“I believe that it is important for people in the community to support and help our neighbors. So the idea of the meeting was necessarily to meet my role as an educator, but to meet in my role as a citizen and a humanitarian,”  Cornelius Rish, social studies teacher, said. There have been many meetings held by the school staff due to the ICE killings and overall violence in our streets by ICE to support families in the community and make sure everyone feels safe. Rish held the original meeting on Friday, Jan. 9. Quite a few teachers and students attended and a plan was put in place to keep people safe.

The staff in charge of these meetings, mainly Rish and biology teacher Stacy Bartlett, were focusing on people who are not already behind on rent, bills and food but focusing on keeping people ahead. They are trying to get rid of any type of stress that people in our community may have through needing to pay the bills or buy food and are trying to keep people from getting behind.

“One of our coalition goals is to help these families with their rent, their bills and their utilities before they get behind, and so we partnered with the first Presbyterian Church in Stillwater to fundraise and collect donations to help with that area, and then through the church, they are going to help to distribute those funds,” Rish explained.

The motivation for holding the meeting was through compassion, humanity and making sure the students at our school feel safe so they have the unrestricted ability to learn without having to stress about outside factors like the ICE violence. They also hope to make sure that all families in our community have their needs met, no matter what those needs may be.

“The truth is, when we have kids in our class for the entire year, they become ‘our kids’, and we refer to them outside of school as our kids. And there’s a mama bear inside me that if someone hurt my kids, I would be angry, and if they have needs, I would step in to fill those needs because if they are distracted, they can’t learn,” Bartlett explained.

The goals of the meeting were to support students and families and help people in our community who have been impacted by the recent events, such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shootings in downtown Minneapolis and ICE’s presence in the area. By supplying the families with the donations of food and money received as a result of the meeting, the hope is that it will help people not only in school but at home as well.

The goal of the meetings was not to substitute what the district is doing but to complement what they have done, and “fill in some of the gaps that they missed,” Rish said.

There were many students who attended these meetings to do what they could to help and also to learn about ideas that others had. Before these meetings, there was no established plan and a lack of action that students could see.

“I saw a plan, I wasn’t really expecting a full, solid plan, but instead for of a rant, but I saw a plan. People had actions they wanted to take and the teachers had something that they wanted to do, and then try to work through the school system to make that happen,” senior Tolu Tanimojo said.

The staff have put on a few meetings since the original one and they will continue to hold meetings on an as-needed basis and try to get together once a week as a large group. They will also continue to have daily communication between administrators and staff through social media groups.

Bartlett expressed how the meetings were extremely passionate and very action-oriented. She explained how schools are the front lines for figuring out things we do not know yet and she wanted to help out and fill in a gap in society.

The actions moving forward will require a lot of cooperation with the community to make donations of both monetary and material goods, especially for rent, bills and food. The meetings have raised $11,472 and have assisted a total of seven families with monetary and material needs thus far.

“If people want to donate, they could come see me, and I would share with them the community link, where they could go online and safely donate, and every dime goes to Stillwater families,” Rish said.