The bumper sticker splayed across 17-year-old Scarlett Jimenez’s grey Cadillac Catera is fitting.
It asks, “What do you stand for?”
The soon-to-be senior at Hinkley High school lives by that phrase as she strives to make her north Aurora school and hometown a better place to grow up for future generations.
She was among the 100 students who walked out of class in April 2011 to protest the layoffs of some of her favorite teachers, she led an effort this year to photograph the problems of poverty and pollution in north Aurora, and now she’s working on a campaign to stop teen pregnancy.
Her undertakings are now being noticed by adults.
She was honored at the seventh annual Courageous Citizens of Colorado award ceremony June 23, sponsored by the Fields-Wolfe Memorial Fund. The organization created by family members of Javad Marshall-Fields, who was shot and killed in 2005 along with his fiancee before he was set to testify in the murder of his friend.
Jimenez said the recognition was unexpected, especially since the award is given annually to people who embody the same sort of bravery that Marshall-Fields did.
“I was really surprised, but really grateful and excited at the same time,” she said. “It was that feeling like, ‘Me? Me out of everyone?’”
The daughter of a special education teacher for Aurora Public Schools and a city employee of Aurora Water, Jimenez has lived in the same house a block away from Hinkley High School her entire life.
For years, she’s been privy to social and economic challenges of the north Aurora area like crime, drugs, poverty and homelessness. But she says she’s lucky enough to have been afforded opportunities in life that some of her friends haven’t.
She has good role models — four brothers and parents who have shown her that hard work and focus pays off, and her dreams of going to college and studying abroad are attainable, although she says it’s still too early for her to have her future entirely mapped out.
She became impassioned and encouraged to speak out last year when she got word that one of her favorite teachers was being laid off because of budget cuts. She was one of the protesters who walked out of class under the threat of being suspended, holding signs and chanting in support of Hinkley teachers whose jobs were in jeopardy.
“It was scary going out of my comfort zone, but it felt good after,” she said.
She liked the feeling of advocating for her beliefs so much that she decided to get involved in her community in other ways.
“It really sparked out of nowhere from not being involved at all to really wanting to be involved in all these things,” said Jimenez, who has been president of the Hinkley High School Student Council since her sophomore year.
“I definitely discovered a passion to leave my school better than what it was. I think that’s what drives me, is leaving something better for my kids or just generations for the future.”
In August 2011 she agreed to be a part of the Fields-Wolfe Memorial Fund’s PhotoVoice project, where she helped about 35 of her peers document the pollution on East Colfax Avenue, and the plight of pregnant teens, homeless people, and kids who felt unsafe at school.
The aim was to shine light on the problems on north Aurora, and in March, many of Aurora’s state and city lawmakers saw the photographs at an exhibit on the Anschutz Medical Campus.
She’s now forming a campaign that she hopes will address the taboo topic of teen pregnancy.
“Getting pregnant doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll drop out and not go to college, but it makes the chances higher,” she said.
The chances of the child being brought up in poverty and without good role models also increase, she said, which could eventually lead to an attitude of apathy toward school and making friends with the wrong crowd.
Many of Jimenez’s friends are pregnant, and she said it’s time that teachers put a heavy emphasis on sex education and abstinence.
“It’s something you see every single day, and it’s just something that can’t be ignored,” she said.
Teen pregnancy will be one of the topics of the second annual “Teen Summit,” an event hosted by the Fields-Wolfe Memorial Fund where students talk about ways to tackle social problems in their community.
Jimenez’s efforts deserve to be recognized, said Maisha Pollard, executive director of the Fields-Wolfe Memorial Fund and the sister of Marshall-Fields. In Pollard’s mind, there is a parallel between Jimenez’s willingness to go against the grain to try to enact change in her community and her brother’s decision in 2005 to testify as a witness in a murder, even in the face of death threats and bribes.
“She looks at the people she goes to school with and she’s an anomaly,” Pollard said.
Instead of relying on lawmakers or school board members, Jimenez is willing to confront challenges and solve problems on her own, Pollard said.
“Scarlett has been looking within her own individual person to identify changes that she could specifically make within her community, and I think oftentimes we look to other people to make the change,” Pollard said.
Reach reporter Sara Castellanos at 720-449-9036 or sara@aurorasentinel.com.