A Diverse Approach

Nine Huntington Beach students huddled in a classroom to tackle tough topics like prejudice and hate in their effort to promote understanding of what life is like for minorities in a county that was 78% white.

That was 10 years ago. Now, the Ocean View High School classroom meeting has snowballed into an annual all-day Orange County symposium, called “Walk in My Shoes.” The event drew 600 high school students and educators Thursday to the Cal State Fullerton campus.

Student interest in exploring such issues as racism, sexuality and illegal immigration has grown as the county has become more diverse. The percentage of Latinos and Asians combined has doubled in the last decade, and whites have seen their presence fall to 58%.

A major goal of the program, organized by the Orange County Human Relations Commission, is to inspire students to serve as “ambassadors” by returning to their schools and starting awareness activities there.

“It helps you be more open-minded with other people,” said Stephanie Lyda, a Mission Viejo High School junior who attended the conference for the first time.

Through skits, games and speakers, students explored their own culture and those of others and learned about the need to be more tolerant.

In one workshop, for instance, teens sculpted clay figures symbolizing their heritage. Fady Gabour created a pyramid to represent his birthplace of Egypt. Yvonne Yao carved a dragon’s head to represent her Chinese roots. And Jessica Dalwani molded the Om sign, a religious symbol in Hinduism.

“I think it’s cool to learn about other people and see how they perceive themselves,” said Annie Bethancourt, a Fullerton High School senior.

The Walk in My Shoes program was born out of discussions in 1988 among a handful of Ocean View High students and English teacher Gayle Byrne.

Those discussions sparked a series of schoolwide meetings on race relations. The teens and Byrne then sought help from the human relations commission to put together a conference.

After two months of planning, the school and the commission put on the first high school symposium on diversity. About 60 students from Ocean View and nearby schools gathered for the June 1988 event, said Tina Fernandez, the program director who coordinated the first conference.

The annual event has continued to grow. While the first symposium was cobbled together on a shoestring budget of $500, this year’s conference cost $25,000 and brought in students from 50 schools.

The program has become so popular that the commission began holding a separate symposium for middle school students three years ago.

“The conference gives students the opportunity to learn about their peers in a very safe place,” Fernandez said. “Students can show their pain, anger and assumptions about each other here and go through a process of trying to find solutions.”

Orange County’s rapid demographic changes over the last decade has amplified the need for programs teaching tolerance and cultural awareness, she said. While the white population has fallen, Latinos and Asians have grown from a combined 20% of the population a decade ago to 40%.

Rusty Kennedy, the commission’s executive director, said he believes the conferences and extensive school outreach programs have helped hold the line on the number of hate-related crimes in Orange County.

He pointed out that even though the county population has grown larger and more diverse, the number of hate-related incidents has remained fairly level most of the decade, dipping to 145 reports last year.

“As the county grows more diverse, you’d expect the number of hate crimes to increase,” Kennedy said, “yet we’ve held it off.”

The only significant jump in the figures came after the commission first started keeping track of reports of hate crimes in 1991. The number of hate crimes rose from 126 that year to 188 the following year. Kennedy believes the jump may have been caused by greater community awareness about reporting such incidents.

Byrne, now a teacher at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, summed up the effectiveness of the annual conference as a constructive “first step.” But, she warned, progress could be slowed if schools don’t encourage the creation of diversity clubs and race relations forums on their campuses as well.

“A lot of schools tend to gloss over these issues,” Byrne said. “Schools also need to commit to building tolerance too.”

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Teaching Tolerance

Orange County’s changing ethnic composition puts a premium on high school programs designed to address issues such as racism and immigration. The programs, officials believe, help to stem hate crimes.

Hate Crimes

1997: 145

County Ethnicity *--*

1988 1998 White 78% 58% Latino 15 28 Asian 5 12 Black 1 2 American Indian 1 *

*--*

* Less than 1%

Source: Orange County Human Relations Council