In 2019, John Handley High School’s dropout rate was approximately 7.1 percent, with chronic absenteeism of 24 percent — most of which Black students accounted for, according to the Virginia Department of Education, Because of Them We Can reports . Those numbers could represent how much Black students at the school feel excluded on a daily basis. After struggling to see themselves properly represented in the school’s population, one student set out to change that by creating an organization to encourage more inclusion. Eunice Mejiadeu — a 17-year-old senior — shared that as a young Black woman, she never felt like she truly belonged at her school. “When we look at Handley, there’s not really this, I guess a safe place to come together. There’s a lot of self-isolation,” she said to Winchester News . “We just got kind of tired of just not feeling like we mattered, and I don’t think that was the intention Handley wanted to bring, and I feel like it just gradually happened over time.”...