By Darius Kemp
What would you do if you were pushed down? Hopefully, you would get back up. It is this basic philosophy of life that parents, teachers, and staff at Nettelhorst Elementary School in Chicago are teaching their students.
The book “How to Walk to School” illustrates Nettelhorst’s transformation from an under-performing, struggling urban school into one of the best schools in Chicago.
However, this past year Nettelhorst had an issue with homophobia and anti-gay bullying of a teacher and students with same-sex parents. The Chicago Sun Times reports that,“One substitute teacher, who is also a Nettelhorst parent, was called a faggot. A first-grader was singled out by classmates — a group of 6-year-olds just couldn’t believe someone could have two dads.”
Blog
June 22, 2009 - 9:00pm
The Working Group was excited to host this weekend in Oakland, California, a small group of scholars from across the state to advise us on our Not In Our Town work supported by the California Council for the Humanities. The group included Yolanda Moses, anthropology professor and special assistant to the Chancellor for Excellence and Diversity at UC Riverside, and one of the shapers of the American Anthropological Association’s “Race Are We So Different” traveling museum exhibit; Alberto Pulido, director and professor of Ethnic Studies and chair of the President’s Advisory Board on Inclusion and Diversity at the University of San Diego; and David Brundage, who teaches the history of social movements in the Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater.
June 11, 2009 - 9:00pm
By Brian Lau
It’s my last day at The Working Group and after nine months of meetings in school after school, agonizing over emails and blog posts, and making the hour-and-a-half commute from Sunnyvale to Oakland, I think I’ve earned the right to get a little nostalgic.
And what a crazily wonderful nine months it has been. Since mid-September, I’ve been working at The Working Group as a Not In Our Town/Not In Our School organizer through an organization called Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that places young adults in different nonprofits and provides them with different training opportunities and service projects. And with the end of our Public Allies year just around the corner, I wanted to reflect on what I gained from this experience.
May 30, 2009 - 9:00pm
By Darius Kemp
In early May, the United States House of Representatives passed the Matthew Shephard legislation, by a margin of 75 votes, that would include sexual orientation into current hate crime laws on the federal level. A growing chorus of individuals has begun to hate the legislation instead of hating the horrible crimes of intolerance that people commit.
The bill now moves over to the Senate for serious consideration. However, the passage of the bill in the House has fueled the disturbing rhetoric of opponents to the bill, and in turn this has worried its supporters. Over the past few weeks the recriminations have begun on both sides.
May 27, 2009 - 9:00pm
We were honored to witness students from Shaw High School in East Cleveland, Ohio as they trained elementary school students to stand up to bullying. Last week, NIOT producer Kelly Whalen and I traveled to Cleveland to film Not In Our School segments at two local high schools.