A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2024 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Lia Musser and Aina Marzia.

Lia Musser

Dav Pilkey Art Portfolio Award

My portfolio is an investigation into movement and change within the earth. It is a collection of thrown forms altered to look into the different processes of the earth and how it is affected by those changes. I looked into processes such as tectonic plates, volcanic activity, human effects, melting, cracking, decomposition, and erosion. Each piece was altered to investigate a different process. I chose this topic because these processes are important to life and they were interesting to research about. There are so many patterns that stem from these topics that I was able to duplicate in my portfolio.

Aina Marzia

The New York Times Writing Portfolio Award

Their School Days Start With Customs Officers—and Searing Heat

As the first rays of sunlight peek through the horizon, at the Paso del Norte (Pass to the North) International Bridge between the United States and Mexico, static lines of workers, children, and visitors
with papers in hand eagerly await their turn to enter the U.S. A smaller, yet noticeable, group of these entrants consists of students of all ages, who cross back and forth between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, every day to attend school in the U.S. Some are in uniform, while others have school IDs
hung around their necks. It’s early in the morning on August 7; the school year has just started, and the
heat already feels oppressive. Later today, the high will reach 109 degrees.

For the average high schooler, an eight-hour school day is enough to elicit complaints—but for binational
students, the school day is the least of their concerns. For them, getting to school on time can mean
waking up as early as 3 a.m., shuffling between often unreliable sources of transportation, and dealing with unpleasant encounters with Customs and Border Protection officers.

This summer, as Texas temperatures break records almost daily, these students face a new problem:
overheating in their cars or while standing in line outside, making them drenched in sweat by the time
they reach school. This week, temperature highs in El Paso were still in the triple digits, as they’ve been
for much of this summer. The students who make these long trips—sometimes by foot, other times by car—are experiencing climate change on another level.

“I’ve been feeling like [that time] waiting in line, it’s completely different to what I was feeling around
five, six years ago,” said Alfonso Gutierrez, a high school senior and U.S. citizen who lives in Juárez,
across the border from El Paso. He often alternates between walking and driving to his school; the whole
trip can take him over an hour.

Home to three international ports of entry, El Paso has long been a hub for migratory activity. From the
population, which is 80 percent Hispanic, to its name—El Paso means “the pass” in Spanish—
binationality is embedded in the city’s culture.

It’s common practice for parents living full-time in border towns in Mexico to cross the border to give
birth in order for their children to get U.S. citizenship. This leaves thousands of kids on the frontera with
feet in two worlds, and the bridge as a lifestyle. When these kids are old enough, their parents often send
them to school in the U.S. for a better chance at a top college. These institutions “have a lot more trust in
U.S. education than in Mexican schools. So it’s the better option for me and my sister,” Diego Chavez, a
17-year-old high school senior who is a U.S. citizen living in Mexico, said.

“I’ve been going to school in the U.S. since first grade,” said Chavez. “I cross every single day, to El Paso for school, and then back to Juárez after school ends. This is regular stuff for me.”

Lorttia’s situation isn’t unique. The Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso estimates that
thousands of students use the El Paso bridges each day to receive an education in the U.S.

“It’s a hassle,” said Gutierrez, who is a competitive swimmer. “I have to get up at 4 in the morning to go
to practice. I drive to a friend’s house … park my car next to the bridge, we walk over, and then we walk
to the pool … and after practice, someone from El Paso gives us a ride to school.”

Even without early sports practice, the commute is often long, unpredictable, and tiring, which makes it
the biggest reason for exhaustion for most of the students I spoke to. “It’s actually really difficult—you’re
doing it daily, and you get burnt out,” said Anaya Martinez, a high school senior with dual Mexican and
U.S. citizenship.

Early days are the norm for most students who use the bridge, but overall experiences can differ. Some
students and their families choose to undergo a long application process, complete with a rigorous
background check, from CBP to obtain a special pass called a Secure Electronic Network for Travelers
Rapid Inspection, or SENTRI, pass, that allows them to cross faster with fewer checks—similar to a TSA
pre-check. Otero’s family is ineligible for the pass; since he and his sister don’t have one, they have to
account for a two-hour wait at the bridge. “I play football, and we have to be there at 6:45 a.m., so I have
to be out of my house by 5 a.m.,” Martinez said. “If I’m not, I’m not going to make it.”

Like the experience of binationality itself, which has no textbook or blueprint, students have learned that
there is no “normal” border crossing experience on a given day. “They’ll sometimes do random checks,” said Chavez, who has a SENTRI pass but sometimes uses the regular lanes to cross when he travels with his peers. “They like to check the car and trunk.”

Others told me about how the attitudes of officers change depending on documentation. “It gets super bad when [the SENTRI pass] is going to expire and you have to use other forms of documentation. The
officers get super sketchy about it, saying, like, ‘Your SENTRI is about to expire and you can’t be
crossing,’” said Gutierrez.

Those with and without the pass know that there’s one thing they have in common: long and often
unpredictable waiting times. These waits outside or in hot cars can compound with harsh sunlight,
minimal shade, and no air conditioning to create a match made in hell—or, at least, that’s what it feels
like. For students who walk over the border, the experience is even worse. “The two weeks that I was
walking to El Paso to work, the heat was unbearable. It was bad,” Gutierrez said.

Figuring out the safest experience in the heat and crowded lines can come down to simple mathematics of calculating exactly how long to stay after school or dawdle at home. “The wait time increases exponentially” at the end of the day, said Chavez. “I feel like if I stay maybe 10 minutes extra that can be
up to, like, half an hour longer that I’ll be waiting at the line.”

All this extra time spent outside can be dangerous in extremely hot temperatures. It can take just 10 or 15
minutes for the initial symptoms of heatstroke to set in. But there are currently few protections for students waiting in line to cross the border to go to school.

“When I have crossed walking several times, there are absolutely no air conditioning units outside,” said
Anaya Martine.

The heat can pose a problem even for students who cross the border in their cars. “I had a problem with
my A.C. not working in my car last week. I got up early, went to school, and in the middle of the line my
A.C. stopped working,” Martinez said. “I was there the next two hours in 104-degree weather inside a car.
I was just sweating really bad by the time I crossed over.”

And while hotter temperatures are to be expected in the Chihuahuan Desert, students say that it’s gotten
worse.

“Last year, I used to walk from the school to the border for an hour. And I can’t do that anymore,” said
Chavez. “I’ve had to think better about where I park, with the shade. The first day of school, I parked
wherever, and when I got out of school, I opened the car and I could not grab onto the steering wheel
because it was burning my hands.”

After this piece was published, a press representative for Customs and Border Patrol reached out to The
New Republic over email. The representative pointed out that average temperatures when students were
cross early in the morning tend to be lower than during the day. He said that the city of El Paso and the
International Boundary and Water Commission maintain pedestrian areas near the bridges, which
includes providing shade. He also said that any agent communicating to a student that a SENTRI pass is
about to expire is “likely giving them good advice.” According to the representative, CBP operates
special expedited lanes for students during the year, and opens additional lanes and increases staffing
during busy periods.

“All that being said our agency does have an important homeland security mission which cannot be
ignored,” he wrote. “It’s not just about getting people across the border quickly.”

As summers get hotter and hotter, students are figuring out how to survive the heat, traveling in groups to take turns carpooling, paying for gas, and buying cold drinks. But they’re receiving remarkably little help from their schools in this effort. Administrators at both Cathedral High School, a school 15 minutes from the bridge where 50 percent of the students come from Mexico, and El Paso High School did not respond to a request for comment about how they may be protecting binational students during heat waves.

Apart from the physical effects involved in crossing the border, the heat also takes a toll on students’
mental health, both inside and outside the classroom. One study found that every degree increase in
temperature reduces a student’s ability to learn by 1 percent. Students also recognize how this heat is
affecting them. “It’s more difficult mentally than physically,” Chavez said. “Physically, you can always
sleep and recuperate. It’s really hard trying to keep up, plus being a senior starting to stress about college applications and getting a good GPA.”

During these hot days that are becoming increasingly common, the bridge becomes a place for reflection, as teens worry about the many others they see doing this daily.

“There are kids that are crying to their moms, like, ‘Mom, it’s so hot, it’s so hot,’” Gutierrez said. “I just
can’t imagine how they survive it.”

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.