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South Carolina students "mix it up" during their Unity Day, a project funded by the Center's first Mix It Up grant.
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CHAPIN, S.C. -- At the beginning of each year, students at Chapin High School chart the groups and cliques on their campus. Typically, it's a picture of divisions.
"We look at the drawings, and we see the ROTC group tends to stay to itself, and other groups stay to themselves," said Danielle Major, faculty adviser for the school's STOP club, which stands for Students Together Overcoming Prejudice.
What happens next is where things get exciting.
"We pull the chart apart," Major said. "Our students ask themselves, 'What can we do this year that's going to help those people interact with these people?'"
The result: Unity Day, an annual gathering that includes diversity workshops and a pep rally. And while Unity Day is a single event, organizers see its effects throughout the year.
"I joined the STOP club because I'm open-minded and I wanted to encourage other people to be open-minded," said 16-year-old junior Caroline Nelson. After three years, she has felt the changes at the predominately white school in small-town South Carolina.
"Sometimes I hear people put other people down, and usually now somebody else steps up and defends the person," Nelson said. "People stand up more for what they think is right."
With that kind of track record, it's no surprise that Chapin High School's STOP club received the first-ever $250 Mix It Up grant from the Center's education projects, Tolerance.org and Teaching Tolerance.
"That's what we're after: New and ongoing student-led activities seeking to cross social boundaries," said Jennifer Holladay, director of Tolerance.org. "What's happening at Chapin, we'd like to see happening at schools throughout the nation."
Mix It Up was launched last fall, calling on students to switch their seats in the cafeteria for one day, breaking down the social, racial and other boundaries that divided schools. On Nov. 21, more than 200,000 students at more than 3,000 schools took part in the first Mix It Up at Lunch Day.
To keep the momentum going, Mix It Up launched its spring After Lunch campaign, urging students to push boundary breaking a bit farther. To help with that effort, Mix It Up offered $250 grants for suitable After Lunch projects.
Chapin High was awarded the first of 70 such grants. More grants are available.
Chapin used the $250 to help defray the cost of Unity Day T-shirts and hire a DJ for a school-wide pep rally. Unity Day has been happening at Chapin for three years, but this year's event was the largest ever.
In addition to morning diversity workshops, Unity Day this year included a Mix It Up exercise at lunch. Students were given colored Lifesavers as they exited the lunch line, then asked to sit with people who had the same color of Lifesavers. The lunchroom theme, appropriately, was "So many colors, one great flavor."
After lunch, the pep rally drew all 920 students at the school.
Based on such success, Major said, the superintendent has asked that all high schools in the district create similar activities.
"We've been saying, 'Hey, we're here; look at what we're doing,' for almost four years, and now it's catching on," Major said.
SPLC Report
June 2003
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