OC HIGH: STUDENT NEWS & VIEWS : Attitude Adjustment : Retreats Raise Awareness and Break Down Barriers

Discrimination can come in many forms: race, sex, age, religion, culture, appearance. Maybe it has happened to you. Maybe you’ve witnessed an act of discrimination. Maybe you’ve acted with prejudice yourself.

At Los Alamitos High School, Inter-Cultural Leadership Retreats are helping students become more aware and sensitive to an increasingly diverse society.

Student volunteers are selected to attend periodic retreats to grapple with breaking down the walls of prejudice, racism and misunderstanding. Fifteen to 20 students at time gather to share ideas at the daylong sessions held off-campus.

A Los Alamitos faculty member acts as facilitator, leading the exercises and group discussions. Help comes from two student trainers who have previously attended a retreat and are involved with the school’s service club Griffins With a Mission.

At the retreats, which are conducted at a church facility in Cypress, students go through exercises to help them discover their own prejudices and to learn to deal with them.

One exercise involves students being assigned to wear labels that identify them as HIV Positive, Cheerleader, ASB Member, Gang Member and Invisible. The catch? They are not told which label is on their back. Based on how others react, the students have to guess who they are portraying. Afterward, the students break into groups by label and discuss how they were treated and how the exercise made them feel.

Los Alamitos sophomore Jason Beamis, labeled Invisible, recalled how “a girl who was a head taller than me kept bumping me into a wall.”

Lunch gives the students a chance to talk informally. Pizza and sandwiches are donated by community groups and individuals.

Fund-raising efforts by Griffins With a Mission have covered retreat costs, which include paying for a substitute for the supervising teacher, transportation and supplies. Twenty to 25 retreats a year are held at a cost of about $4,000.

A need for the retreats was recognized last year after white supremacist literature was placed in lockers on the school campus.

The retreat idea was developed by a Human Relations Task Force formed by principal Carol Hart. English and drama teacher Judy Trujillo, who heads Griffins With a Mission, organizes the retreats and prepares students to be trainers. Also assisting in setting up the retreats has been Carolyn Novello-Herrera of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

About 400 students have gone through the program.

Sophomore Yoko Tanaka said the retreats “encourage the beneficial effects of cultural awareness.”

Jeremy Ploessel, a freshman, learned “that everyone is prejudiced against something.”

At the end of the day, students are bused from the church back to Los Alamitos High School. “We don’t expect to make drastic changes in the span of one day--but we hope to make students more aware, more sensitive; we hope to open their eyes and begin to make a difference,” Trujillo said.