Friday, January 8, 2016

Parkland Students Present Play to Students at Philo-Hill Magnet Academy


In the Thursday, Jan. 7 edition of the Winston-Salem Journal, reporter Arika Herron write about a play that Parkland High School students presented to students at Philo-Hill Magnet Academy. Photographer David Rolfe took the pictures.

Here is an excerpt:

Gay. Ghetto. Cocky. Promiscuous. Nerd. Snob. Immigrant. Outcast.

She’s a fast girl, hanging around the wrong people.

That boy’s a no-­good thug.

These are just a few of the things that Stacie Pelsinger’s theatre arts students at Parkland High School have heard about themselves.

“It’s about how people first perceive you,” said Pelsinger, who does the project each year. “And people get bullied because of (those perceptions).”

In their original work, “I Can Be Anything,” the Parkland students are setting the record straight.

“I’m a black, African American male with a 3.5 GPA,” said senior Cameron Wagner, who plans to play football in college next year. But, Wagner said, that’s not most people’s first impression of him.

“They say, ‘He’s probably slinging drugs. He’s going to end up in jail,’” Cameron said.

People assume that Elijah Booth, a senior, only likes to play ball. Really, he likes to sing. He might join the student choir at North Carolina Central next year, where he’ll be majoring in education.
For Shaquayvia Christian, it was: “She’ll be pregnant by senior year.”

“Well I’m a senior,” she said from the stage at Philo-­Hill Magnet Middle School, where the Parkland students took their production Wednesday. “Do I look pregnant?”

Shaquayvia does not, and is not.

But, Pelsinger said, the things that people think about young people can have detrimental effects. So she invited her three theatre arts classes to push back against those perceptions.

After the students wrote down what people thought of them, Pelsinger asked them to write down how they see themselves and what they want. She took the written assignments and created a script with the 45 strongest statements.

“It ends up being a very powerful play,” she said.

For the full story, go to Winston-Salem Journal


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