School Girls Unite for girls rights

Albert Einstein High School juniors Joanne Conelley, Mira Fleming, Georgia Handforth, all of Kensington, and Danielle Jones of Wheaton were four of the founding members who continue to raise funds and awareness for children’s education rights as they have since 2005.

‘‘We’re not going to be able to keep this going away at college,” Fleming said. ‘‘But there are other schools that have groups and we just hope more people stay involved.”

There are plans for a benefit rock concert in August when school starts to kick off the new year. And plans for a film club and other social gatherings are in the works, according to the girls.

‘‘Really we just want to make it as fun as possible and get as many people involved in the group as we can,” Fleming said.

In the beginning, the group just wanted to make a difference in the world.

‘‘We just wanted to do something to change the world somehow,” Fleming said.

With that in mind, Wendy Lesko a Kensington resident and friend of one of the girl’s parents, set up a meeting between some neighbors from Mali and six 12-year-old girls. They discussed the benefits of education, which is denied to many girls across the world.

‘‘We told them that $40 could pay for one girl’s education in Mali for a year,” Lesko said. ‘‘You should’ve seen their faces. ‘That’s my shoes,’ they said.”

Lesko heads the Youth Activism Project’s Global Initiative, a local chapter of a national nonprofit dedicated to getting kids involved in international issues. She helped form School Girls Unite in early 2005. In three months, the group was up and running, and soon after was registered as a nonprofit.

Fleming said the focus of girls helping girls was a natural fit. ‘‘There are statistically more women in the world than men, and we should all have rights to an education,” she said.

Since then, the club has raised enough money for school tuition, textbooks and tutoring for 70 girls in Mali, a French-speaking nation in the northwest of Africa. More than $3,000 is raised each year for their education.

‘‘We’ve been adding more each year, and we pay to send them all the way through high school,” Jones said. ‘‘[Education] is so important over there.”

Les Filles Unies Pour L’Education was established as their sister organization in Mali. The chapter is made up of more than 20 high school and university students who live in Bamako, the country’s capital city.

In 2005 and 2006, the girls held rallies around Kensington and in Washington, D.C., and hosted speakers who talked about the importance of education in the lives of women.

Clubs were also started at A. Mario Loiderman Middle School in Silver Spring, North Bethesda Middle School, and Blair High School in those years as chapters of the same organization.

Conelley said since the group started, the issues concerning the club have matured as much as the members.

‘‘It started out just wanting to help send girls through school, but just like we’ve grown up, now it’s about larger issues,” she said.

In the past several months, the group has taken steps to raise awareness of childhood marriages practiced in Mali and other developing countries.

‘‘These are young girls getting married before they have a chance to finish school,” Conelley said. ‘‘If a girl gets married, then that’s usually the end of her education.”

In late April, School Girls Unite students met with Shakira, international pop music star and spokeswoman for the Global Campaign for Education, and lobbied Congressional lawmakers like U.S. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen Jr. (D-Dist. 8) of Kensington to promote education funds and limit the funds that go towards countries where childhood marriages are still practiced.

As a way to lobby the lawmakers and their friends, the girls put together a five-minute video petition of students asking lawmakers to help put an end to childhood marriage.

More than 60 percent of Malian women are married before they reach 18 years old, Lesko said, that’s the age at which girls have to be married according to their culture.

‘‘That kind of outraged me and freaked me out a bit,” Fleming said. ‘‘So we filmed people reacting to finding out about child marriages and had them talk for a video petition right there.”

The girls were able to gather 400 signatures between students at Einstein and Montgomery Blair high schools.

‘‘It was funny, you’d tell [other students] what childhood marriage is and they said, ‘Eww,’” Handforth said. ‘‘So we had about 30 students on the video and then 300 to 400 signatures on a petition.”

Van Hollen said he has met with the girls each of the last three years to discuss global education issues and child brides most recently.

‘‘I think they’re very persuasive,” he said. ‘‘It’s always heartening to see young people involved in politics, especially in this case where you have girls working to help their peers across the globe.”

Van Hollen said the girls have reached a number of other lawmakers including Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin (D) of Pikesville and Barbara S. Mikulski (D) of Baltimore.

‘‘They’ve been effective working with other organizations to increase the budget for those programs and raise awareness of members of Congress,” he said.

To learn more

For more information, visit www.schoolgirlsunite.org.