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Ep 174 Tell Your Story: Addressing School Segregation with Jayln Robinson · Hearts Of Gold - Reflections from Gold Award Girl Scouts

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  Ep174 Jayln Robinson
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  Thrille Media: The Hearts of Gold podcast is brought to you by the Grow and Share Network, produced by Thrille Media.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Welcome to Hearts of Gold. Today, we have Jayln with us. Hi.
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  Jayln Robinson: Hi.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Can you tell us about your Girl Scout Gold Award project?
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  Jayln Robinson: Yes, I can. So my Gold Award project was called Tell Your Story, and it was about the lack of diversity in New York City public school system because New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the entire country.
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  So the focus of my project was specifically on how to improve the admissions process in the city because we actually have to apply to high schools here. So it's very similar to the college process, but there's a lot of kind of complicated ways in which it makes it harder for students of color to get access into these specialized high schools because you have to take a test, and oftentimes what's on the test doesn't reflect what a lot of schools get taught.
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  So I know me personally, for example, I couldn't take the SHSAT, which is what the test is called, because I didn't know half the material on it, and my guidance counselor was like, "You should sit this one out." I was like, "Okay." Yeah, so I started a blog kind of just talking about my experience growing up in the public school system because I did all 12 years in a public school.
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  And then I created a documentary in January of this year called Separate Not Equal, which highlighted specifically the specialized high school admissions process. And then just a couple months ago, I did a final paper for senior year which I call Barriers to Integration, which was going further into everything that goes into the segregated systems.
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  And in July, early July, I published it on my blog.
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  Sheryl Robinson: That's very exciting.
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  Jayln Robinson: Thank you.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What did you learn about through this process that surprised you?
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  Jayln Robinson: The amount of kind of decrease in the diversity in these schools because when you look at what New York City Public Schools publishes per year versus what the independent data was saying, it was two very different things.
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  They're saying that there's all these people that come from all these different backgrounds, and then The New York Times would publish an article, and they would be like, "Oh, only three out of 250 something students got admit." This year it was really interesting because when I started the project and when I started doing my research, I think they said in 2024 it was about eight students, and then last year it was, like, maybe four, five Black students, and this year I think they said it was, like, maybe three.
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  So the fact that the numbers keep decreasing and everyone's more so talking about it, but nothing is getting done, that was what really surprised me.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What kind of feedback did you get from people that learned about the information you were sharing?
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  Jayln Robinson: A lot of people were surprised because when you think of New York City, like everyone thinks of melting pot.
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  When I told them these things, they were like, "Oh, that makes sense," but like also it's just so hard to wrap your head around. A lot of people were also surprised because it's a, a subject that nobody really wants to talk about. It's something that everyone has been skating around for literally as long as I've been in school, 'cause there's been like all these different lawsuits about it.
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  Nothing was ever really fully went through, like no reform has come out of it. And so people were like, "Oh, you're really brave for talking about it," 'cause, you know, some people, they just leave it alone. And I was like, "Yeah, well..."
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  Sheryl Robinson: What's one thing that you wish that the school system would implement, one change?
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  Jayln Robinson: I think making the curriculum more accessible. I had a conversation with the superintendent where I went to high school, and we were just talking about like what we saw different because this was my final for senior year. I just told him like it wouldn't be a problem if it was like everyone was getting access to these things, and it was just that certain students just aren't performing well.
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  But the problem is that the further uptown you go, the less access there is to certain stuff. The rezoning and the redistricting, it allows for our districts to get budget cuts. Like one of the things that I spoke about was when I was in eighth grade, I live in Upper Manhattan, and so my middle school district had budget cuts to our like arts funding.
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  So we went from being able to have music class and all this stuff to all of that being on the line because we just, we didn't know how much money we were gonna have. And it wasn't particularly an art school, but a lot of kids do go into the arts after that school, so it was like to see such a program that really fueled a lot of kids to potentially go away, it was so heartbreaking because there weren't that many places for us to go.
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  We would have to go all the way downtown, and then like those places would be super expensive.
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  Sheryl Robinson: You mentioned your school superintendent. Who else was on your team, and how did they help you?
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  Jayln Robinson: I was really lucky to have really great humanities teachers. A lot of my humanities teachers when I first had told them about like my project and then also about my final, they were actually really excited, and they were really open and willing to donate information and just have conversations with me as teachers in the school system and how they felt about it, which was really interesting because I would have never really thought of it from a teacher's perspective.
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  I also had gotten a lot of support from my friends. Actually two of my close friends and I, we wind up doing our big presentation together for our final paper because all of us had agreed that this was a topic that we felt like was important. So having those conversations with my friends really fueled my project, and then also fueled just me being able to have conversations about it with other people because to a lot of people it just seemed like a project that you wouldn't necessarily speak about.
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  A lot of people felt like it was a topic where it was like, why are you focused on that? What an interesting topic to be focused on. And I was like, "Yeah." I also had a lot of support from my mom. She actually is the reason why my project is named Tell Your Story, because she always used to tell me "Who will tell your story?"
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  And so I always thought that was just such an interesting thing, so I took the name from her. And I had a great project advisor who really helped me push the project along, but also helped me understand what I could do with such a big piece of information. Because one of the biggest things with my project was where am I gonna put this?
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  What am I gonna do with this? I have all this information, but just telling it to people isn't enough. People need to see the impact that this is gonna have.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What did you learn about yourself through this process?
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  Jayln Robinson: I learned that I am a really great organizer, because I had to organize a lot for this project.
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  I also learned that not only that I am a good organizer, but also that I like to organize. I like sharing information especially not in like a typical format, like in a multimedia type format. Making the documentary was a lot of fun, and I got to present it to people, my classmates, so that was really interesting.
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  And then also just when I published one of the first articles of my blog, so many of my friends were like, "This is so good." And I was like, "Wow, thank you. This is great." So it was really great to see all these different skills that I feel like I've always had get put together and put out in a way that I could feel proud of and the other people around me could feel proud of.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What was your biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?
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  Jayln Robinson: I was a big procrastinator. I can't lie. I always knew what I wanted the project to be, but I didn't know how I wanted it to come out. And then a lot of the other challenge was when we had a change of administration, it was the diversity, equity, and inclusion, all of those resources were starting to go away.
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  So it was hard to access a lot of information for a really long time because people were trying to just push it under the rug. Nobody wanted to talk about segregation. You'd bring it up to someone and they'd be like, " That's not really a thing anymore." And it was like, eh, well, not in the way that everybody else thinks of it, but it still does exist, and especially in a place like New York, you know?
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  That was really hard. And then also just finding ways that I was going to be able to get this information across in a way that it was going to capture other people. Because I feel like now online so many people kind of just get given information, that a, a lot of people just choose to skip over it or pull out what they think is important, and then everything else is okay, whatever.
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  I knew that I had to appeal to the people that I was trying to reach.
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  Sheryl Robinson: You identified your project through the lack of resources that were available in order for students to take this exam or, other pathways to these schools. When you think about that in the Girl Scout environment, what could leaders think about in order to be balancing those resources and being able to provide an equal table for those that they're serving?
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  Jayln Robinson: I think really just being open and willing to have conversations. Something that I really liked about Being in Girl Scouts was that it didn't really matter, who you were or where you came from, 'cause it was just like everyone was going to have the same experience. And so I think it's just being a Girl Scout means looking at a problem and seeing, how are we gonna fix this, right?
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  And you can't live by the promise or the law if you're also not willing to accept or have open and honest conversations about the issues that maybe don't affect you personally, but they affect the people around you. I think that was the biggest thing, and I had a lot of conversations about that with people in my troop, and also just people that I knew through Girl Scouts when I was in the process of this project.
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  'Cause I was like, it's a hard topic, but it's something that everybody needs to know about so that everyone can be in agreement and understanding of kind of the issues that affect real people.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What other Girl Scout experiences have you had?
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  Jayln Robinson: This past year I was a CIT at our Girl Scout Camp Kaufman.
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  That was so much fun. I made some of, like, my favorite people in the world at camp. And I also got a lot of new experiences, because prior to being a CIT, I had never really went to camp and actually got to experience camp. I got to go to camp and do the fun things with my troop, but it was also just a completely different experience getting to share a cabin with girls you barely knew.
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  We had our CIT kickoff weekend, and it was snowing so hard, and I remember we had just met everyone on the train, and literally by the next day we were having a snowball fight in our field. So that was one of my favorite parts of being a CIT this past year. We also do this thing in the city called the CEO program, or the Cookie CEO program.
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  We got to do these fun workshops. Pre-COVID we would actually go to the Girl Scout headquarters but post-COVID we would get on a Zoom. Sometimes we would get to look at some fun stuff that they had planned for the next cookie season. I did our leadership institute program for a couple of years.
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  I was in our business track, so we got to go and do different workshops with Bank of America, and just other kind of really cool companies. Morgan Stanley, we got to tour the Morgan Stanley building, and we actually got our face on the billboard that they have in Times Square, which that was really fun.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What is your camp name and how did you get it?
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  Jayln Robinson: So my camp name is Snoopy, and I actually got it because we were in our CIT meeting and we were making our constitution and they were like, "Okay, this is the time where you have to pick a name." And so I was like, "Hmm, like what am I gonna do?"
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  And so initially I was gonna do Rain 'cause that's my middle name, but I was like, "No, I don't like that." Everyone had such cool names, And I was just like, "Oh my God, what am I gonna pick?" And then I was just thinking about it, and I was like, "Snoopy." And so I picked Snoopy, and I love it.
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  Sheryl Robinson: So you said that you've been to camp with your troop, but you hadn't actually gone to camp before. What made you think about pursuing the CIT program then?
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  Jayln Robinson: I wanted to experience a lot more of camp than I had. So at our camp, we do these overnight and day trip experiences. We had an Earth Day thing that my troop went up to, and I had so much fun, and we got to do tie-dye and fishing and all this really cool stuff.
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  And so I was like I would love to do that for longer, and I would also love to experience that more than just one time a year. So I was like, "Let me just sign up to be a CIT." And then about a week later they emailed me back, and they were like, "We're so happy to accept you into our CIT program."
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  And I was like, "Yay!"
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  Sheryl Robinson: You also went to Girl Scout Convention this summer, didn't you?
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  Jayln Robinson: I did go to convention.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Do you wanna tell us about that experience and anything special that might have happened?
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  Jayln Robinson: So this was my second convention. I went to Disney in 2023, which that was my first convention ever, and that was a lot of fun, although it was very hot.
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  But this convention, I got to stay with my older girls from my Girl Scout troop, and it was really special because this was my last one as a Girl Scout. Once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout, but being in the program. And so we went to the African American Museum. We got to see the Washington Monument.
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  We also got to see the MLK Monument. And we got to do a lot of the fun, like, touristy stuff, but then we also got to do a lot of the fun stuff that was happening at the convention center. We actually went to the Gold Ceremony, which it was really cool because the keynote speaker that they had at the Gold Ceremony, she was from Greater New York, and she actually won the award that I won in, I believe it was 2009, she said.
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  Which in my head I was like, oh my God, that's so crazy. And so we got to meet her afterwards. And then Saturday we got to go to the Jordan Childs conversation which that was really fun because we actually, the night before we all were like, "Okay we have to get up really early," but then we got home really late, so we woke up the next morning and we rushed over.
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  We wind up getting second row, so we were like, "Oh, thank God."
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  Sheryl Robinson: I was first in line for that Jordan Childs event.
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  Jayln Robinson: Oh my God. We tried. My friend made it beforehand, and so we wind up coming with, another group of people, and she called and she was like, "We're up at the front." I was like, "I don't want anyone to get mad."
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  And she was like, "No, it's okay." So we walked up, and we were literally standing in line, and we started swapping. I was like, "Okay, great."
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  Sheryl Robinson: So even though you'll be an adult Girl Scout, are you considering going to Indianapolis in 2029?
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  Jayln Robinson: Oh, for sure. For sure. For sure.
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  Sheryl Robinson: I'll be there, too. Has Girl Scout impacted you and your school?
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  And what is it like as you're finishing up your youth activities as a Girl Scout?
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  Jayln Robinson: It's very bittersweet. I've been a Girl Scout for 10 years now, and it definitely shaped me as a person. I really don't think that I would be the person who I am now if I wasn't a Girl Scout. It's taught me a lot about leadership.
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  It's taught me a lot about perseverance, but also it's taught me a lot about friendship and friendship values. I've met some of my closest friends in Girl Scouts, but not just being in the Girl Scout program with my troop, but also through going to other events and CIT-ing. I talk to most of my friends from the CIT program literally every day, and I just think that's what's so special.
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  Whenever you go somewhere, you're always identifiable by being a Girl Scout. I remember I had this necklace that I was walking around with my junior year, and I went to this college fair, and the woman saw the necklace on my neck, and she was like, "Are you a Girl Scout?" I was like, "Yeah, I am."
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  And she was like, "Oh my God, I was a Girl Scout." And she was started asking me about my Gold Award project and all these things. And that it was so funny because throughout the college application process, the one thing that people would ask me about was being a Girl Scout and over anything else. So I was like, wow, like, it really is cool.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What are you going to do in your future?
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  Jayln Robinson: I'm studying sports management at the University of Connecticut. I actually leave next weekend. I'm very sad. I hope to not go too far from Girl Scouts. I hope to return back to Camp Coffman as a staff member in early next year. And yeah, maybe I'll find a troop in Connecticut to buy some cookies from.
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  Sheryl Robinson: What else would you like to share with the audience?
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  Jayln Robinson: I think that this last year in Girl Scouts has been one of my favorite years in Girl Scouts, between convention to CIT-ing, but also at the beginning of last year, I was awarded the Future Women of Distinction Award for my council, which was insane.
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  I remember the year before, I had met the girl who had won the award prior, and I was like, " that sounds really cool. I'm gonna apply for it." And I was just like, "Whatever." And I was talking about it with one of my best friends from my troop. She was like, "Yeah, you should do it." And I was like, "Okay."
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  And then I got an email, I think a month later, and it was like, " We wanna interview with you for the award." And I was like, "Okay, whatever." So I did the interview, and in my head, I was just like, "Okay, if I don't get it, it's okay because the finalists they still get to go to the breakfast."
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  The next day, I get a call from our CEO, and she was like, "I'm so happy to tell you that you're our next Future Woman of Distinction." I was like, "Oh my God. Like, I can't believe it." It was such a surreal feeling and year, honestly. Like even through there I got to meet some like amazing people at the breakfast, and it was actually funny because one of my friends at my CIT program, the first thing she asked me, she was like, "Oh, like you're a Future Woman of Distinction, right?"
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  I was like, "How'd you know?" It was really fun, and it was such a great experience to not only get to talk about my project on such like a, a wide level, but it was also fun because I got to connect with like younger Girl Scouts and really show them that like it's possible to get here. It doesn't take a lot.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Yeah. NYC really, the council really. It's not just an award or a title. You become a spokesman for the council for a year.
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  Jayln Robinson: I got to go to Nasdaq, which was really cool. I got to tour the whole Nasdaq building, and then the stock exchange, when they have people who are like getting signed they have confetti.
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  And so the woman who was standing there, she was like, "Oh, do you wanna push the confetti button?" I was like, "Yes." The most stressful minute of my life, let me tell you, because you have to get it perfectly on time, otherwise you've just thrown off the whole big moment. But I'm very happy to say that I did get it on time.
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  So I did not mess up their moment, but that was pretty cool. I also got to go to Fordham and speak. They host an event called Girl Congress. So I got to speak to a bunch of middle school to mid high school level Girl Scouts on just about my Girl Scouting experience, and also kind of encouraging them to go for their high awards.
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  So those were like my top two favorite moments of this past year.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Congratulations. It is a really big deal. How do you make your s'mores?
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  Jayln Robinson: You have to put the marshmallow in, but it has to be orange. Has to be. I cannot see a single bit of the original marshmallow. And then I have to put the chocolate down first on the graham cracker, and then twist and pull.
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  Sheryl Robinson: That way you get the smooshiest, hot marshmallow so that it melts your chocolate. Mm-hmm.
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  Jayln Robinson: Exactly.
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  Sheryl Robinson: That's, that's my favorite way.
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  Jayln Robinson: That's the only way.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Thank you so much for joining us.
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  Jayln Robinson: Yes, thank you for having me.
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  Sheryl Robinson: Make sure to click follow or subscribe so you always know when new episodes are released.
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  Power your passion and conquer your challenges.
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  Thrille Media: Thank you for listening. If you'd like to be on the show to share your story with how you earned your Gold Award, reach out and send an email to growandshare@outlook.com. Be sure to catch up on our previous shows on any of your favorite podcasting platforms, as well as view the full video versions @youtube.com/SherylMRobinson.
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  Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time