Middle school is an unlikely launching pad to musical superstardom, but a group of politically aware students at Charles Carroll Middle School might have rocketed ahead of the competition, reports the Washington Post. A music video they wrote and recorded about the life of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor so impressed her that she visited the Prince George’s County school in April. They recently released another video about the passage of the health-care bill, and they’re working on one about Oprah Winfrey. In the health-care video, students in green polo shirts and khakis dance through the school’s hallways – one wears medical scrubs and has a stethoscope around her neck – and sing lines that include, “Politicians in conflict, there are too many people who are sick” and “I’ve seen people ill, patients overbilled, people uninsured in poverty, that’s for real.” In one scene, a girl playing a doctor refuses to attend to a sick person until she is paid a stack of dollar bills.
At a school where almost four out of five students qualify for free or reduced-price meals and the student body is about evenly divided between African Americans and Hispanics, both videos spoke to personal experiences…
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