Those of us who grew up on sitcoms like High School Musical, Dawson’s Creek, or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air may recall a distinct tinge of disappointment upon entering our real school. Compared to Capeside High or Bel-Air Academy, how could ours compete?

A particular vibrancy permeated those fictional school spaces. Some sort of spark or tension in their ambience beckoned us in towards the potential of it all.

Here we might begin a lifelong friendship, discover the earliest threads of interest leading us to a career, or even learn something crucial that will fundamentally shape the rest of our lives. There’s magic in the air. Hidden amongst the bleachers or in a lone chair facing the principal’s desk, myriad undercurrents of an unknown future wait to be unraveled.

And then you’d turn the TV off, sling your backpack over your shoulder. Time to go to school.

Yasuhara Middle School doesn’t inspire such dissonance. If anything, it’s as though I’m wandering through an empty set for one of those sitcoms. Walls decorated with real student art and timely announcements betray that feeling, but only just. Though I’ve long since graduated middle school, a familiar excitement for learning wells in my heart. It truly is a gorgeous place.

There are no students headed to Yasuhara today. We’re in late August and classes are out for one more week. Most of the folks gathering in Yasuhara’s gym, including myself, are adults.

But we were all students once. And though we may have stopped waiting at the school bus stop in the mornings, I suspect most of us never stopped trying to learn. In fact, that’s why everyone is here now. We’re learning how to work together as a community.

The admittedly tired adage of villages raising children perseveres not just for its catchiness, but also its veracity. Today’s youth here in our home county need help, yet parents alone can only do so much. The same goes for educators. We need to gather the rest of the village.

That’s what we aim to do today at Yasuhara Middle School. Spokane community leaders like City Council President Betsy Wilkerson, Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard, Mayor Lisa Brown, and LaunchNW’s own Ben Small, among others, face a room of more than 150 educators, politicians, and local business and nonprofit leaders.

They stand prepared to unveil LaunchNW’s newest program, EngageIRL. Born of a partnership with Spokane Public Schools, EngageIRL could provide much-needed change in the life trajectories of the district’s twenty-eight thousand students.

The reveal event in Yashura’s gym feels upbeat and exciting thanks in no small part to the wonderful performance put on by the Ferris High School Drumline, but the realities underlying EngageIRL’s existence are grim.

A mental health epidemic threatens our kids, particularly students who are 10 to 17 years old. In 2010, fifty-four Spokane County children in this age range committed or attempted to commit suicide. Little more than a decade later, that number has risen to five hundred and fifty.

Student academic engagement and success data follows similarly worrying trends:

• Forty-one percent of Spokane County students have missed more than a month of school in 2021-2022
• Only forty-four percent of Spokane County students are meeting standards for kindergarten readiness
• Just forty-eight percent of Spokane high school graduates go on to postsecondary education in 2-year or 4-year colleges and universities
• The median annual income of graduates with only a high school diploma is $32,000… fourteen years after graduation

Though categorically distinct, we here at LaunchNW believe these findings to be symptomatic of something bigger: a fundamental disconnect between kids and community.

An isolated student will struggle to be successful. They lack tangible relationships and real-life activity– both vital for social and educational growth. Though not insurmountable, these deficits could have ramifications for the rest of a child’s life, directly affecting their potential as adults.

It’s no surprise either that most of this harmful isolation occurs after school, around 3pm. As students leave their classes and head home for the day, they delve into hours and hours of often unmonitored time on their digital devices– five hours daily on average, according to Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard during his speech.

Kids need connection, but online spaces and social media are not the best places for them to find it. But out-of-school activities fail to be affordable and accessible for many children. What can be done?

At the heart of EngageIRL lies a profound recognition that we, as a community, have an undeniable responsibility in ensuring that our children thrive.

Betsy Wilkerson puts it best during her brief but moving speech at the podium: Community isn’t someone else. She points to her heart. Community is me.

Too often I get lost in the language of this work. It creates a distance. It’s that covert, subconscious perception that the problems discussed in news broadcasts and speeches are someone else’s problems, that the ‘us’ who need to find a solution somehow includes everyone but me, so I should just go on living the same.

To paraphrase Calvin’s father from Bill Watterson’s indelible Calvin and Hobbes, though, we are someone else to someone else. Despite every solution we hear about which may inadvertently elicit this ethos of complacency, it’s worth remembering that countless more solutions and solution-makers never manifest. The pain of the world does not only continue in their absence. It swells.

As much as EngageIRL presents itself as one such solution to problems in our world, it exists just as much to be an emphatic call to action—for me and for you. What do you love to do? What activities could you share with kids? How can you become like the mentors and trusted adults of your youth who taught you what it means to look out for someone else? And if you never had anyone like that in your own life, how can you become that person for someone else now?

It takes courage to ask ourselves these questions, and it takes honesty to answer them. Whether you know the answers or not, we encourage you to get involved and join us however you can from your own little corner of community– whether that’s submitting a youth activity to the EngageIRL website or giving your employees time off to volunteer.

You can take part in creating life-changing experiences and memories for the students who need them most.

It takes a village. From all of us here at LaunchNW, we sincerely thank you for reading. We’ll see you after school.

Samuel McLaughlin is a Marketing and Communications Program Associate at LaunchNW.