South Fayette High School partners with national civil rights organization
This past summer, South Fayette School District officials attended a program at Mt. Lebanon called, “A World of Difference Workshop” to promote diversity and respect.
After the program, Superintendent Bille Rondinelli said the district considered how it could improve and continue teaching students about respecting others, as part of the Dignity & Respect Campaign from UPMC.
“A school district is a microcosm of society, and we really want to make sure that we are treating each other kindly,” Rondinelli said. “It’s age old that children are going to say things about each other, or that there will be disagreements on the playground, in the lunchroom or on the bus. You have to give children the skills necessary to work through those matters.”
To do that, South Fayette High School is partnering with the Anti-Defamation League, a national civil rights organization, to give presentations to students about preventing discrimination and hate.
“It’s a message you can’t ever hear enough,” high school Principal Aaron Skrbin said. “It’s something that students and adults for that matter need to be constantly reminded of. It’s always a good thing to stop and reflect on how you treat people and how you expect to be treated and what expectations are for appropriate behavior. That’s our goal in bringing the ADL into the high school, to promote that idea.”
The ADL met with the high school’s ninth- and 12th-graders on Oct. 11 and with the 10th- and 11th-graders Nov. 29.
Kristen Davis, the school board’s student representative and a senior at the high school, said during an October school board meeting that the ADL’s program was well-received by students.
“A lot of the concepts that the ADL were discussing were new to a lot of students, and I think it was a really good introduction how hate and discrimination really manifest in your daily life and seeing how you can really combat that and promote acceptance,” Davis said. “A lot of the program was fostered around discussion. One activity was talking about different definitions of types of discrimination and another one talked about the pyramid of hate, how it kind of builds upon itself.”
Rondinelli said she liked how the ADL’s program was “collaborative.”
“They encouraged participation and encouraged them to think about inclusion,” Rondinelli said. “It encouraged us to think about our own differences, and we come into school with our differences and our customs and the way we think about things. The fact that we might be different, it doesn’t make one or the other wrong.”
As students move on from South Fayette, Davis said, it is important they take the lessons they learned from the ADL.
“It was a good introduction, and it was a nice way to get students in on the ground level of those discussions and it’s important for them to kind of gain that understanding, especially transitioning to post-secondary life,” Davis said. “As we’re going to college we’re going to meet a lot of people who aren’t necessarily what you see at SF, and so I think by having an open relationship with the ADL students are getting that experience and that information they need to be successful.”