Brighton High students raise funds for school in Mexico

Thanks to students at Brighton High School, some students in Mexico now have a school building of their own.

Led by student body officers, Brighton raised $35,000 between the beginning of November and Christmas break. The funds covered most of the construction costs of a new secondary school building for the small mountain town of Nichnamtic, in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. The school was built through the nonprofit Foundation Escalera.

Since Mexican law only requires children to complete nine years of school, many children in rural areas never have the chance to attend high school. In addition to that, the 2,000 residents of Nichnamtic speak a native Mexican language, not Spanish. One of the greatest educational needs of the town's 200 or so secondary school-age young people is a place where the students can learn Spanish, so they can have a chance to integrate into the larger Mexican society.

"For most, they would be the first in their families to get an education beyond sixth grade," Brighton Financial Literacy teacher Jerry Christensen said.

Christensen has seen the town's need first-hand, as he and his family have visited Nichnamtic before with Escalera. He and a couple of Brighton students traveled there again over Christmas break to lend a hand in the actual construction; not specifically representing Brighton, just there because they wanted to help.

Nichnamtic's residents were so thrilled to be getting a new school building that they cleared the construction site and poured the foundation themselves before Brighton was even finished fundraising, Christensen said. The rest of the construction was also completed quickly, and the six-room school was open for classes this month.

Brighton's SBOs chose to contribute to the Foundation Escalera out of several organizations that pitched projects to them, because they saw that this project would make a big difference to kids their own age who have been marginalized by the society they live in, Christensen said.

"In Spanish, escalera means ladder, and the name is a symbol of our desire to help lift the young out of the debilitating and vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty," according to the foundation's website.

The Foundation Escalera was started by the Garbett family, owners of Garbett Homes, whose own children are Brighton alumni.

To raise the funds for the Nichnamtic school, Brighton's current students started out with an awareness campaign before Thanksgiving. Classes took turns for a day holding a period outdoors under a tarp to simulate the conditions Nichnamtic's students were under without a school building. The day was damp and cold, and the tarp too small for an entire class to fit underneath.

"The students were shocked," Christensen said. "They came away with a new understanding, and hope that they could improve some people's lives."

The SBOs raised the funds by collecting donations in first-period classes, selling hot chocolate and muffins, and holding a joint stomp with Brighton and Jordan High students.