Official Student Newspaper of Henry M. Gunn High School

The Oracle

Official Student Newspaper of Henry M. Gunn High School

The Oracle

Official Student Newspaper of Henry M. Gunn High School

The Oracle

Not In Our Schools Week promotes diversity and unity

by Jean Wang

From March 28 to April 1, Gunn participated in the annual Not In Our Schools week to promote acceptance and awareness among the Gunn community through the theme of “Striving  to  Embrace our Differences.”

To kick off Not In Our Schools week, students came to school on Monday wearing T-shirts that had been distributed a week earlier, a gesture that brought together the Gunn community.  In addition, during lunch on Monday, there was a musical celebration on the quad where student musicians performed live for their fellow peers. There were also Six Degrees of Separation slips available for students to discover how interconnected the Gunn community is. The activity involved receiving a slip of paper with the name of a fellow student on it and participants attempted to connect themselves to the student on their slip of paper through a chain of six people.

The Day of Silence took place on Thursday, and participants remained silent for an entire day to raise awareness for the discrimination and silencing that members of the LGBT community face. “I think gay rights are very important, and this is one of the few ways we can express that,” junior Sian Ye said. At the end of the day, the Day of Silence participants gathered on the quad and screamed loudly. “Right after the scream, it’s a community moment to talk about how happy you are to talk now and the crazy stories that occurred,” Ye said.

On Friday, students wrote stereotypes and prejudices on slips of rice paper and dissolved them in a pool of water in a symbolic gesture of “dissolving” prejudices. Over the course of the day, the pool of water slowly changed color, ultimately becoming red at the end of the day. In addition, students could read slips of papers that had been taped along a string strung across the quad containing stories of discrimination that anonymous students had faced.

 

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