This year marks another year of Scarsdale’s famed Global Citizenship Day. On Global Citizenship Day, SHS students learn about both past and present global issues, how they affect us, and what we can do to help mitigate these problems. Discussing issues is an important way to fully understand topics we may not know much about and discover methods to alleviate them. 

Global Citizenship Day 2021 was different from previous years. The number of presentations over Zoom increased, both because some people were joining from across the globe and because of risks with Covid. In past years, Global Citizenship Day was more hands-on, but this unconventional setup has made some students wonder how effective Global Citizenship Day really was this time. 

Some students have said that this year’s event was ineffective because of the barrier that Zoom provided. This was an issue for many people, because the level of connection goes down when you can’t see or properly interact with the person telling you their life story. “[Some] of the speeches that I attended were uninteresting since [the speakers] never really engage with the students,” commented Jeffrey Lee ’23. In order to make the speeches more interesting, some students have proposed letting the students choose what events they want to attend, rather than having the teachers choose it for them. “I’d come up with a system to have students vote on what they want to learn about so that they are more engaged and can learn subjects they’re interested in,” said Lee. That way, students would be able to choose topics interesting to them, making the day more impactful to their personal lives. 

On the other hand, there were those who did not have an issue with the current system. They believed that the workshops were able to educate students on things that are important to learn about, but that are often ignored or glanced over. They felt “engag[ed] despite meeting people over Zoom, and it reminded me of the world still functioning outside of the Scarsdale bubble,” noted Yuval Cherki ’23. The speakers who came gave powerful speeches. The teachers involved in the event ended up bringing speakers – or giving presentations themselves – about wide scale problems, many of which had personally affected the speaker in some way. “[The] speeches were interesting when the speaker had experienced an event,” remarked Dean Witham ’23. 

Additionally, some feel the novelty of this event can make it more impactful. The fact that it only happens once a year makes it a marked day on calendars. People putting designated time aside to learn about these issues makes it a more memorable experience, rather than how people usually learn about current events: absentmindedly scrolling through their phones. As Cherki aptly puts it, “[Global Citizenship Day] was definitely very effective in making me more aware of my surroundings and allowing me to take a break from my personal life to see the importance of issues going on around me.”