Environmental Justice Featured in Symposium

Bohn is a junior at West High School in Madison, WI, and a Director for YEPT.

On April 9, 2025, Madison West High School welcomed around 200 community experts and presenters into its classrooms for the school’s second annual Equity Symposium. As a junior at West, I was eager to see how the symposium would evolve from the previous year, as well as what would be offered. 

The Equity Symposium was an all-day event where, in lieu of classes, students attended four workshops ranging from art to food justice to disability awareness. Sarah Quinn, the Academic and Career Planning Coordinator at West, undertook the massive responsibility of planning and coordinating the symposium, leading an impressive community outreach effort to connect with workshop leaders and offering one-on-one support to tailor workshops. 

“Student choice is critical to the success of this event,” said Quinn in an email interview. In order to center student voice and choice at the symposium, a form was sent out for students to indicate interest in certain workshops; students selected from a catalog of over 100 sessions. Each student then received a personalized schedule for the day based on their choices. 

Nine of the workshops focused directly on environmental justice and climate change. In one popular workshop, titled Stop the Line 5 Pipeline, Abby Novinska-Lois, the Executive Director of Healthy Climate Wisconsin, shared her battle against the Line 5 oil pipeline, which runs through Indigenous lands and poses significant health and environmental risks if it were to leak. In another, a student-moderated panel spoke about climate advocacy and policy. 

Because the climate crisis is such an overarching issue, many of the workshops that were not exclusively climate-focused also addressed environmental inequity, including one session on food insecurity and another on city design. 

In addition, some of the workshops dealt with equity more broadly and allowed participants to dig deeper into a particular aspect that was important to them. Instead of telling students about a particular issue, these workshops encouraged students to do the telling, offering a toolbox for finding their voice.

For example, I attended a workshop titled Printmaking for the People: Linocut Workshop. In linocut printmaking, linoleum blocks are carved and used as stamps. It is a method often used in messaging for social justice causes, as it is comparatively cheap and quick to produce. Lydia Zoells, a Madison-based printmaking artist, began by encouraging students to create a brainstorm-web of the things that are important to them. Then, we spent time exploring symbols that might represent these topics. Finally, the process of carving the print itself began.

 When I walked out of the door at the end of the workshop, just one hour later, I held five prints in my hand and a carved linoleum block that could be used to create more prints. All materials were provided at no cost to students. The Equity Symposium is a powerful opportunity for high schoolers to explore topics that would otherwise never be addressed by school curriculums, and to learn from community experts in the field. 

Linocut print and tile created by Madeleine at the 2025 Equity Symposium. Image credit: Madeleine Bohn

The effort to prioritize equity at West has evolved significantly over the past few years. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, West began quarterly lessons, about an hour long, to address inequity and antiracism. However, Quinn says that they received feedback that these lessons “felt performative and inauthentic to many students.” The Equity Symposium was conceived of as an alternative that would integrate the topic of equity in a meaningful and engaging manner. 

What began as an attempt to address racial inequity in the halls of a high school has grown into something much larger, something that took an entire community to pull off. This year’s Equity Symposium focused not only on antiracism efforts, but also many of the various intersectional aspects of equity that are necessary for a community to contend with.