On the day of her junior prom, Anna Newcome woke up early, loaded several boxes into trucks and drove over to the Kansas Statehouse with friends, family and other volunteers to plant one felt-fabric rose for each of the 5,000 Kansans killed by COVID-19.
For her Girl Scout Gold Award leadership project, Newcome had committed to organizing Kansas s installment of the national Rose River Memorial, a project by international artist Marcos Lutyens to honor each life lost to COVID-19.
Newcome, a junior at Topeka West, had first started planning the project about four months ago, holding Zoom conferences and sending emails to people and organizations across the state who would help her realize the ambitious project.
Chris Frazier used to dislike the police.
Growing up, the French Middle School eighth-grader had been deeply influenced by accounts of police brutality and discrimination he had seen on TV.
But then he started talking with the Topeka Police Department school resource officer stationed at his school, and over time, he got to know the officer more deeply as a person, rather than some abstract figure and symbol of oppression.
Frazier began to see the police, but particularly those who work in schools, as a source of comfort, even if other students still held onto a skeptical, but not totally unreasonable, fear of police interactions.