San Diego students are tackling city's biggest issues

• In San Diego, students will address chronic absenteeism, coastal conservation, immigration, mental health and homelessness.

Driving the news: About 200 students from 19 San Diego Unified high schools heard from leaders of local organizations during the kickoff at Balboa Park last week.

Zoom in: Student challenges are:

• Create a program that educates the community about immigrant and migrant populations while promoting human dignity.
• Inspire people to habitually use fewer single-use plastics that harm ocean ecosystems.
• Design a program to improve relationships between students, parents and schools to increase attendance in the school district, where 27% of students are chronically absent.
• Create a tool that helps youth navigate their mental health journey and connects them to resources.
• Lead a campaign that raises awareness of homelessness prevention efforts in the city and reduces stigmas around using those services.

How it works: Over the next 10 weeks, mentored student teams will design, share and implement their ideas in the five topic areas derived from focus groups with local students.

• In May, they'll present their proposals to a panel of judges from the San Diego community, who will choose the winners.

• Three winners will share their projects at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado in June.

The big picture: Now in its 11th year, the Aspen Challenge selects different cities to host the annual competition — from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

• Director Katie Fitzgerald told Axios that San Diego was picked because it's a large city where "we're seeing some of our marginalized communities most underserved."

What they're saying: "We may not have the fiscal resources or the connections or networking, but what we do have is creativity," Vihaan Bhardwaj, a participating freshman at Mt. Everest Academy, told Axios.