Preuss Student Plans to Create New Organization Dedicated to Supporting “Persecuted Youth”

July 29, 2009

By Pat JaCoby

Paul Tran, a junior at the Preuss School at UC San Diego, returned from a week as a Bezos Scholar at the Aspen Ideas Festival with an idea of his own: to start a new organization, The Common Thread, dedicated to supporting youth who have been persecuted because of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and/or values.

Tran says the new group will partner with local organizations to provide meaningful service projects and one-on-one peer mentorship. “The Common Thread will show that, regardless of where we come from and how different we are from one another, we are all connected by our humanity,” Tran said. For the capstone project, he said, The Common Thread  will host a three-day “Cracks in the Glass” leadership conference for 50 high school students from throughout San Diego County on the UC San Diego campus.

Tran suggested that individuals or organizations interested in getting involved contact him at commonthreadorg@gmail.com.

The Preuss student and Scott Barton, principal of the Preuss School, were selected as 2009 Bezos Scholars, a program which brings together 12 of the nation’s top public high school juniors and 12 of the most engaged educators for a weeklong seminar.

They returned from this year’s July gathering enthused about sharing a private breakfast with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and meeting privately with notables such as Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs correspondent Thomas Friedman; founder of “Tom’s Shoes,” Blake Mycoskie; and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Barton noted that the Bezos Scholars Program is about commitment, and that he is dedicated to working with Tran to design, organize and carry out The Common Thread plan so that it has a positive and sustainable effect.

We learned, said Barton, that “money, markets and me should be replaced with excellence, empathy, ethics and we.”

The Preuss School is a middle and high school dedicated to providing intensive college-prep education for motivated low-income students who will become the first in their families to graduate from college. The school is jointly chartered by UC San Diego and the San Diego Unified School District. Opened in 1999 with 150 students, the school currently has 755 students in grades six through 12. Ninety-six percent of the seniors in the last two graduating classes were admitted to four-year colleges.

Media Contact: Pat JaCoby, 858-534-7404 or pjacoby@ucsd.edu