Snohomish County NewsFirefighters serve up turkey
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Kelsey Calvert, 14, serves Thanksgiving dinner to 83-year-old Everett Senior Center member Ed Husarik Nov. 22 at the Everett Firefighters 10th annual Senior Center Thanksgiving Day dinner. About 600 seniors were served. Firefighters and their families served and cooked the meals.
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Student films 'moving,' sheriff says
MUKILTEO - When law enforcement officers came across teens in their line of work, it’s usually because they’re mixed up in gang violence, drug use or other problems that plague youth today.
So when Snohomish County Sheriff John Lovick attended the Kids’ Futures Film Festival, where high school students produce short movies about a problem they see in their community, he expected to hear about the same issues he deals with on a daily basis.
Instead, Lovick said he was surprised to learn issues important to youth included students who go without necessary school supplies.
“It was so moving,” he said.
Lovick, who grew up in a poor family, said hearing about young people trying to succeed in school without the basic essentials really hit home.
“We didn’t have a lot of resources growing up in Louisiana,” he said. “It touched me.”
The movie, written and produced by six students on the Central Youth Council, which represents young people in Everett, Mukilteo and Mill Creek, explains how local groups provide thousands of dollars in school supplies for low-income families.
“Imagine coming to school without basic necessities like paper, pens or a backpack,” the film starts. “Most of us take this for granted, but many students in Snohomish County require assistance.”
Darren Pouv, one of the film’s creators, said his group focused on school supplies because they were surprised to learn so many of their peers were going without such basic essentials.
“It was something new,” Pouv said. “It was not something we already knew about. School supplies are really important.”
For their movie, Pouv’s group interviewed Volunteers of America employees who organize supply drives and a former Lakewood High School student who benefited from the program.
Pouv said they wanted to show adults that young people face more than the stereotypical challenges.
“The stereotype is drugs and alcohol,” he said. “We wanted to come up with something a little different. We looked around and thought, ‘What’s a problem in our community?’”
The students for all six films were responsible for choosing a topic, gathering video and audio, interviewing sources and editing.
Pouv said his group’s biggest challenge was deciding what would go in their four-minute video and what needed to be cut.
Over the course of their reporting, the group learned about several ways their low-income peers struggle to have a “typical” high school experience, such as paying for a prom dress. They found a donation center in Arlington called Kids Kloset, where needy students can find a prom dress for free, but ended up cutting it from the final video so they could focus on basics, like pens and paper.
Lovick hosted the film festival event, which happened late last month, and called it the most important event he’s been to all year.
As he kicked off the festival, Lovick said he asked the audience of adults to think about how often they sit and listen to young people explain the issues they face.
“They’re being real,” Lovick said about the students who made the films. “They are going to be the leaders of this country in the next couple of years. We can either help them or get out of the way, and I think we better help them.”
By LINDSAY TOLER
Published Dec. 2, 2009