Members of Parsons High School and Parsons Middle School’s C.A.M.P. Club were invited to participate in a logo contest to represent the new club.
C.A.M.P. stands for Cultural Alliance and Multiracial Pact.
The club gives students the opportunity to explore multiracial backgrounds while acknowledging issues and events, bringing awareness and education through celebration, diverse learning and fun activities for those interested and willing to collaborate with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
Club sponsor Kristina Mayhue said she first opened the contest only to middle school members because she didn’t want there to be an unfair advantage. Some of the middle school students rushed through first entries, so Mayhue encouraged them to invest more time and put more thought and heart into developing their ideas into works of art. As the deadline neared, Mayhue decided to extend an invite for PHS students to submit designs, too. This put a little pressure on the middle school students to do better. As it turned out, middle school students ended up with a month to work on designs and high school students had a week.
In the end, 12 designs were submitted. A group narrowed the designs down to the top four, three middle school entries and one high school entry, and then sent those four out to staff asking them to vote on their favorite.
The winner by popular vote was Parsons Middle School student Marlow Scott-Adamson.
Marlow said in her design she wanted to focus on youths of different cultures, who have different skin tones, coming together, while also spelling out C.A.M.P. on their clothing. She gave one student dark skin, one light brown skin and one light pink skin. She couldn’t decide what to do on the fourth one, and then decided to have that youth be one with vitiligo, a disorder affecting all races where skin pigment, or color, is lost in some areas, causing people to have splotches of different colored skin.
“I think that caught a lot of people’s eyes with that vitiligo on there,” Mayhue said of the winning entry.
Marlow’s design is now the official logo for the club. “It will be on our social media page, on our T-shirts. We hope to get merchandise, pens, pencils, and cards for the kids to hand out, too,” Mayhue said. Marlow said being a member of the club is fun.
“I like being included in it,” she said. “I like all the stuff we get to do.”
Besides fun club activities and community involvement projects, upcoming activities for the club include some field trips to places like Heiskell Indian Nations University and the Gordon Parks Museum.
All students at the middle school and high school level are welcome to join.