Building connections: Hundreds attend student-run social justice event at Sutton High

SUTTON ― Class was in session Friday for both students and teachers at Sutton High School, as Connection Convention 2024, also known as “ConCon,” held its fifth year at the school.

The event is a day of workshops geared toward social justice awareness.

“(ConCon) teaches students how it’s important to keep an open mind with new people: their stories, their background, and make everyone feel at home in the school community and that they can be heard,” said Nixon Huggins, 18, a senior at Sutton High, who has been a part of ConCon since their sophomore year of high school.

Since it began in 2019, ConCon has continued to grow, and this year hosted over 600 students and teachers from over 50 schools in New England, but it remains student-run.

“It gives kids the chance to see the difference that they can make in their own communities,” said Sutton High Principal Ted McCarthy. “Here in Sutton we have done a lot of work over the past couple years to bring issues of racism, homophobia and transphobia to light so we can improve things for the kids here at our school.”

That was the primary draw for Cynthia Smith, a New York Times bestselling children’s author, who was the event’s starting keynote speaker as well as a workshop host.

“It was clearly centered around the potential of young people coming together and raising their voices for a better future,” she said.

Though Smith is no stranger to teen conferences, this was the first she attended that has been so completely focused on issues of equity and social justice.

“Young people have always been at the forefront of social justice but (this generation) is just much more aware, sensitive and proactive than I was or my peer group as a Gen-Xer at their age,” she observed. Smith attributed this in part to the greater flow of information through the internet and social media. “Now kids have their own information ecosystem,” she said.

Smith’s stated goal is representation of underrepresented and marginalized people in books for young readers, particularly Indigenous peoples, as the author-curator at Heartdrum, a Native-focused imprint of Harper Collins Children's books.

“I want to show that Indigenous people have a past, present and future and we didn’t all die out in the 1700s,” she said.

She brought her own medium of story telling to her workshop, guiding participants in crafting their own narratives and how those can relate to larger themes, referring to some of her own work focusing on commitment to respect for elder generations as a key value of intertribal cultures.

“I was a little out of my element, but I guess that was kind of the point,” said Grayson Shettler, 18, a senior at Tantasqua High School. As a painter, Shettler said he was used to expressing concepts through images rather than words, but he welcomed the challenge of a different medium.

Shettler hopes that ConCon can inspire similar events at other schools.

“I feel like at my school, there are a lot of people who need to hear certain things that get talked about here and I feel like (these events) would definitely help,” he said.

Stories were a strong theme at ConCon 2024. Huggins referred to another workshop, geared toward building empathy through storytelling. Participants broke up into pairs, and each related a story about themselves. Their partner would then retell the story they had just heard using first-person pronouns.

“It helped us relive the story through the perspective of our partner and created a connection,” they said.

Ending keynote speaker, trans-youth activist Kai Shappley, 12, fiercely recounted her own story. Shappley, born in Texas, discussed growing up while having her existence as a transgender student politicized by changing laws and policy in her home state, and having to become an advocate at a young age.

“I’m in the seventh grade,” said Shappley. “I have eight years of political experience and I’m not even old enough to vote yet.”

The documentary about her journey, “Trans in America: Texas Strong,” won an Emmy for outstanding short documentary and a new full-length documentary that chronicles her story, “Mama Bears,” recently premiered on PBS.

She has also been a guest star on the Netflix series “The Babysitters Club” and released her first book in May 2023, “Joy to the World,” a middle school novel published by HarperCollins. Kai has been interviewed by Vice, The Today Show, Teen Vogue and Good Housekeeping.

“We need allies, like y’all,” she said. “But we don’t need quiet allies. The LGBT community has a lot on our mind, and yes, a Pride sticker on a classroom door or pronouns added to your ID badge may be that one thing that keeps us hopeful.”

The thunderous applause throughout her address showed that the assembled students, at least, had no intention of remaining quiet.

“All these kids have the opportunity to go back to where they’re from and do something positive for their communities,” said McCarthy.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Hundreds attend student-run social justice event at Sutton High School