On Wednesday February 1^st, Greeley West’s AVID program had a guest speaker named Danny Cohen who came in and spoke to all of the students from 9 to 11  a.m. The speaker was hired by UNC and he gets to go to schools and give speeches. The reason Greeley West got to be a part of this speech is because the school was invited to participate in a forum that UNC was holding by Dr. Jeri Kraber.

The speech was called “Unsilenced” and was about things around the world that aren’t talked about. The bigger idea is the school needs to talk about the taboos in society so that atrocities can be addressed. This topic led to a very intense speech for everyone. Ms. Elisabeth Dent, who was in attendance with her class said, “It was incredibly powerful and brought out topics that students think should be addressed. It was great.”

There were multiple classes in attendance and every student felt an impact on them. Each controversial thing brought up led to another, and another. “I feel like he did a great job by putting the whole speech into a different perspective. Which was my favorite part. At one point he even made the teachers leave and had all the students just speak out. He passed the microphone around and kids just talked,” Marcela Martinez said.

The speech got very intense as Cohen even talked about his own life stories. Things were being said that students were not used to. Lorenzo Baldarama said, “It was very interesting that he talked about things people don’t like to talk about. It was intense the whole time because we talked about sexual assault and discrimination. It made me think a lot.”