Teen Pulse

Opportunities for work in the teenage years can be limited. Youth Mobilizers, a program administered by the Family YMCA and funded by the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board (JJAB), seeks to provide teens with a way to identify community issues and address them through projects.
Teens offer an outside perspective that can make all the difference in new and innovative growth. Including teens in important community issues, Youth Mobilizers then empowers them to change a perceived issue by employing them to fix it.
Recreating the atmosphere of the job application process, a youth fills out a job application through the Family YMCA. This is followed with an interview to complete the application process. A project is then proposed by the teen that must meet one of the program’s goals:
• Celebrate teens and their interests/accomplishments
• Further teen skills and experience in an area of teen interest
• Empower teens voice in the community regarding topics that are important to them
After the project is approved, an adult from the program is paired with the teen to provide guidance through the process. The pair then meets and constructs a plan with the details of the project. Goals, timetables, and quality are discussed and included in this plan.

It is common knowledge that smoking cigarettes is detrimental to one’s health, but some methods such as hookah are thought by many youth not to be harmful.
Hookahs are water pipes used to smoke special tobacco that can come in many different flavors. According to the American Lung Association (ALA), hookah smoking has many of the same health risks as cigarette smoking including oral cancer, lung cancer and decreased fertility.
Hookah use originated in ancient Persia and India, but is now gaining popularity with teenagers in many European countries and in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, hookah use is increasing among youth and college students.
Because of this trend, organizations such as the multinational youth-led Evolvement movement are undertaking campaigns to raise awareness about the dangers of tobacco use through cigarettes and hookah.
Members of Evolvement need to be part of a participating high school and are required to go through training with an Evolvement coordinator.
Evolvement New Mexico has started a campaign called Clear the Haze. This campaign specifically targets young people to educate them that hookah smoking is as dangerous as cigarette smoking.

Teen Pulse staff writer Rigel Baron asked students, “What are your plans for the upcoming three-day weekend?”

The Los Alamos High School’s Topper Advisory Council (TAC) has recently reviewed and approved a new set of guidelines, created by the student council, pertaining to dress code and other school rules for high school dances. The TAC, a council consisting of members belonging to the LAHS staff, student population, and parents, provides advice to the principal on school related issues. With a membership of about 20, this group of hardworking individuals meets monthly and is committed to making a positive and influential impact on the high school.
After tireless effort to revise the old code, members of the high school’s student council created a new set of dance rules due to previous misconceptions, misinterpretations and an overall negative reaction from high school students in relation to the previous dance regulations.
LAHS senior Jodi Thomas said, “I think that the main problem about what happened was not the rules, but how late they were released.” Others felt differently though, asserting that the rules regarding strapless dresses, dress thigh height and open back dresses needed revisions. Regardless, both issues have been solved with a revision and approval of the new rules more than five months before the high school’s next big dance, Prom.