‘Call to action’ part of Olathe’s MLK celebration for middle, high school kids

To Olathe’s middle- and high-school students, “a call to action” means looking at issues like gender inequality and civil unrest.

Sunday afternoon, organizers of the 21st annual Olathe Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration shared several student projects on this theme as part of a competition. The ceremony was streamed online and on Olathe’s government TV channel. The contest is held by the Olathe Human Rights Commission with help from Garmin, the Olathe School District and the Olathe Library.

Olathe North senior Kaitlyn Savoy, who won second place in the contest’s high school written-entry category, saw the theme as a chance to relate to all her peers’ viewpoints without judgment.

“A call to action could be talking about anything: racism, sexism — any problem society faces,” said Kaitlyn, 17.

“I wanted to communicate with as many people as possible. If you hear something that contradicts your beliefs, it might make you less likely to listen to whatever that person has to say.”

Her essay described the way people might use a bridge that was breaking, and, for various reasons, not do anything about its crumbling structure until it’s too late.

“Big problems that society faces aren’t very sudden most of the time, and they usually are noticed well before they’re confronted. So this person who’s just walking by, seeing this over and over again, and they can’t bring themselves to do anything — I use that to show how problems don’t go away if you don’t do anything about them,” she said.

The contest’s wide parameters appealed to her.

“I honestly just enjoyed the freedom of being able to write what I want. There wasn’t a template I had to conform to; I could talk about what I believe without starting an argument — just conveying an idea,” she said.

For their third-place multimedia video entry, Olathe South seniors McKenna Cowles and Liz Stoeck involved numerous classmates conveying a message of unity in the face of an increasingly divided country.

“We’re not as different as the world makes us out to be. We’re two sides of the same coin. The country is splitting further apart, but we can recognize similarities, and we can come together from that,” McKenna said.

Both of them wrote poems on the call-to-action theme, and they combined their best elements when creating the script for their video. The video also used clips of marches led by King but also more recent marches from both left- and right-wing groups.

“We kind of wanted to recognize the division that was happening, because we started the video process in early October. With election season, we wanted to recognize the split that was happening within the nation,” Liz said.

Both said numerous teachers from their school stopped them in the hallways to say they had shown the video in their classes.

Overall, for the contest, the high school first place winners, who took home $300 each, were Kutina Cabrera, Skylar Saragusa and Jackson Brown. Skylar also received a $500 best in show award.

Middle school first place winners, who received $200 prizes, were Jackson Roller, Coryn Jesperson and the team of Riley Lewis and Sadie Vo.

Visual arts winners of a public vote, based on their displays at Indian Creek Library, were Olathe North’s Sarah Manuel and academic extension classes at Prairie Trail Middle School. Mission Trail Middle School and Olathe West High School also won awards for the largest number of students entries in the district.

This story was originally published January 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Call to action’ part of Olathe’s MLK celebration for middle, high school kids."