by Rower Girl

Created on: April 26, 2009   Last Updated: April 27, 2009

As a student in a predominately white school with only 2-3% of ethnically diverse students in the school population, I have seen a fair amount of cultural issues. Even though the Latino student population there has been on the rise consistently for several years now, we still have on average, only about 20 black and Asian students combined within a 360-student body.

It is sad to think that in all of my classes but one, in all my primary subjects anyway, there is not one ethnically diverse student. I myself enjoy the small class sizes of 15 or 16 but would enjoy them even more if they were more integrated with a wider variety of students... it would have been nice to have had an African American student's perspective in our discussions on the antebellum slave period and other topics of the like when we read "Huck Finn".

But, as not diverse as my school is, my teachers do take extreme initiative to integrate cultural diversity into their curriculum. My English teacher, for example, uses trivia questions to educate us on African American history during each day of Black History Month. The culinary teacher often assigns her classes to make ethic recipes from around the world.

The good thing is that our school, SHR, is not a snobby stuck up one full of kids who could care less about minorities and want to bully them specifically because they look different or speak a different language. SHR is a small, close-knit school community where everybody knows everybody. I am not saying that is a picture-perfect school; we do have some drug problems and bad kids, but for the most part there is no one who feels the need to exclude anyone else on the basis of their skin color and ethnicity. This ideal of a safe school environment is stressed everyday through the actions of all the school community: administrators, staff and students all do their part in some way. We are one of the better schools in NJ, paying as much per student as a private school and giving every student, regardless of their background, a quality education and the skills that they need to excel in the real world.

That is the basis of everything the school stands for, and as it continues to move forward with its multilingual/ethnic goals for the future, so do its students. SHR does not just stop and stare when it comes to addressing cultural diversity in the classroom, that is not enough. No. Its community knows that this is an area in which it is lacking, so they try to fix it. But it does not just put some ethnic books and lessons into each teacher's lesson and call its mission for cultural diversity "complete". No. Instead, it actually brings the cultural diversity to the classroom for real: in the form of students from all backgrounds and continuously strives to make them feel at home and give them the edge they need in education, and thus a thorough education for everyone.

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