VENTURA : 8th-Graders to Visit Museum of Tolerance

To help teach the destructive consequences of bigotry, the Ventura Unified School District is sending all 1,200 of its eighth-grade students to visit a Los Angeles museum dedicated to racial and ethnic tolerance.

Beginning next week, eighth-grade classes from the district’s four middle schools will take turns piling into buses for trips to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

The trips are sponsored by the district and the nonprofit United Jewish Appeal of Western Ventura County, Inc., which is raising most of the $9,000 needed for museum admission and bus rentals.

The museum features multimedia presentations on the history of prejudice, said Eitan Ginsburg, executive director of the United Jewish Appeal.

Besides general exhibits on bigotry against blacks, Jews, Latinos and other groups, the museum has large displays on the history of American slavery and the Holocaust.

Upon entering the Holocaust exhibit, visitors receive cards with the faces and names of real people who lived in Europe before World War II. By the exhibit’s end, they learn whether these people perished or survived, Ginsburg said.

Ventura teachers are building lessons on the history of racial and ethnic conflict around the museum trip.

Balboa Middle School teacher Bob Shirley, for example, gave his class vocabulary words such as demagogue and bigot this week. And for the week following the museum visit, Shirley has invited to the school a Holocaust survivor and a retired U.S. serviceman who helped liberate a concentration camp.

To donate money for the school trips, call the school district at 641-5000 or the United Jewish Appeal at 647-7800.