Junior High Students to Discuss Cultural Harmony

With the city of Los Angeles just beginning to pick up the pieces after its worst civil unrest this century, more than 200 San Fernando Valley junior high school students, teachers and parents will come together this week to discuss ways to achieve harmony among people of different races and religions.

The First Annual Human Relations Conference for Junior High Schools that is to convene tomorrow will feature a keynote address by Los Angeles Police Chief-designate Willie L. Williams. Although the event was planned several months ago, the recent strife has increased the conference’s urgency, according to its organizers.

“It’s even more critical that all of us make more efforts in the area of intergroup relations,” said Ken Castro, a spokesman for the Valley Interfaith Council, a Chatsworth-based ecumenical group that organized the conference.

Although various groups have been working on improving inter-cultural relationships for many years, the recent rioting indicates that much remains to be done, he said.

“There have been a lot of meetings . . . but apparently we haven’t really been hearing each other,” Castro said. “We’ve been talking, but we haven’t been hearing.”

The conference aims to change that among students from 28 Valley junior high schools who will attend the gathering at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Training Academy near Dodger Stadium. Each campus will send one student leader and two youths identified as “at risk” of getting involved with gangs or drugs. One parent and one teacher from each school also will attend.

The conference is aimed at seventh- and eighth-graders, Castro said, because they are at a stage of development that often brings about personal struggles with peer pressure and interpersonal relationships.

“The gang tendencies are there, the drugs, discrimination, racism, the whole nine yards,” he said. “It kind of explodes at this adolescent, junior high school age.”

In addition to hearing Williams speak on the value of cultural diversity, participants will spend the day in seminars on self-esteem and prejudice to help them learn to recognize racism and to deal with it in peaceful ways. The sessions will incorporate material developed by the Anti-Defamation League and will be led by league staff members of different ethnicities and backgrounds.

The seminars are designed to raise awareness that discrimination, in whatever form, is harmful to individuals as well as to society in general, said Debbie Stogel, education coordinator for the league’s “A World of Difference” program in Los Angeles.

“We’re trying to get them more aware so that they can confront these issues in a creative, nonviolent way.”