STUDENT profiles
ALAN PLOTZ ‘21:
Mobilizing
for
Change
A
t recess, Alan Plotz regularly sets the standard for Bill Wharton’s “concise and essential” announcements: “Politics Club will meet in 3E to talk about the impeachment hearings. A lot of people are interested in where the attacks on Vindman are coming from, so we’ll discuss that along with Trump’s legal strategy and the precedents for it.” Or: “Next week I’m going to the GBRSAC meeting [Greater Boston Regional Student Advisory Committee, to which Alan’s classmates elected him as a representative]. Let me know about topics you think I should bring to the group, or if you’d like to know what we’ve been working on.” These offer only a glimpse of Alan’s vast array of activities. Through his work with United 4 Social Change, he has been writing a curriculum to train less privileged students to find paid internships, an opportunity much more readily available to those with professional parents and connections. He has also organized protests: As a ninth grader at Commonwealth, he put together a walkout after the Parkland shootings. We weren’t in session during the national walkout, but when we were back from our March break, Alan ran our own event, organizing student speeches while working with faculty to minimize disruptions to school. Another cherished project, with Boston Mobilization, examined inequities in school discipline. Alan looked at data from numerous schools, working to clarify the relationship between disciplinary action and the race of the students involved. Through GBRSAC, he also managed to wrangle access to students’ responses to questions about school climate on the MCAS. Closer to home, he’s organized a one-day Model Congress at Commonwealth. For this, he started with the list of schools on the back of the T-shirt from Harvard’s multiday Model Congress. After many emails, Alan ended up with enough schools to run the conference, including some whose students don’t often find their way into our building. Most recently Alan joined several of his fellow students and alumni/ae— Mosammat Faria Afreen ’16, Iman Ali ’18, Gueinah Carlie Blaise ’16, Tristan Edwards ’18, Kimberly Hoang ’21, Alexis Domonique Mitchell ’16, Ryan Phan ’22, and Tarang Saluja ’18—in petitioning the school to more closely examine the ways in which it historically has not fully supported all students of color, as well as those who are first generation and/or come from lowincome backgrounds. As Commonwealth, along with the rest of the country, reckoned with racism, privilege, and white supremacy in the 30 CM Summer 2020
Alan Plotz ‘21, far left, with his fellow Supermarket Drive planners in 2019 (Kim Hoang ‘21, Elise Requadt ‘19, Anirudh Nistala ‘21, Lawrence Wang ‘21)
wake of George Floyd’s murder, this group advocated for the school to address the inequities within its walls. Their petition sparked conversations bringing together the whole of Commonwealth’s community in what can only be the beginning of a much larger movement. Whenever he talks about social-justice work, Alan’s joy is evident, but he also describes his struggle to remain aware of his own blind spots as a privileged student. Last summer, he stepped into another kind of uncomfortable position: in Tajikistan, learning the language through a State Department program. Like most Americans abroad, he came to understand his own values better as he puzzled over those of his hosts, who seemed to place the interests of their own families ahead of those of the larger community or the nation. As he played with his host family’s kids, he came to see these priorities as logical: because of their country’s recent history, it made sense to value stability above all else. Without Internet access, Alan also had to step outside the relentless productivity of his life here. What made that worth it, for someone who loves getting things done? “Who knows,” Alan observes, “whether I’ll have the time to study abroad in college.” This long-term planning invites us to wonder what we’ll hear about Alan’s doings in five, ten, or thirty years. The print version of this article omitted the names of all student and alumni/ae petition organizers. We sincerely regret the oversight.
