PUPs program helps elementary students get engaged with community

The Community PUPs after they received the resolution from Common Council. (Photo courtesy of Emma Cox)

Standing in front of alders and city government officials, 11 fourth- and fifth-graders sang, “No education, no house, no food, you need to get your education in school… Someone goes homeless every 30 seconds, so we need to stop it so we don’t break the record.”

They let all of those in attendance know that homelessness matters, and everyone in the room immediately got on their feet at the end of the song. The alders voted to pass a resolution to honor this group of students who brought awareness and action to issues surrounding homelessness.

This group is the Mendota School Community Peers Uplifting Peers (PUPs). During the 2015-16 school year, PUPs met once a week to discuss major issues in the community.

At the Common Council meeting in May, PUPs culminated their year of discussions by asking for action. One young girl said 1440 kids in Madison schools are homeless, so these students do not get the chance to learn how to read. Every student called for the city to make changes to education, shelters, high rent prices and lack of resources.

Debra Minahan, a third grade teacher at Mendota Elementary, and District 18 alder Rebecca Kemble worked together to create the PUPs program after Kemble taught Minahan’s third grade class about districts the previous school year. They wanted to better involve students with the community.

“They have the power to make changes in their community,” Minahan said. “They have so many amazing powerful things to say and I think you often don’t give kids that opportunity.”

At the beginning of the school year, students who joined PUPs  were sent home with an assignment to start researching topics that impacted their community. According to Minahan, she did not want to pick out a focus for the group. 

The students came back with a list of 30 different topics, which was narrowed down to three ideas: homelessness, environment and police accountability. Various community members came to speak to the PUPs to help further educate them on each issue.

The students split into three teams to prepare for a debate where they discussed the issues and ultimately voted to focus on homelessness for the school year. 

Throughout the project, two interns from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Morgridge Center for Public Service worked with the PUPs.

Nasitta Keita and Emma Cox, both sophomores, became interested in working with the Community PUPs during a First-Year Interest Group at UW–Madison. The main focus of the group was social justice and service learning – a perfect combination for working with the elementary school students.

Keita enjoyed watching the students grow interested in the topics. She said the children wanted to completely get rid of homelessness and as the weeks progressed their passion only grew.

“It’s important to start doing things like this young because they all had a chance to take a leadership role and to come up with a project and actually solve through with it and do it all by themselves which actually shows they are valuable members of our society,” Keita said.

Cox said that originally the leaders did not know what they wanted to come out of the program, but the students’ motivation helped guide the program towards the end goal of presenting the research to the common council. 

According to Cox, the students gave her new perspectives and insights to major issues facing the Madison community that she had never thought, especially when it came to police accountability. She hopes that more young students become interested in engaging with the community. 

“I think civic engagement is such a huge part in our lives that often gets overlooked, especially if you are not 18. People say, ‘Oh you can’t vote,’ but there is more that you can do than just voting,” Cox said. 

The Community PUPs program grabbed the attention of the common council and Mayor Paul Soglin and highlighted one of the big issues facing the general Madison community.

Though the school year is now over and the community PUPs are on summer break, the group hopes to continue work next school year and tackle another problem in the city.

“When we give kids the avenue to question, to talk about things that are important to them, I think the sky’s the limit to what there is to do,” Minahan said. “We just really set off of questions that they were asking and things like that. It was a really amazing process, and I’m excited to see what it brings next year.”