School: San Francisco Friends School
    San Francisco, California, United States

2 students, ages 13 worked together to complete this Doors to Diplomacy project on March 14, 2012. They have participated in Doors to Diplomacy in the following year(s): 2011, 2012

Classes and Teachers: Jodi Pickering, Gavi, Maddy

E-Mail contact:

Our School's Web Site: http://www.sffriendsschool.org/

1. Description of Our Team

We are two eighth grade students from the San Francisco Friends School in San Francisco, California. Both Gavi and Maddy are 13 years old. We decided to do something about immigration because we have studied about it this year and Maddy’s mother is an immigration lawyer. We worked on putting content into the website in an interesting and appealing manner. We would like to thank anyone else who had confidence in us for the duration of our project. During the project Gavi wrote three articles, and Maddy wrote four articles. We presented them to each other for editing. We both collaborated in the final decisions on the appearance and content together.

2. Summary of Our Project

Our project is about unaccompanied minors immigrating to the United States. Our goal is to educate people around the world about immigration of unaccompanied minors and let them know what the risks are of sending an unaccompanied minor to the United States.

3. Our Computer and Internet Access

A. Percentage of students using the Internet at home:more than 50%

B. Number of workstations with Internet access in the classroom:more than 6

C. Connection speed used in the classroom:dedicated connection

D. Number of years our classroom has been connected to the Internet:more than 6

4. Problems We Had To Overcome

One of our biggest problems was gathering statistics. While there are many statistics available to the public about immigration in general, there are not as many about minor immigration let alone unaccompanied minor immigration.

5. Our Project Sound Bite

The Immigration of Unaccompanied Minors to the United States.

6. How did your activities and research for this Doors to Diplomacy Project support standards, required coursework and curriculum standards?

In the eighth grade, classes at San Francisco Friends School go to the Central Valley of California to address the issues that people there face, including immigration. To begin the year, we learned about the project, 67 Sueños, a project about youth who are in the US illegally and the challenges they face daily. We took this and researched more about US immigration and how children are part of this.

1) What information tools & technologies did you used to complete your Doors to Diplomacy project?

We used the school’s Apple MacBook laptops at school. Gavi has been using a Macbook home and Maddy has also been using a Mac, but she also uses a Dell. We had access to two computers at school and at least one at home. We used wix.com for our website as well as noodletools.com and http://citationmachine.net for our bibliography.

2) In what ways did you act as "ambassadors" and spokespersons for your Doors to Diplomacy project both on-line and in person.

A big part of our eighth grade curriculum is immigration and we hope to be able to tie our project in with the curriculum during classes.

3) What has been the impact of your project on your community?

So far, our project hasn’t had an impact on the community but we plan on sharing it with our class as part of our Central Valley studies and possibly coming up with an action project to help youth who are illegally in the United States.

4) How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

Our teacher for our project was Jodi Pickering, a seventh grade humanities teacher at our school. We also interviewed Hayley Upshaw, an attorney at Legal Services for Children, an agency that helps unaccompanied youth become US citizens. LSC is a local agency, just blocks away from our school.

5) Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises (Optional)

During this project, we learned a lot about child immigration and how relevant it is in our every day lives and in our communities. We also discovered that statistics, facts, and easily comprehensible information on this subject is very hard to find. This prompted us to find first hand looks on the current status of unaccompanied minor immigration.