NHA Seniors Take (Social) Action

Top: Glasco Staten. Bottom: Ana Y. Martinez Paz, who presented on the power of youth advocacy. Her final project has been practicing that advocacy in real time. 

Michael Massey didn’t always think about how abortion laws applied to him. Then he considered his four sisters, his seven aunts, and his mom—and what he could do to better advocate for their rights as they came increasingly under attack.

Massey is a senior at New Haven Academy (NHA), where he has had the chance to study and address abortion rights with a year-long Senior Action Project (SAP), an action-focused capstone that all seniors present before graduating. Wednesday, he brought his completed work to the school’s second-floor library, as 68 members of the senior class presented their SAP findings to the wider school and New Haven communities.

“It’s really exciting to watch the students learn how much they know about the world,” said NHA co-founder and Principal Greg Baldwin, who leads the school alongside Program Director and fellow co-founder Meredith Gavrin. He added that the projects often give students a sense of communal and global responsibility, on everything from police misconduct to public health.

“It’s an amazing process and it gives the kids a chance to acknowledge what’s going on in the world,” added Gavrin.

As students filled the library, their interests ranged from immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights to better mental health training for police officers to wealth inequalities right here in New Haven. Around the room, conversation rose and fell as students opened their computers, pulled out info sheets and jumped into presentations, describing months of research that led to projects in the community.

Top: Wayne Gilliams, who studied the lack of police training around responding to people in the midst of a mental health crisis. Bottom: Grayce Howe, who worked with Spruce Coffee on State Street to create an incentive program to reduce single-use plastic cups. Her dream, she said, is to institute a city-wide composting program in restaurants to reduce food waste. Bottom: Melissa Rodriguez, whose project focused on immigrant rights in and beyond New Haven. 

Massey, who is headed to Lincoln Tech in the fall, based his SAP around abortion laws, which have been changing rapidly and growing more restrictive across the country since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. After choosing the topic last year, his research into anti-choice legislation helped him to better understand how laws affect the lives of not only women who may become pregnant, but the lives of people who are related to or care for these women.

“As someone with a lot of women in my life it was something I was interested in learning about,” he wrote in his presentation. 

Once he got started, Massey focused his attention on advocacy and education, with an interest in collecting the opinions and testimonies of people in his orbit. “I interviewed peers, teachers, and my parents, they all gave me different answers, some deeper than others,” he said in his presentation. He tried to think about how to be both helpful and empathetic as a cisgender man, who cannot physically get pregnant but knows and loves people who can.

What he took away from the interviews was a realization of “how much people don’t know,” he said Wednesday as he presented. It gave him the space to think more deeply about his own role in advocating for women who may need access to abortion, and reproductive care more generally. As a brother to four sisters, he thinks often about the women in his own life, and what it means for them to have wider access to choice.

Top: Lassiah Thomas, who loosed at inequalities in the fashion industry. “People can be beautiful in their own way, whether it’s skin color, skinny or tall, age or gender,” she said. Bottom: Maya Tindill, who addressed the uniquely American epidemic of gun violence in schools. 

Another participant, senior Lassiah Thomas, focused her SAP on inequalities in the fashion industry. Last year, the project grew out of her interest in fashion, including an internship with the New Haven brand Kami during her junior year at NHA. Thomas, who plans to study marketing at UConn in the fall, noticed that the standard of beauty—young, white, skinny, able-bodied and tall—rarely matched the diversity of the world that she lives in.

It also didn’t embody the spirit of body positivity that she so deeply wanted to see in the industry. So she set out to change it with a magazine that captured a broader spectrum of people interested and participating in fashion.

“I believe that this action will help in this industry, as well as people who look up to the industry, become more inclusive in diversity, body types, races, genders, abilities, instead of following the beauty standard,” she said in her presentation notes, 

In the vibrant magazine that she developed, designed and printed as her project, she describes the backlash models face when it comes to their race, gender, and sexuality and their physique. She dives into history, including the Victorian Dress Reform Movement of the 1850s and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance of 1969.

She learned that there have been efforts throughout history to spread body positivity, including recent, vocal remarks from celebrities like Sydney Sweeney and Florence Pugh. She also interviewed fellow students, teachers, and working artists, including senior Lashae’ Fairweather, plus-size model and photographer Tay’shaun Thomas-Butler, NHA dance teacher Carissa Kee, and NHA Spanish teacher Luis Rivera among others.

“People can be beautiful in their own way, whether it’s skin color, skinny or tall, age or gender,” she said. It’s her hope, she added, that people can come away from the project with a better and more stable sense of self-worth. For her, “health is more important” than cosmetic appearance.

Top: Melissa Rodriguez, whose project focused on immigrant rights in and beyond New Haven. Bottom: August Hotis, who looked at the deleterious impacts of AI on visual art. 

Fairweather, who will be studying social work at Morgan State University in the fall (and who was also featured in Thomas’ magazine), found a similar project when she chose to focus on teenage mental health. For years, Fairweather has had her own struggles with body image and mental health, including difficulty gaining weight that resulted in several doctors appointments.

She believes that the Covid-19 pandemic, during which young people were online more often, exacerbated mental health issues, from social media usage to the isolation of remote schooling. Her answer? A social media campaign talking openly about teenage mental health.

“A lot of teenagers don’t ask for help because they’re scared of being criticized,” she said. Currently, she’s concerned about budget cuts at the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), where social workers are already often stretched between multiple school buildings. She worries that a lack of counselors may result in students coming to school with no possible support system or an adult they can talk to when needed.

“Teenage mental health is real,” she said. “We’re not attention-seeking. We’re humans too.”

Senior Janii Morgan, who will be entering Central Connecticut State University and majoring in pre-nursing, focused on a different aspect of public health. After thinking about the current health landscape, she decided to research women’s health and abortion rights. Her process led her to create a lesson plan for middle schoolers at the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT), teaching them about personal choice.

When she was building the lesson plan, Morgan folded in activities that she thought would grab students’ attention, including scenario cards, informational videos, and group activities. She also added an advocacy component, teaching students about measures like the Women’s Health Protection Act that are meant to safeguard abortion rights.

“They need to be aware of the real-world implications of these laws, which should empower women to make their own choices,” she wrote in her “Theory of Action,” a standard part of the SAP that all students must include. 

Top: Lily Gonzalez, who looked at how implicit bias and systemic racism affects wrongful conviction. Bottom: Alisha Legeon. 

Around the library, the topics abounded, all of them tethered to real, sometimes very present problems unfolding in and beyond New Haven. On one end of the room, Lily Gonzalez dove deep on racism and wrongful conviction, the presentation thick with data from The Innocence Project. Across the room, Alisha Legeon explored racism in healthcare, from its long and violent history to a Change.org petition and blog to provide better antiracism training and anti-bias support for healthcare practitioners and students. Somewhere in between them, Lia Malone took a deep breath, and launched into an impassioned appeal for trans rights, and particularly the rights of trans youth.      

Zuhal Jamal, who is headed to Brandeis University in the fall, studied health disparities in New Haven, using homegrown, local resources like the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) and Project Access to back up her research. The idea grew out of learning some of the city’s history, including that New Haven was not immune from redlining in the 20th century (she can see its long-term damage in the West River neighborhood, where she lives).

The history stuck with her. Jamal, who has spearheaded climate-conscious initiatives at her school, started doing on the ground research, including in Prospect Hills and nearby Newhallville. She learned that the average life expectancy in Newhallville was 71.7 years old—a number that lagged behind Prospect Hill’s average life expectancy by over a decade. She designed informational workshops, presenting them at both New Haven Academy and the Dixwell Community Q House. 

Zuhal Jamal. 

It’s also personal, she added: Jamal came to the U.S. in 2015, the eldest of five siblings in a family of Afghan refugees, and has long been interested in a career in public health. Her dad, Shah Jahan Samim, owned a pharmacy in Afghanistan  before coming to the U.S. (for years, he worked in human resources at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services in New Haven).

Last year, she was able to intern on an observation unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital. As she heads to college in the fall, she wants to work to bridge a gap that is only growing wider under the current administration.

Nearby, two students—Desmond Benjamin and August Hotis—looked at the adverse effects of artificial intelligence or AI on mainstream media, misinformation, and arts and culture. Benjamin researched the different types of misinformation and disinformation, interested in young people’s access to reliable sources. Hotis, who plans to study writing at Goucher College, explored the effects of AI on visual art and artists, from original compositions to Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.

While Benjamin focused on educating his peers, Hotis printed a multi-page pamphlet teaching people about how AI hurts individual artists and encourages a sense of laziness. Both, working independently of each other, ultimately identified AI as a kind of mammoth, corporate and common enemy.

“I believe that if I educate and teach people how to be more media literate and aware of their own biases, then people will be able to have access to accurate information, therefore leading to them making better well calculated decisions based on what they know,” Benjamin said in his presentation.

Mya DeBerry is the Arts Paper's 2025 New Haven Academy (NHA) intern. The New Haven Academy internship is a program for NHA juniors that pairs them with a professional in a field that is interesting to them. From now through the end of the month, look out for her byline! Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.