Non-violence themed assembly held in Philly school promoting inspirational messages, boosting self-esteem
The Brief
A nonviolence assembly was held at William Longstreth Elementary in Kingsessing, filled with inspiring speakers and performances.
The theme was "Do you REALLY need that" in reference to the phrase used by youth to start fighting.
The school wanted to share this important message on the last Friday of Ramadan and as warmer weather approaches.
KINGSESSING - A Philadelphia school is determined to prevent gun violence in the community and the elementary school held a lively assembly promoting self-esteem and thinking critically.
What we know
William Longstreth Elementary School held an assembly on Friday focused on promoting nonviolence in the community.
"Do You Really Need That?" was the theme of the gathering, referencing the phrase used by youth in school to pick a fight. The program was attended by students in the 5th to 8th grade and included community speakers, performances and a chance to build the students' self-esteem while also asking them to think critically about resolving conflicts.
What they're saying
Climate Manager Joseph Morris who manages the school environment and disciplinary issues organized the event as warmer weather approaches and in remembrance of last year's tragic shooting during end of Ramadan celebrations.
"As we are at the end of the Ramadan celebrations, we remember last year there being a tragic shooting nearby in a park. We wanted to do it this Friday, the last Friday before the end of Ramadan, focusing on nonviolence and what to do in conflicts to avoid further circumstances," said Morris. "We do care about our students very deeply and we're trying to do the best we can to make sure students feel safe within the school district."
The assembly featured speakers from the community to inspire students to work hard and believe in themselves.
The Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Democratic Representative Joanna McClinton told students it all starts from within.
"We have control of ourselves and our outlook. Many times, when we hear terrible headlines about youth being involved with violence we don't get down to the core. It starts with how we feel about ourselves and it starts about the love and peace each of us can carry around," said Speaker McClinton. "It's moments like this and events like today that let them know there are community leaders who care about them, who are proud of them. Seeing them perform today was a true uplift and it's a real nudge to keep doing the good work you're doing every day."
Big picture view
The Jenks Diamonds Step Team performed and Longstreth's very own cheerleading team. Both performances made strong references to the theme of the assembly of nonviolence.
"Basically, don't get peer pressured, be yourself, express yourself. Don't let anyone manipulate you," said student and cheerleader Gabriella Watson.
Longstreth's basketball team was also recognized for their hard work that led to an undefeated championship winning season.
"I'd say never give up and don't give in to the violence stuff. Just be you and don't try to be like anybody else. Be a leader, don't try to follow anybody else because than that makes you in a bad situation and get a bad reputation on yourself," said student and basketball player Ty'Quane Overton.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
Six Books That Prove Abstinence Can Be Abundance
To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience. In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate. I knew I needed to take stock of and change my romantic patterns, and ended up going a year not only without sex, but without all the attendant activities, including dating and flirting. The great surprise of that period wasn't how it changed my outlook on love and sex, but how enjoyable it was. For 20 years I had been relentlessly falling in and out of love, and withdrawing from those obsessions meant devoting my recouped attention to other passions: friends, family, activism, art. I read more books and went dancing more often that year than during any other in my life. Even mundane experiences came into more vivid focus: I was taken by the tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets, along with the sweet freedom of solitude. I had always looked for the sublime in lovers, but in their absence I found it everywhere. Writing a book on the abundance of that year got me thinking about all the other kinds of reneging I've experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights. As a young addict, I thought that my artistic practice relied on drugs and alcohol, only to find that my work bloomed in recovery. Similarly, when I gave up obsessive control of my eating habits, I began to truly relish food again. Rather than grimly depriving us, purposeful refusal can open us to all the bounty we have been forgoing. This realignment applies not only to attachments that rise to the level of addiction, but also to idle penchants or habits that we seek repetitively for comfort. The six books below describe other forms of abundance found, counterintuitively, through abstinence. Fasting for Ramadan, by Kazim Ali This lucid memoir originated from a journal that Ali kept while fasting during one Ramadan, and it retains the intimacy of that private beginning while evolving into a resonant meditation on hunger and worship. In the opening he writes, 'One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.' Readers will find sensual pleasure in his sumptuous writing about hunger, its passing, and what swells to fill that space; his tremendous poetic gifts capture that richness. 'I will miss the feeling of emptiness that foodlessness offers me,' he admits later. 'I will miss the weird focus that comes from removing consideration of this huge thing from my mental space.' In anticipation of swearing off something, we typically focus on what we give up or will lack. But the experience so often reveals the things we've been neglecting. As Ali depicts so beautifully, 'holiness is everywhere,' and sacrifice can sharpen our attunement to it. , by Pema Chödrön Probably no other book on Earth has given me more comfort over the years than this one. Chödrön is a kind of patron saint to Buddhists in the United States, and for good reason. Her warm explanations of Buddhist principles make clear their application to everyday struggles. This book is her most direct explication of the First Noble Truth—that life is suffering—and it locates the freedom of living in that truth. She instructs readers to cultivate compassion and curiosity, and to stop running from fear. This final invocation, against choosing comfort over distress, is the most challenging kind of abstinence for many of us, myself certainly included. She asks us to feel the needle of fear without slipping away with a fantasy, a snack, a book, or a lover. I once read a definition of compulsion that described it as 'an action meant to relieve a mental obsession.' As an addict, much of my life has been governed by such actions. But as Chödrön explains, when we pause before the deed 'and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.' Notes and Methods, by Hilma af Klint This book contains the first English translation of the writings of af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic. Born in 1862, she was trained in painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, where she was among the first generation of women admitted. She painted naturalistic portraits and detailed studies until, in her mid-40s, she dove dramatically into abstraction. A student of Goethe's color theory and a member of Rudolf Steiner's Theosophical Society, she eschewed traditional painting methods in order to pursue what she encountered through séances and mediumship: an invisible life force undergirding everything. Years before Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian created their nonrepresentative canvases, af Klint assembled a massive body of abstract work marked by esoteric spiritual codes, diagrams, and symbols. Before she died in 1944, she indicated that she did not want her paintings revealed to the public for at least two decades, claiming that the world was not ready for them—and, true to her prediction, her work found a rapturous audience when it was shown in the 21st century. Notes and Methods includes a glossary of her meanings along with reproductions of her sketches and paintings. It provides a guide to the thoughts behind the great artist's works. It is also, more implicitly, an ode to the freedom found in relinquishing the need for recognition in one's lifetime. The Art of Sleeping Alone, by Sophie Fontanel This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s. At the start, she imagines a life turned 'soft and fluffy'; she claims, 'I was through with being had.' Fontanel goes on to elegantly describe the gratification of aloneness, and offers keen social observations about the mistaken assumptions of others, foremost among them the idea that a woman needs a partner to find happiness. 'I don't know if love makes us blind,' she ponders, 'but I do believe that solitude allows us to see inside people's minds'—that is, it hones a person's ability to accurately perceive others, and oneself. Set against a classically Parisian backdrop, this tour through Fontanel's head is pure pleasure, especially her moving reflections on how celibacy led to healing her own relationship with her body and sexual desire: 'Could it trust me, this body, after the rough treatment I'd put it through?' She finds that it can. Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium -Eater by Thomas De Quincey, The Night of the Gun by David Carr, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Lit by Mary Karr, and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precedes the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. Writings, by Agnes Martin I had long loved Martin's famous, minimalist mid-century grid paintings, but for a long time I didn't know much about their creator. During my period of celibacy, this changed. Something of a mystic, just like af Klint, Martin found meaning and structure in artistic practice and spiritual rigor. Raised by Calvinists, she rejected formal religion but was influenced by many philosophies, particularly Taoism. Martin lived an ascetic and solitary life, and often denounced overly cerebral art. 'A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn't. It is understanding of yourself,' she said in a mid-1970s interview. Or, as she put it to a class of students at the Skowhegan School in 1987: 'The intellect has nothing to do with artwork.' Writings is full of notes, poems, micro-essays, lectures, and aphoristic passages that ring in my memory years after I first read them. Though Martin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic episodes plagued her, she never described her life as an unhappy one. She chose the path she wanted, one that structured and directed the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her and alchemized them into great art.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
On This Day, June 6: YMCA founded in London
On this date in history: In 1844, the Young Men's Christian Association -- YMCA -- was founded in London. In 1872, feminist Susan B. Anthony was fined for voting in an election in Rochester, N.Y. She refused to pay the fine and a judge allowed her to go free. In 1933, the first drive-in movie theater opened -- in Camden, N.J. In 1944, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops began crossing the English Channel in the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. It was the largest invasion in history. In 1966, James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first Black American to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a sniper during a civil rights "March Against Fear" walk in the South. Meredith was hospitalized and recovered from his wounds, later rejoining the long march, which he had originated. In 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. attorney general, died the day after he was struck by an assassin's bullets in California. He was 42. In 1972, a coal mine explosion in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), trapped 464 miners underground. More than 425 people died. In 1981, a train conductor braked too hard to avoid hitting a cow, causing several cars in his train to slip off the tracks in rainy weather. The cars slid off a bridge into a swollen river, drowning an estimated 600 people in India. In 1982, thousands of Israeli forces pushed deep into Lebanon in an effort to defeat Palestinian guerrillas sheltering in the southern border region and near the capital of Beirut. Syria said its forces joined the fighting in a major escalation of the conflict. In 1993, the Guatemalan legislature elected Ramiro de Leon Carpio as president to replace ousted leader Jorge Serrano. In 2001, a man drove his pickup truck into a Muslim family of Pakistani heritage, killing four and injuring one in London, Ontario, Canada. The driver was charged with terroristic murder and accused of targeting the family because of their religion. In 2023, Prince Harry became the first member of the British royal family to give testimony during a court proceeding since 1891. He sued Mirror Group Newspapers, accusing them of illegally hacking. In February 2024, Prince Harry won a "substantial" settlement in the case.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
Former Colorado teachers union president Amie Baca-Oehlert launches congressional bid
Amie Baca-Oehlert, a former teachers union president, launches her congressional campaign in Colorado's 8th District at Adams City High School on June 5, 2025. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline) It's suddenly a very crowded race in the Democratic primary for Colorado's most competitive congressional seat. One day after Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young announced his bid, former teachers union president Amie Baca-Oehlert became the latest Democratic hopeful in the 8th Congressional District, a key battleground in the nationwide battle for control of the House of Representatives. Baca-Oehlert, who served as president of the Colorado Education Association from 2018 to 2024, launched her campaign in front of a crowd of about 50 supporters Thursday evening at Adams City High School, where she got her first teaching job. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX 'When I look at Congress, I don't see people like me,' Baca-Oehlert said. 'I don't see enough teachers, Latinos, moms, union members or middle class Americans. What I do see is a broken system, a system that caters to the wealthy and well-connected, where plenty of politicians are looking out for themselves and their billionaire donors.' Drawn by an independent redistricting commission in 2021, the 8th District includes parts of Denver's northern suburbs as well as more rural areas in southern Weld County. Four in 10 residents of the district are Latino. The seat is currently held by U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, a Fort Lupton Republican who unseated former Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo by a margin of fewer than 2,500 votes in the 2024 election. Despite representing one of the nation's most evenly divided congressional districts, Evans has remained a steadfast supporter of President Donald Trump's historically extreme anti-immigration agenda, his chaotic efforts to launch a global trade war and a sweeping GOP budget bill that would cut $625 billion from Medicaid. 'Nearly all of us are hurting right now, because of the fear, division and economic turmoil that Trump has created,' Baca-Oehlert said. 'And Evans is literally standing by — standing beside his friends like Lauren Boebert, to promote this disastrous agenda, and not fight against it.' Boebert, a staunch Trump supporter, is the Republican representative of Colorado's 4th Congressional District. Caraveo has launched a bid to win back her seat in 2026, joining a Democratic primary that also includes Young, state Reps. Manny Rutinel of Commerce City and Shannon Bird of Westminster. Baca-Oehlert's campaign launch featured endorsements from Adams County Commissioner Emma Pinter and former state Reps. Judy Solano and Joe Salazar. 'I know all the candidates that are running, I know all of them,' Solano told the crowd. 'But Amy's the one.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
