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Partnerships Involved: Mendocino County Youth Project, MCOE, and the North Coast Rural Challenge Network

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Project description: The Point Arena High School Tolerance Project's purpose is to enhance cultural respect, awareness,and pride in our diverse community. With increased cultural understanding, increased self esteem, and increased inter-cultural interaction, student drug and alcohol abuse will be diminished in our community.

Historically many of our ethnic minority children in our diverse community are the youth at risk. They often drop out of high school before graduation and become the youth who abuse drugs and alcohol. The Tolerance Project's goals are to increase cultural pride, gain respect for cultural differences, learn conflict resolution techniques, create a Tolerance education resource library for teachers and create a culminating Diversity Celebration to educate our community and fellow PAHS students.

Students in the Peer Helping Class at Point Arena High School and students in 3 Spanish classes will participate in a field trip to view El Dia de Los Muertos Exhibit at the Oakland Museum on Nov. 3-4. The following day students will tour the Mission District Hispanic Murals.

October 23-24 students from the Peer Helping Class will be involved in a training retreat to learn conflict resolution techniques taught by Maggie Steele(Mendocino County Office of Education), Linda Heinsohn(Mendocino County Youth Project) and Shakati Walsh. These students will then use their training to help their peers to mediate problems in the schools. When students learn to be in control of their lives, how to take care of conflicts effectively without violence, anger and stress is reduced, reducing the depression associated with drug and alcohol abuse.

In December, Peer Helping students will attend a Religious Diversity Celebration at Humboldt State University. They will visit the Pomo Village Demonstration Site in Mendocino enroot.They will visit the Fort Humboldt Native American Museum and the Hoopa Native Village demonstration site.

Culminating Activities (and evaluation products) will include a community Celebration of our Diversity Day at the High School , a tile mural 'Celebrating our Diversity' in the school entrance, videotapes of all activities and projects for future education, and involvement in building a demonstration Pomo Village Education Site at our Point Arena Reservation. Students will write articles to contribute to our local newspaper, the ICO and create a book to sell titled 'Celebrating Cultural Diversity'. Sales of these products along with support of our local business community will help to sustain the Celebration and maintain our multi-cultural unity.

Program Goals and Measurable Objectives: The South Coast of Mendocino County is isolated from major service centers. With three Native American reservations and a rapidly increasing Hispanic population inter-racial tensions between Native American, White, and the Latino populations has increased.

The goal of this program is to increase cultural pride and improve intergroup relations through cultural awareness experiences, conflict mediation training and school and community education. The objectives are as follows:

• Conflict mediation training-Oct. 23-23 retreat with Maggie Steele of MCOE, Linda Heinsohn of Mendocino County Youth Project, and Shakati Walsh-counselor at Point Arena High School. Students will learn communication skills, listening skills, they will use these skills to do peer mediation at both elementary and high school sites in helping to deflect escalation of hostilities.

• Increase Cultural Awareness experiences through field trips. Hispanic awareness will increase with a visit to the Oakland Museum to view the El Dia de Los Muertos Exhibit and tour Hispanic Murals in the Mission District of San Francisco. Native American awareness will be generated by visiting the Native American Museum at Fort Humboldt, the Hoopa village site,and the Pomo Village site at Brewery Gulch. World religious diversity will be experienced at the Religious Diversity Festival at Humboldt State University.

• Increase multi-ethnic unity theme with an assembly with Kevin Locke, renowned Native American Hoop Dancer(Nov. 2)




• Increase cultural awareness with guest speakers: Dr.Royal Alsup former professor at Humboldt State University to speak on racism. Chris Lopez- Native American Drug and alcohol prevention education Jack Norton-University of California at Riverside-to speak on the genocide of the Native American peoples.

• Create an educational resource library for teachers. All events will be videotaped for future interactive use in the classrooms.

Status: In our second year of the Diversity Project, students in Shakati Walsh's peer helping classes visited San Francisco's Mission District to view the El Dia De Los Muertos Exhibit in the Cultural Museum. Unfortunately one group en route to the museum were jumped by local gang members (one girl unwittingly wore a blue bandana). Fortunately no one was hurt and this harrowing experience brought home a powerful message to our students: Violence is not a way to solve our differences. The safety of our small coastal community is now treasured. The students decided to turn this experience around and create a powerful play, Similar Differences, to express their message. With the help of local poet and artist Blake More, the students wrote and produced a powerful play depicting the different races and stereotyped roles in our community and our need to support each other. Though we have differences beneath everything we all have the same needs. Contrasting the struggles of students in homes of poverty and homes of material comfort also carried a powerful message to promote tolerance.

Similar Differences was performed as part of our second annual Diversity Day Celebration, held at our local theater and at PAHS. Students enjoyed Mad Crew, hip hop dancers and a DJ from KMEL radio highlighting diverse cultural music and school awards. Also performing at the theater were the new PAHS band, local Manchester Point Arena Band of Pomo Native American Dancers and local Latino Dancers. At PAHS students circulated throughout learning center classrooms which included Pomo Pride, Latino Low Riders (Paula Patterson's Cultural Awareness class), Ellis Island passports (Using a digital camera, our librarian Vikki Seed photographed students in costume to create passports), Soul Music, and the Psychological roots of prejudice. Carne Cruda, a Caribbean band from Santa Cruz finished the day with music to dance to.

Diversity Day, begun in Point Arena, has become so successful that the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors has now proclaimed the month of May as "Mendocino County Diversity Awareness Month" with Diversity Day Celebrations happening in five locations throughout the County.