In-Tech, Horace Mann students focus on diversity

Last year, two Horace Mann School students made a deal. Yeewen New, 16, and Riya Satara, 18, were attending the Student Diversity Leadership Conference.

“On the last day, we made a promise to each other to take what we learned and implement it in our community,” Yeewen said. 

The duo went on to create DiversiDream, an after-school diversity training program designed for middle school students at IN-Tech Academy (M.S./H.S. 368). Yeewen and Ms. Satara won a $2,500 start-up grant from the Alexander Capelluto Award and found a partner in IN-Tech middle school science teacher Kristen Young.

“A lot of school curriculums, especially middle school curriculums, don’t offer diversity training,” Ms. Satara said at IN-Tech Academy on June 1. She explained that Horace Mann has an entire department called the Office of Diversity, and the office is implementing a middle school curriculum next year. 

“Our school doesn’t have a diversity program,” said Ms. Young, explaining that IN-Tech is already “immersed in diversity.”

At IN-Tech’s middle school, 81 percent of students were Latino, 10 percent black, 5 percent white, 3 percent Asian and 1 percent from another group in the 2013-14 school year, according to Department of Education stats.

Ms. Young said it is still important to have discussions about diversity, so she encouraged her students to sign up for the new program.

“It was more or less like challenges people face, titles that we are trying to break down, like gender and sex. They’re not the same thing,” explained sixth-grade student Benjamin Minaya.

“I just decided to try it out,” said Amelie Nachtmann, another sixth grader, “and I ended up really enjoying it.”

 Students challenged

Over 10 meetings, Ms. Satara and Yeewen came to IN-Tech to run activities designed to push students to think about issues that might otherwise go unmentioned. With funds from the grant, they gave the students journals to write in and brought snacks. One day, they put up big pieces of paper with a race or ethnicity written across the top, and students were supposed to write whatever words came to mind.