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Students encouraged to celebrate diversity

Program aims to stop discrimination

“Mr. Wright,” the Rev. Paul Johnson (left) gets tough with the non-brown-eyed students and teachers at a “Celebrate Diversity” anti-discrimination exercise that teaches students to overcome prejudice. Mirror photo by Mary Haley

Thad Garner, a student at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Newry, had taken enough put-downs from “Mr. Wright” just because he didn’t have brown eyes.

Almost since the moment Garner and his non-brown-eyed peers arrived at the event Saturday, Wright ignored them and constantly berated them. The man in the sunglasses and black leather outfit called them names, ridiculing them about everything from their poor intelligence to their sloppiness, all based on their eye color.

Finally, when Garner and his non-brown-eyed peers joined the brown-eyed students, Garner told Wright how he felt about this treatment.

“What you put us through wasn’t right today,” he told Wright. “It’s discrimination.”

Garner had just picked up on the key reason he and the other 149 students attended the “Celebrate Diversity” event at the Penn State Altoona campus. If he and the others can remember that discrimination in all its form is wrong, that it hurts whether it happens to you or anyone else, then organizers of the event have done their job, they said.

The teachers who also take part in the Celebrate Diversity program, now in its 25th year, said many of the students do absorb the lessons they learn from the program.

The “Brown Eyes-Blue Eyes” exercise is a famous anti-discrimination experiment developed by an Iowa school teacher who first tried it with her third-grade students the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Students with brown eyes are treated better while the non-brown-eyed students are handled in an inferior way. In the case Saturday, the brown-eyed students received doughnuts and got to talk with their friends, while the blue-eyed and other non-brown-eyed students had to stay in a room were they were not permitted to talk, and later, “Mr. Wright” ridiculed and criticized them solely because of their eye color.

The lesson isn’t lost on many students who’ve experienced it, said Steve Wilson, a longtime program participant who teaches fifth through eighth grade at St. Patrick’s School.

“I see the effects of this in my classroom,” he said. “Now we’re a small school, but I see it at work there as the kids really respond to each other in a good way.”

When “Mr. Wright,” also known as the Rev. Paul Johnson, asked Garner to define discrimination, Garner said it’s something that when people go through it, “it would make life miserable, horrible.”

“I would just imagine that what people go through, those who face it, I’d do as much as I can to make them feel like a real person,” he said.

Saturday’s anti-discrimination event is the first of three student sessions that are part of the program, said Judy Sue Meisner, chairman of the event.

Other sessions include “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” which is to teach students about physical challenges, and visits to Protestant, Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches and a synagogue to educate them about the variety of religions.

The Celebrate Diversity program ends next May with a field trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The program has several sponsors, including Penn State Altoona, the Mirror, the Greater Altoona Jewish Federation, Reliance Savings, Sam’s Club and WalMart and Sheetz Inc.

Students from Blair County including Altoona, Hollidaysburg, Claysburg-Kimmel and Spring Cove as well as those from Northern Cambria School District, send middle-schoolers to the event. In addition, the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown sends students to the program, which Meisner said makes the program unique.

“I think we’re the only program to have public and private schools come together to work as a team,” she said.

Meisner has worked on the program’s board almost since its inception, about 23 of its 25 years. The former middle school teacher said the program is as relevant now as when she started.

She noted that the format has adapted as times have changed, and that they’ve added topics such as cyberbullying as needed to address what kids are dealing with today.

“This program is really a gift to me, I feel so passionate about it,” she said. “It’s essential that we teach our young people to respect each other. I think there is such a lack of respect among young people and even among adults in our society. Our children really need a program like this.”

Jean Sinal, a science teacher at Hollidaysburg Junior High School who has been part of the program since the beginning, said she also sees the effects of the program when her students return to class. She said the lessons they learn aren’t just for their years in middle school, either.

“Hopefully, this is for high school and it’s for all of their life, too,” she said.

As Johnson reminded all of the students, the blue-eyed, the brown-eyed, the ones with hazel eyes and all variations in between, people on planet Earth come in many variations but they share one common link.

“We’re made like a bouquet of flowers, all different, all beautiful,” he said. “But it’s like my dear mother used to say, ‘How many races are there? There’s only one race. The human race.'”

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