Students Earn a Ride on Rose Parade Float

A trip to the Museum of Tolerance earlier this month has led to a trek down Colorado Boulevard in the Rose Parade for four Sierra Canyon seventh-graders.

The winners of an essay contest on tolerance, Tim Casey, Katie Crisalli, Courtney Mohl and Tatiana Segrist are expected to be among a dozen Southland students aboard the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance float.

The contest was the culmination of a two-month social studies and language arts unit that included the museum visit, as well as speakers who talked about experiences with racial and religious intolerance.

The Sierra Canyon School students, chosen from among 12 classmates, wrote that Americans should not label ethnic groups, should treat everyone with respect, and that the world can change if children are taught to be tolerant.

“What children learn in school and from their parents and grandparents has the greatest effect on what they’re like as an adult,” Tatiana said.

For its second appearance in the parade, the Wiesenthal Center has created a space shuttle to travel down the parade route, carrying likenesses of nine American presidents and the teens, costumed to represent occupations in the 21st century.

Nearly 100 parents, staff and students from the school helped decorate the float on Monday, officials said.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, executive dean of the center, said the participation in the parade has been a way to “remind people of the underlying theme of the Museum of Tolerance,” while providing a few hundred children the opportunity to be involved.

“It’s a nice experience when the kids don’t even know they are being educated [because] they are having so much fun,” Cooper said.

Shelley Deutsch, coordinator of Sierra Canyon’s service learning program, said that though the children will represent their school, they are in a larger sense representing the museum, a bigger honor for them. “One boy, while we were decorating, held his hand to the float and told me that this was the greatest thing he’d ever done,” she said.