WHS’ No Place for Hate Committee conducted its second activity period of the year on Feb. 23 as a way to deepen the school’s culture of acceptance and understanding of others.
NPFH had a successful event after school in November called “A Seat at the Table” where a gathering of students, staff and parents brought all kinds of international foods to eat while sharing stories of immigration. This, along with another event at WHS on Nov. 17, at which Orchestra Director Craig Stanton hosted a game night for students to come and play board games for team building, sparked the idea of creating a school-wide event where students would be able to develop a sense of community while playing a game.
NPFH collaborated with the Makerspace elective engineering class to create February’s activity period. Read more about the Makerspace class on Page 3. Makerspace students were asked to create dice that displayed a different symbol on each side, each corresponding to a broad category revolving around identity that every student could speak about. The six categories included location, people, music, food, story and wild card which allowed the student to choose from any of the five categories to discuss with their group.
The Makerspace and NPFH students came up with questions for each category. After the students rolled the die, they could choose prompts from the generated list. Students received game cards so they could keep track of which questions they answered and be able to move on to categories or questions they might not have covered.
Many students found this activity period to be a success. Senior Evan Sewald said, “I thought it was great learning about everyone’s cultures and traditions. I really loved hearing from everyone.” The large selection of questions to choose from allowed students in homerooms that aren’t as closely connected to learn more about their peers.
Ultimately, the main goal of this activity period was to promote unity and integration among students and staff. Assistant Principal Dr. Warren Hynes said, “When we do events that deepen our understanding and acceptance of one another that doesn’t mean that everyone is always going to be getting along but it means that we can do better at it. Hopefully this allows people to be more comfortable calling each other out when people see unkindness.”
To bring some excitement to the games, homerooms had the opportunity to win prizes like a free breakfast or a chance to go to the student faculty basketball game. If teachers felt that their classes had shared meaningful stories, they submitted their homeroom on a google form provided by the NPFH committee. Homerooms will be randomly selected to earn the prize.
WHS’ next activity period will be the student-teacher basketball game run by the Student Government Association on March 28.