IndyKids-Issue-75-Summer-2021-v3-spreads
Center Spread: Climate Change, Should We Be Afraid?
Angel Guzman, age 10 and IndyKids staff Have you noticed a change in the weather, the oceans rising and melting glaciers? This is all because of climate change. The recent results of the biggest climate poll ever conducted by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP)...
Center Spread: This Makes Me Sick! How Climate Change Contributes to Health Issues
By Leah Romero, age 11 and IndyKids Staff Climate change causes all manner of catastrophes around the world, and according to researchers, it can also have a direct impact on our health and wellness. A new study conducted by Harvard University found that one in five...
Center Spread: Humanity Is Killing Its Co-tenants
By Orik Ehren, age 15 Climate change is one of the most intimidating beasts that humanity has ever faced. Its multifaceted nature combined with a lack of human attention results in a force that spells the demise of an ignorant race and the species with which it shares...
Center Spread: Climate Change Is Going to Cost Us Big Time
By Nicolle Berroa, age 13 and IndyKids Staff Winter Storm Uri hit Texas in February and caught everyone off guard. The unusually bitter cold weather put a massive strain on energy demand and available electricity as the infrastructure around natural gas, coal, nuclear...
Center Spread: “Without Nature’s Help, We Will Not Thrive or Even Survive,” Says New U.N. Report
By Garyelis Lopez, age 14, and IndyKids staff Earth is gradually becoming an unlivable planet. The United Nations released a report on February 18 calling for an urgent response to tackle the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and pollution that threaten our planet. In...
Who Am I?
By Zaynab Latheef , age 8 I was born on April 9, 1921, in Hampton, Virginia. I graduated from Hampton Institute with a dual degree in mathematics and physical science. I became a teacher and helped kids to build their own wind tunnels to conduct experiments. In 1951,...
Getting Wild With… The Endangered Blakiston’s Fish Owl
By Mila Lemoine, age 9 The Blakiston’s fish owl measures 60 to 72 centimeters in length, making it the largest owl in the world. The Blakiston’s fish owl lives in the riparian woodlands of Asia and Russia. These owls nest in large, old trees near rivers, lakes and...
New York City Mayoral Races
Hudson Mu, age 14 In 2021, New York City will elect a new comptroller, at least four new borough presidents, and because of term limits, there will be an almost entirely new City Council. But the most competitive, expensive and crowded race will surely be for mayor....
Indigenous Youth Run 93 Miles to Put Pressure on President Biden to Close the Dakota Access Pipeline
By Musa Hasan, age 12 Several dozen Indigenous youth, some as young as 9 years old, from Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservation ran 93 miles to put pressure on President Biden to close the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The event took place on Feb. 9, 2021, in...
Why Youth Activism Cannot End with a Biden Presidency
By Nicolle Berroa, age 14 and IndyKids staff Trump is out and Biden is the new president, but the activism that got us here shouldn’t be over. After George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement gained considerable momentum....
Science Brief: World’s First Underwater Youth Climate Protest
Zahra Latheef, age 11 In early March, Shaama Sandooyea took a deep breath and plunged into the western Indian Ocean in the first-ever underwater youth climate protest. Holding a “Youth Strike for Climate” placard right above the world’s largest seagrass meadow, the...
Science Brief: Florida Declares State of Emergency over Toxic Reservoir Leak
By Jessie Mitnick, age 13 Over Easter weekend, residents of Manatee, Florida, were evacuated from their homes due to leaks from a nearby reservoir. The reservoir contained water contaminated with phosphogypsum—a toxic fertilizer waste product—from a former phosphate...
News Brief: Hate Crimes Still Plaguing Asian American Communities
Jessie Mitnick, age 13 On March 16, 2021, a devastating shooting took place in Atlanta. The attack left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent. Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been a sharp rise in anti-Asian attacks, largely fueled by former...
News Brief: Saudi Arabian Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul Released from Prison
By Maliyah Ledesma, age 9 Loujain al-Hathloul, a 31-year-old women’s rights activist in Saudi Arabia, was released from prison in February after being accused of trying to change the political system. In 2018, when al-Hathloul was arrested, women were not allowed to...
Class of COVID-19: The Pandemic of Missing Students
By Khadija Hasan, age 12 Thousands of students have been missing from school in the United States, attending neither in-person nor online classes, according to ABC News. Students are facing countless issues with their virtual classrooms. Many have been completely...
Hotels for the Unhoused
By Zahra Latheef, age 11 The Austin City Council voted in January to buy rundown hotels to house the Texas city’s unhoused population. Many people were unhoused in Austin even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The vote to purchase the first hotel was unanimously...
The Insurrection: A Turning Point for the U.S.?
By Raya ElHajjar, age 13 and IndyKids staff The morning of Jan. 6 began with crowds of Trump supporters flooding Washington, D.C., in anticipation of the then-president's speech. During the rally, Trump urged his followers to “fight like h***” against what he called a...
“No Farmers, No Food, No Future”: Why Are India’s Farmers Protesting?
By Hudson Mu, age 14 Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have been encamped near New Delhi, India, since November 2020 to protest three new farming bills passed in September. The farmers have created a fully functioning community, some setting up schools and...
Someday You Could Be… Amy Goodman
By Lucia Mejia Cardenas, age 13 Amy Goodman is an award-winning journalist, investigative reporter, human rights activist and host of Democracy Now! for the last 25 years. IndyKid reporter Lucia met with Amy to discuss her career and legacy as a social justice...
Rise of the “She-cession”: Women Hit Hardest by COVID Job Losses
By Sira Basse, age 15 The fight for gender equality in the workplace is an ongoing battle in the United States, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the struggle more dire. In the first 10 months of the pandemic, 5.5 million women around the country lost their...
IndyKids-Issue74-April2021-5-spreads (1)
Celebrating 15 Years of Kid Journalism: Why We Need Programs Like IndyKids
By Adedayo Perkovich, age 16 “The mission of IndyKids is to engage young people to become informed world citizens through the production of a current events and social justice news source that is created by kids, for kids.” When I was 9 years old, I walked into a...
Someday You Could Be… Jabari Brisport
By Vienne Linsalata age 9 Jabari Brisport is a socialist politician, middle school math teacher, actor and the first Black openly gay state senator-elect for New York’s 25th District. He is fighting for equal access to quality education, combating climate change,...
Puzzle: Who Am I?
By Linnea Quammen, age 10 I was born on July 30, 1924, in Boonville, Missouri. I led my first sit-in, which sought to desegregate Barton’s Cafeteria in Peoria, Illinois, in 1947. I dropped out of college to become a minister and was an inspiring leader in the civil...
Endangered Rabbit Species Loses Large Portion of Its Habitat Due to West Coast Wildfires
By Mona Delgado, age 10 The small gray mammals known as the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits lost more than half of their population due to the Pearl Hill and Cold Springs wildfires in Washington. In early September, the wildfires destroyed the pygmy rabbits’ natural...
Science Brief: Study Reveals 14 Quadrillion Plastic Microfibers Lurking in California’s Ecosystem
By, Vienne Linsalata, age 9 and IndyKids Staff A new study of California waters has revealed that in 2019, an estimated 13.3 quadrillion microfibers were released into the state’s waterways and ocean, as reported by the Guardian. By 2050, it could be three times that...
Science Brief: World Isn’t Meeting Biodiversity Targets
By Sloan Becker, age 10 Mother Earth has been losing many of her diverse plants and animals. In 2010 the Convention on Biological Diversity, made up of 150 countries, pledged to complete 20 targets by 2020 in order to help protect Earth’s biodiversity. However,...
The Beneficial BioBus
By Becca Jene Uss, age 10 BioBus is a moving science lab that is open for schools to expand their learning program of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and educate kids that have limited access to a high-quality science education. Typically, the...
Personal Report: The Challenges of Educating During a Pandemic
By Arnay Agarwal, Age 12 Teachers are great problem solvers, but the coronavirus pandemic has presented challenges unlike any other. From technical glitches to exposing the socioeconomic inequities of education to dealing with overstretched parents, teachers are now...
Meet an IndyKids Reporter: Raya El-Hajjar
Q. How did you first hear about IndyKids and how long have you written with them? A. My mom always got IndyKids for her classroom, and I always remember reading it. When I was in 5th grade, I started wanting to write for IndyKids, so I filled out the survey on their...
News Brief: Lower the Voting Age? The Discussion Has Begun
By Oscar Tomasello, age 12 The minimum age required to vote was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970. Now 50 years later, activists around the country are pushing to lower the voting age again. Tyler Okeke, a 19-year-old organizer with the nonprofit Power California, told...
News Brief: U.K. and Europe Pesticide Scandal
Oscar Tomasello, age 12 Around 81,000 tonnes of illegal pesticides were shipped from the EU in 2018 to smaller countries including South Africa, Ukraine and Brazil. These pesticides contain paraquat, a toxic chemical which is fatal if ingested and has been banned from...
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: An Equality Superhero
By Mia Silverman, age 11 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the legendary Supreme Court justice, passed away in September after serving 27 years on the Supreme Court and a lifetime of fighting for equal rights for people of all races, genders and sexual orientations. With her seat...
A Boon to Billionaires, a Bust for Average Americans
By Sami El-Hajjar, age 11 Carlos Rodriguez Herrera was a barista at a Mediterranean restaurant in New York City. But on March 14, right after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, he was told not to come back to work. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay the...
From School Closures to Child Labor
By Hudson Mu, age 14 The pandemic has robbed millions of their jobs, and now with prolonged school closures across the world, many children in impoverished countries have been forced into backbreaking and often illegal work in an effort to make money for their...
Court Rules in Trump’s Favor to Stop Temporary Protected Status for Some Immigrants
By Aida El-Hajjar, age 11 Nearly 400,000 immigrants may be forced to leave the United States because of a September 14 ruling by the federal court of appeals on temporary protected status (TPS) visas. In a 2-1 decision, the court sided with the Trump administration’s...
Trump’s Proposed “Patriotic Education” Commission Seeks to Whitewash U.S. History
By Augie Wolfe-Rocca, age 12 This past November, President Trump announced an executive order for a so-called patriotic education commission, or the 1776 Commission. The order was called in response to the 1619 Project, an award-winning interactive project of the New...
“Climate Arsonist”: How the Trump Administration Impacted the Environment
By Raya El-Hajjar, age 13 “It’ll start getting cooler...you just watch,” President Trump said as he sat in a news briefing in Sacramento, California. It was September 2020, at the height of the California wildfires. A picture of burning trees was displayed on his...
Personal Report: The Challenges of Educating During a Pandemic
By Arnay Agarwal, Age 12 & IndyKids Staff Teachers are great problem solvers, but the coronavirus pandemic has presented challenges unlike any other. From technical glitches to exposing the socioeconomic inequities of education to dealing with overstretched...
IndyTeens: The Deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd Spark Protests Similar to the Civil Rights Movement
By Carlos Prates Tavares, age 16 On May 26, after the death of George Floyd, protests against police brutality and racism sparked across the country. These protests are reminiscent of the civil rights movement, bearing uncanny resemblances as well as differences....
IndyTeens Op-Ed: From Columbus to Netanyahu
By Raya El Hajjar, age 13 Everyone knows the year 1492. It is the year that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. From then on, Indigenous land was continuously taken, while the Native peoples were displaced or restricted to reservations. Now the remaining Native...
IndyTeens: Devastated Wuhan Hit by Heavy Floods
By Dayanara Hernandez, age 15 Originally published, July 2020 Heavy rains and flooding over late May and June in southern and central China have displaced over 2 million people, and at least 141 people are dead or missing. This is the worst flooding to hit the country...
IndyTeens: Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis Worsens as COVID-19 Strains War-Torn Country
By Ishaan Horwith, age 13 The humanitarian crisis in Yemen, a country already devastated by an ongoing civil war, has worsened dramatically since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, increasing the demand for aid and crippling an already struggling healthcare system....
IndyTeens: Amazon Fires Fueled by Human Greed
By Sophia Reilly, age 12 The Amazon is burning. Brazil is facing not only a pandemic but an environmental disaster as well. The number of fires in the Amazon rainforest has risen over the last year due to legal and illegal deforestation. According to Brazil’s space...
IndyTeens: Fast Fashion Amid a Pandemic of Human Rights and Environmental Violations
By Luca Pang, age 16 What is fast fashion? If you’re unfamiliar with the term, fast fashion refers to cheap clothing which is rapidly produced by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends. Many people are still unaware of the true social and environmental...
IndyTeens OP-ED: Trump and the Rise of Authoritarianism
By Neva Simon, age 16 Donald Trump has repeatedly taken advantage of the American government to fit the agenda and desires of his administration, like his preference to protect the economy more than people during the COVID-19 crisis. But recently, he has begun taking...
IndyTeens: Trump Administration’s Recent Ruling Attacks LGBTQ+ Community
By Sabat Ali, age 14 As the global pandemic continues to worsen, access to healthcare providers is crucial to staying healthy and safe. However, President Trump’s recent measures have attempted to make it difficult for members of the transgender community to find...
IndyTeens: The Pandemic Within the Prison
By Sira Basse, age 15 The coronavirus is still a threat to the health of people worldwide. Every nation has chosen their own path in how to deal with this pandemic. Even during the times of heavy quarantine and the most precautions being taken, people of lower...
IndyTeens: Poor African American Communities Are Dying at Twice the Rate of White People Due to Environmental Racism in Their Communities
By Michael Hirschfield, age 13 Environmental racism could be a contributing factor for why Black communities have faced more serious illness and death due to COVID-19 than white people. Environmental racism is a term which refers to the disproportionate targeting of...
IndyTeens: “The Time Has Chosen Us”: The Legacy of John Lewis
By Samaira Bunburry, age 12 The Southern sun shone down upon the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. Arms locked in arms, the sound of hundreds of footsteps thumped proudly, for this was the day that voices turned into power. And leading that...
IndyTeens: Ashville, North Carolina, Approves Reparations for Black Residents
By Jessie Mitnick, age 12 Asheville, North Carolina, is acknowledging its racist actions and policies by giving reparations to its Black community. On July 14, the Asheville City Council voted unanimously to provide reparations and apologize for their engagement in...
IndyTeens Op-Ed: “Tu Lucha Es Mi Lucha,” — Your Struggle Is My Struggle
By Lucia Mejia Cárdenas, age 12 To understand the complicated and messy subject that is the relationship between Latinx movements and Black movements, it is essential to first understand that racism and colorism in the Latinx community very much exists. Lighter skin...
The Americans with Disabilities Act Turns 30
By Jet Watling, age 11 This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). There are 61 million people with disabilities in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), many of whom have benefited...
Who Am I?
I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1945 and was relocated to San Francisco through a federal program that sought to assimilate Native peoples to urban areas off-reservation. I was introduced to political activism in San Francisco, where I faced poverty,...
Melting Habitats Imperil the Polar Bear
By Seneca Oehrle, age 12 and IndyKids Staff A study published in July on Nature.com found that almost all polar bear subpopulations are facing major habitat loss. Human contribution to global warming has led to declining levels of summer sea ice. This forces polar...
Personal Report: Homophobic Hate Crimes Haunt Upstate Couple
By Ellie Schneider, age 12 Homophobic hate crimes against my uncle, Arjay Baker, and his husband started three-and-a-half years ago, when a neighbor began to use homophobic and racist slurs against them. The hate reached a tipping point after a high-power pellet gun...
Meet IndyKid Reporter… Nicolle Berroa
By Hudson Mu, age 14 Meet Nicolle Berroa, a 13 year old eighth grader from South Florida. Nicolle has been writing for the newspaper for a while now after being introduced to the program by her aunt who works with IndyKids. She wrote her first cover story for this...
Going Ape for Social Distancing?
By Ozzy Brown, age 11 Humans may think they are the only species that practice social distancing, but other animals also social distance to stop the spread of contagious diseases. Humans could learn from them about how to protect their community and stay safe....
Global Methane Emissions at Record High
By Linnea Quammen, age 10 and IndyKids Staff Methane emissions across the world are at a record high, according to the most recent data findings from 2017. The latest study by scientists with the Global Carbon Project in July says that nearly 600 million tons of...
Washington NFL Team Drops Its Racist Mascot, But Fight Continues
By Claire Davis, age 12 Washington, D.C.’s NFL football team decided to drop their team name because it was offensive, containing a racial slur, to the Native American community it portrayed. They aren’t the only sports team with this problem. A study of Native...
Real-World Examples of Police Defunding and Reform
By Varick Mazumder age 10 and IndyKids Staff While according to White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, President Trump is “appalled” by the current BLM movement, some states have already started taking steps toward reexamining their police systems, and some...
How George Floyd’s Death Sparked New Momentum for the BLM Movement
By Sabrina Mazumder, age 12 and IndyKids Staff George Floyd’s death at the hands of cops has reignited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement globally. On May 25, Floyd, a Black man, was killed after a white police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost...
A Brief History of Policing in the United States
By Aman Mehrota, age 10 and IndyKids Staff The United States police forces are a pretty modern invention. Early police forces were privately funded systems governed by the rich white elite to protect property. Some say that systemic racism has always been the...
New York Bans Facial Recognition Technology in Schools Until 2022
By Maude Stevens, age 12 This summer, New York state lawmakers voted to ban the use of facial recognition technology in schools until 2022, citing student data protection and concerns that the technology might be biased against Latinx and Black students. The New York...
Has Time Expired for TikTok in the United States?
By Aimen Zehra, age 10 Originally published July, 2020 President Trump issued an executive order in August to ban TikTok in the United States. The app, popular with celebrities and teens around the world to make goofy content, was created by ByteDance, a Chinese...
New Security Law Erodes Hong Kong’s Autonomy
By Sam Gelber, age 12 China imposed a new security law on Hong Kong on June 30. It is designed to erode Hong Kong’s autonomy and criminalizes acts of subversion, secession, terrorism and collusion. Hong Kong was responsible for setting up its own security law, but did...
The Plastic Pandemic
By Amy Block, age 9 and IndyKids Staff In recent years countries began banning single-use plastics because they often end up in landfills or, worse, in our oceans. According to the Smithsonian magazine, many states were forced to lift bans on plastic bags because...
Portland Protests: Will Police Brutality End?
By Inaaya Majid, age 10 Originally published July, 2020 Mass Black Lives Matter protests in Portland against police brutality and racial violence have been ongoing ever since May 29. When the protests started, they were very peaceful and nonviolent. But violence...
The Ballot Box and the Mailbox in the Time of COVID-19
IndyKid Journalist, age 12 The coronavirus pandemic has brought new difficulties to the 2020 presidential election due to take place on November 3. Reduced access to polling stations and issues with mail-in ballots could potentially affect the amount of votes for each...
IndyTeens: A Progressive Agenda Lies in Congress: Jamaal Bowman
Interview and article by Hudson Mu, age 14 It was a sweltering June Saturday in the Bronx, New York. A pop-up table supported boxes of face masks, hand sanitizer and water bottles in front of Van Cortlandt Park. Taped to it were posters that could be spotted all...
IndyTeens Op-Ed: Confederate Statues? Take Them Down!
By Lukas Azcurrain, age 14 Monuments that commemorate Confederate soldiers and other racist historical figures whose fortunes were built on the slave trade have been at the forefront of recent conversations in the United States. After the murder of George Floyd, the...
Indigenous Peoples’ Day
By Lauren Claggett, age 12 Most U.S. citizens have heard of Columbus Day, which is observed every year on the second Monday of October. The holiday was named after Christopher Columbus, who claimed to have found the “new world.” Although this holiday is very well...
Policing in Schools: Is It Really Necessary?
By Simon Boon-Blankinship, age 11 and IndyKids Staff The number of police officers hired by schools across the country has skyrocketed in recent times. These officers, also known as social resource officers (SROs), are often not trained to work with children, and...
IndyTeens: The American Virus: “The Absence of a Coherent Federal Leadership That Puts Public Health First”
By Amzad Ali, age 16 “I’ll be right eventually. You know, I said, 'It's going to disappear.' I'll say it again,” President Trump said in an interview with Fox News in mid-July. This comes after COVID-19 cases in the United States have reached 5.5 million cases,...
Do You Really Know What Reform & Defund Mean?
By Melina Cantagallo, age 12 While the Black Lives Matter movement was established seven years ago, the death of George Floyd in May, among other Black lives at the hands of police, has raised the question: “Are the police really keeping us safe?” According to a...
Trump Seeks to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants from Census Count
By Neena Maya Sapkota, age 11 President Trump is seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants in the 2020 census. The census has been recorded every 10 years since 1790 and counts everyone living in the United States and its five territories. Providing important...
The Pandemic of Unhoused Youths
By Nicolle Berroa, age 13 As the United States grapples with a global health pandemic, the crisis of youth houselessness steadily worsens. Most recent data on the rate of unhoused children from 2017 to 2018 found that youth houselessness was at its highest point in...
Black and White African Rhinos in Coronavirus Crisis
By Sofia Mancini, age 8 Did you know that in 1995 there were 500,000 black rhinos, but now they are critically endangered, with only 5,500 of them left? There are only about 23,500 black and white rhinos in total left. With a global pandemic crushing the tourism...
Who am I?
By Nicolle Berroa, age 13 “[He] was the most important bridge between the wonderful legacy of the civil rights movement and the message of hope and change,” said Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and civil rights lawyer. I was born in...
Meet IndyKid Reporter… Dayanara Hernandez
By Giavana Maldonado, age 13 Meet Dayanara Hernandez, a 15-year-old high school freshman. In 2019, she became an IndyKids reporter and wrote her first cover story in early 2020. Dayanara was introduced to IndyKids by her elementary media teacher. Her passion has...
Socially Distant Social Movements
By Charles DeLange, age 12 Activists have found new ways, or gone back to older ways, to fight for their causes during the coronavirus pandemic. Many protesters and people want to keep their communities interactive, even if people are spaced at least six feet apart....
Supreme Court Ruling Makes Discrimination Within Contracts Easier
By Amzad Ali, age 16 and IndyKids Staff In March, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of cable giant Comcast in Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media (NAAAOM), weakening a key provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibiting racial...
Immigrants in the U.S. Demand Release and More Protection During Coronavirus Outbreak
By Jesus Hernandez, age 11 President Donald Trump has scaled up his anti-immigration campaign by overseeing changes in immigration policy that first went into effect on March 18 citing the coronavirus pandemic. The new policies restrict undocumented immigrants,...
How Do You Stay Home Without a House
By Raya ElHajjar, age 12 COVID-19 has been ravaging New York City since March 2020. Although the streets are largely empty, if you look closer, you might see a person huddling in a corner, holding up a cardboard sign that reads “Anything Helps.” More than 70,000...
Coronavirus Explained
By Giavana Maldonado, age 13 COVID-19 is a virus caused by the novel coronavirus which causes respiratory illness in its hosts. There are many types of coronavirus, some of which cause diseases in humans. The first reported case of this coronavirus was in Wuhan,...
News Brief: Earth Day Goes Digital
By Nicolle Berroa, age 13 April 22 marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers had to get creative with their activism. A 72-hour online live stream was co-hosted by actor Ed Begley Jr. and his daughter, Hayden Carson Begley,...
News Brief: DACA Status Update (May 2020)
By Nicolle Berroa, age 13 DACA recipients across the United States are anxiously awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court that will ultimately decide their futures. The close to 70,000 recipients for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), may lose the legal...
Science Brief: Endangered Sea Turtles Enjoy Quarantine
By Gibran Williams , age 8 On March 22, 97 vulnerable hawksbill turtles felt the benefit of human social distancing and ended up in the ocean instead of dying. The turtles hatched on a beach in Paulista, a town in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Brazil. Paulo...
Science Brief: Antarctica’s Hottest day on Record
By Anneliese Smudde, age 10 On February 9, Antarctica saw its highest temperature on record at just over 69 degrees Fahrenheit, according to researchers at Comandante Ferraz Antarctic Station. This temperature broke a record heat of 63.5 degrees recorded just three...
Supreme Court Ruling Makes Discrimination within Contracts Easier
By Amzad Ali, age 16 and IndyKids Staff In March, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of cable giant Comcast in Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media (NAAAOM), weakening a key provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibiting racial...
Dakota Access Pipeline Given a Glimmer of Hope
By August Kaiser, age 10 and IndyKids Staff The Dakota Access Pipeline has been operational since May 2017, but now a federal court has ordered the U.S Army Corps of Engineers to do a full environmental review. In response to a petition to nullify federal permits,...
What Is Medicare for All?
By Dayanara Hernandez, age 15 and IndyKids staff Medicare for All is commonly thought of as being just one proposal, when in fact there are several proposals. Medicare for All is a way for all people to have the same benefits, regardless of their income or private...
School’s Out: How Coronavirus is Changing Education
By Orik Ehren, age 13 All over the world the schools of hundreds of millions of students are closed due to the coronavirus. Their educations have been moved online or, in many cases, suspended entirely. Keeping students away from school does positively...
Someday You Could Be… Sean Petty, Pediatric Emergency Room Nurse and Social Justice Warrior
By Dayanara Hernandez, age 15 Sean Petty has been a nurse for 13 years and is currently a pediatric emergency room nurse at a public hospital in the Bronx. This interview took place via email in April 2020 during the height of the coronavirus outbreak in New York...
Op-Ed: Why We Rise
by Adedayo Perkovich age 16 “It comes as a great shock to discover that the country, which is your birth place, and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality involved any place for you.” — James Baldwin This year, my...
The Evolution of LGBTQ+ Rights
By Rida Ali, age 16 “Would I truly go to heaven, despite being gay?” was a question that James Guay asked himself as a young child. Guay, in an interview with Time, described how he was a victim of conversion therapy, a practice that attempts to change one’s sexuality...
Coronavirus and Xenophobia: Hate Spreads Like a Virus
By Rosell Estrella, age 10 and IndyKids Staff COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China, late in 2019. The subsequent worldwide spread of the novel coronavirus has with it spread xenophobia and racism toward many people of Asian descent. President Donald Trump and...
Parker Todd, aka The Sickler
By Charles Delange, age 12 Parker Todd was diagnosed with sickle cell disease (SCD), also known as sickle cell anemia, at 3 years old. At 11, he wrote The Adventures of the Sickler, a comic intended to help other young kids struggling with illness. Now 14 years old,...
Drag Queen Story Hour Strives to Teach Kids Acceptance and Diversity
by Juan Cortes, Age 10 and IndyKids Staff Some drag queens around the United States are taking to a different kind of stage: one at the front of a public library. The Drag Queen Story Hour, which started in 2015 in San Francisco, are events which see drag queens...
