official U.S. website.
It runs Sept.15 to Oct. 15.
