A noose is found hanging from a goalpost on a high school campus.Students pull the turban off a Sikh student and cut his hair. White students taunt their majority-black rival with racial slurs at a high school basketball game.These are just a few examples of the hateful and bigoted acts schools encounter every year.
After the Southern Poverty Law Center responded to a plea for help from students in Savannah, Tenn., we’re happy to report that students successfully wore pro-LGBT slogans at school last week without resistance and with mostly positive responses from classmates.
We know little about the motives of the gunman who opened fire yesterday in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Many of us will monitor the news during the day, hoping to learn more about what the shooter thought he was doing, sure to hear more about the heroism and horror inside the building.
The face of America is changing. In 40 years, the United States will become a minority-majority nation – a remarkable milestone for a country that already boasts one of the most religiously, ethnically and racially diverse societies in the world.
At a time when the nation’s schools are becoming more segregated, teachers and students across the country have an opportunity to show the rest of the world they’re committed to challenging these boundaries by registering for Teaching Tolerance’s Mix It Up at Lunch Day.
Registration is open for the Mix It Up at Lunch Day 2012, set for Oct. 30.
The event, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program, encourages students across the nation to challenge and cross social boundaries by sitting with someone new in the cafeteria for just one day.
As part of an effort to help teachers educate their students about the importance of being involved in their community and its power to bring positive social change, the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project will offer 10,000 teachers a set of free classroom posters promoting this important lesson.
Earlier this year, high school students in Montgomery County, Md., received flyers at school saying that being gay is a choice and that people can change their sexual orientation. The flyer’s message is a popular and harmful piece of propaganda about LGBT people – the claim that gay people can change their sexual orientation through what is commonly known as “ex-gay” or “conversion” therapy. It’s a notion that has been rejected or highly criticized by every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association.
The SPLC is calling for the reinstatement of a Michigan teacher who was fired recently for helping students organize a fundraiser for the family of Trayvon Martin, the teen who was fatally shot in a Florida neighborhood earlier this year.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program is seeking nominations for the 2012 Excellence in Culturally Responsive Teaching Award.
