a conversation with the co-founders of laguardia outreach

Article by Aisha Baiocchi, featuring an interview with Nina Worley and Zaina O’Connor

For this week’s Saturday post, we had the pleasure of talking with Nina Worley and Zaina O’Connor-Jamia, students from LaGuardia High School’s class of 2022 and co-founders of LaGuardia Outreach.

LaGuardia is one of the city’s nine specialized high schools, but the screens that it uses are unique. Applicants are expected to prepare portfolios and auditions for their respective concentrations. This year, though slightly adjusted for COVID safety, a similar process remains. Additionally, LaGuardia faces another issue: its admissions process is not well known or well understood by all of the potential applicants (8th and 9th graders) in the city. Nina and Zaina first encountered this problem last September:

“We volunteered for a high school open house, in the Bronx where we were representing LaGuardia,” Zaina said, “and while we were there we realized that the questions we were getting were ones that we did not expect to get at all. People were asking us if we had dorms or if we offered scholarships, so we recognized that the information about LaGuardia and the high school admissions system, in general, wasn’t as much as we were taught. We realized we wanted to help people, the students in low-income neighborhoods, get the information that they deserved, to offer an even playing field.”

That’s how they came up with the idea for LaGuardia Outreach. Nina, the President of the group, describes their work, holding regular information sessions for middle schools in low-income areas, as providing “some sort of equity in a system that is full of inequities.”

When talking about the importance and impact of their work, Nina and Zaina mentioned how a recently well-published incident of a Muslim Student at LaGuardia facing discrimination by a teacher was representative of some of the environment.

“This is not a new thing, this has been happening forever,” Zaina said, “There’s so much microaggression in LaGuardia against minority students. It comes from other students, it comes from faculty, teachers, and it’s not okay.”

In Nina’s experience, student unions play a large role in helping create a welcoming environment. She talked about the Latinx union, coincidentally one she helped found and the only one in all of the specialized high schools. Recently the union collaborated with Beacon High School’s Latinx student union: 

“We had a conversation about microaggressions and I don’t think there was one person in that zoom meeting of like thirty to forty people who didn’t have a story.” Nina recalled, “And even though some of us are white, and have the privilege of that, the minute I speak Spanish in my classes or that students find out, I think things come out about LaGuardia. I don’t think there are many minority students, ethnically or racially, that can tell you they haven’t experienced something– within this public school system, not just LaGuardia, I think in middle schools as well.

Though they both have ideas about how to change the larger system, they agreed that LaGuardia Outreach is a start. While discussing the work she also does as an organizer for Teens Take Charge’s education unscreened campaign, Nina said that “LaGuardia outreach works to change the demographics and change who is represented in our school and who isn’t frankly. I mean we live in a super segregated school system and this is our little part.”

As a final piece of advice to our readers, both those considering schools like LaGuardia and those in different schools but facing similar environments, Zaina and Nina both had something to say:

  “Be really well researched.” Zaina advised, “Do your research, know the schools you want to go to, and figure out everything you can about them. Figure out where your advantages and disadvantages are and work with the system. It’s awful to say but you have to find a way through it.”

Nina, on the other hand, talked about fear: “Don’t feel like you can’t fit somewhere because you don’t see other people that look like you there and until the system really changes, take a risk!”
  To learn more about LaGuardia Outreach, check out their Instagram, @laguardiaoutreach . To learn about similar school-based campaigns, check out Instagrams by students at other specialized schools working to desegregate their environments: @hsascedi , @hchs4diversity, or check out groups like Teens Take Charge and Integrate NYC . More information about LaGuardia can be found on the school website. A special thank you to Nina Worley and Zaina O’Connor-Jamia for participating in the interview and talking about all the work they do.