Camp Stays in Them

A frank session on dating violence. A screening that rips the lid off popular culture and shows music videos as a source of damaging sexist imagery. And, as if those topics weren’t heavy enough, a panel discussion on genocide.

These are just a smattering of events embraced by a group of Orange County’s top high school students cloistered at UC Irvine for a 10-day course in reality that could easily be dubbed Camp Bummer.

The Knowledge and Social Responsibility Program is a centerpiece offering of the National Conference. In its 12th year in Orange County, the program aims to hone critical thinking skills among student leaders and mold an influential new generation.

Its method: exposure to every imaginable social ill and policy quandary, including childhood poverty, racial and gender bias, immigration, nationalism, affirmative action and family violence.

The surprise: Students love it.

“At school, they sometimes ask you not to talk about these issues because they’re so big, people get upset,” said Sara Dai, 17, commissioner of spirit at Buena Park High School. “When I go back to school, I’ll be a new person. I think of things in a totally different way. People look up to me and how I think, and I’ll be able to influence them.

“We want to make a change,” Dai said. “Take a stand. Take a risk. That’s what we’ve learned.”

The youths, all soon-to-be seniors from 27 Orange County high schools, were selected not only for their high grades, but for their level of involvement as student leaders on campus, said Bill Shane, executive director of the National Conference’s Orange County chapter, which sponsors the program along with UCI.

Before lights-out at their dorms, students power through 15-hour days that include a series of workshops by university professors and community leaders, a field trip today to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and hours of debate and discussion.

By the time their stint concludes next Tuesday, they will face one final task--to craft community service projects that take their newfound awareness and put it to work to change the world around them. (Last year’s group launched a massive get-out-the-vote drive.)

Eric Mason, 17, is president of the Key Club and the Boys League at La Quinta High School in Westminster. While the clubs have dabbled in community service by helping paint a youth center or clean up a park, Mason said, now he will be able to offer up more front-line activities.

“Now I’m thinking we can help women in battered women’s shelters,” Mason said after a two-hour presentation Wednesday on dating violence and family abuse by Vivian Clecak, executive director of Human Options, which runs a shelter and counseling center for battered women.

The session got students talking about gender roles in their own families, whether the girls would leave a boyfriend who showed the early signs of abuse, and the symptoms of “addictive love” that can lead to physical violence.

Wednesday was Day 5 of the program, and students were already feeling deeply moved.

When 17-year-old Bia Myung, a community relations commissioner at Garden Grove High School, checked in, she was skeptical. She worried she might hate her roommate. And when she watched a video filled with testimonials from last year’s students, she thought their statements of transformation were way over the top.

By Wednesday, she was sold.

“Here, everybody listens. Everybody respects everyone else’s opinions,” she said. “We gain the knowledge here, and now we have the social responsibility to take that extra step.”

The program’s theme this year is based on a life-affirming poem from a young man who died: “To last the blink of an eye and leave nothing but nothing unmoved behind you.”

“That quote completely embodies [the program],” said Aman Bhandari, one of the two co-directors. “It promotes living life to the fullest and generates compassion. . . . It doesn’t stop after the 10 or 11 days. It goes on for the rest of your life. We give them the tools.”

For Shane, the annual program is an inspiration. It is also essential.

“I think it’s extraordinarily important for them to understand that with leadership comes responsibility and an obligation to improve not only their own lives, but their communities and their society--that it’s not someone else’s problem and it’s not, ‘I’ll deal with it in 20 years,’ ” Shane said.

“They have the ability and the power to make this a better world today.”