Playing the role of a school district, GT American Studies students presented their semester-long projects in the lecture hall for guests Monday morning. Students developed plans for a new high school in Frisco ISD to “Save the System” in the context of U.S. history.

“Keeping in mind the foundations of building a country as we did in the United States, this project aims to encourage the students to build their own ideal school,” co-teacher Emily Griffin said. “This addresses issues that they find in the current school system and then solutions that they want to implement into their own campus. They get the opportunity to develop an entire school.”

Explaining the principles of colonialism guiding the project, co-teacher Swapna Gardner emphasizes the project’s application to history.

“We were hoping that they would think about how the colonists and how they left everything to start something new,” Gardner said. “They wanted to leave behind what they had, because they didn’t believe in that system or it wasn’t for them, so we wanted them to sort of see that idea and then sort of go from having this dream and then figuring out what are the actual logistics of a school. I think a lot of even our counselors and guests were just like, well, now they’re starting to think about how a real school works and observe things that they probably didn’t think about that.”

Presenting with the third group, junior Pearce Dennen reflected on the impact of the project on his understanding of colonialism and creating schools.

“We spent a lot of time learning about the founding of the country which helped when we were asked to make the founding principles of our school,” Dennen said. “We also all had to meet at different times throughout the semester to get our parts finished. For our project we wanted to create a more career driven school with a focus on becoming more specialized to careers the students may want to do in the future as well as learning how to function as adults in the future. I personally learned how much work it takes to make a school and that there are many different things that were considered that I had never realized.”

Throughout the semester, Gardner was impressed to see students bringing in their passions outside of class to the project.

“I really liked that the students could work off their strengths and so we just were listening to like the fight song and alma mater for a team where  their strength was music,” Gardner said. “One of their leaders is just really into band and so they put together this really impressive fight song and alma mater and then somebody else is really strong in art, so their logo and the way their branding came together was really polished really nice.”