The hateful act has rocked the school, and the school has denounced it. Administrators and teachers are dealing with victims and offenders. The school has provided opportunities for faculty and staff, students, parents and other community members to discuss the underlying issues of the incident and offer suggestions for change. Now is the time to start a project or series of projects that draw students together in a commitment to prevent further bias incidents. The key to success is student involvement.

Once the campus has settled back into its usual routine after an explosive incident, it's easy to procrastinate on implementing change. Long-term responses are essential to the healing process and to prevention of future problems, so start working on them quickly.

• Follow through on previous commitments. Establish timetables for each response. Use the local media or school newsletter to share the plans with students, parents and the community, and invite members of each group to join action committees.

• Gather resources to help action committees. The booklet "Preventing Youth Hate Crime," published jointly by the Departments of Justice and Education and available online at www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/SDFS, offers guidance in setting up a hate prevention program, suggests activities and resources for classrooms, lists resource organizations and includes an extensive bibliography (see also Resources).

• Plan a school-wide or community-wide show of unity. Ribbons of a special color or paper chains make a simple but effective visual statement. After a school incident involving the Klan, students in one Indiana town designed a unity symbol to be printed in the local newspaper and displayed for a week by residents and businesses.

• Sponsor a "tolerance retreat" for students and staff. At one South Orange County, Calif., high school, a student club organizes an annual all-day off-campus event for all 9th graders, with a focus on diversity issues. The National Conference for Community and Justice is one of several organizations that conduct student leadership camps (see also Resources).

• The section, Long-Range Commitment includes other ways to foster an environment of respect at school.

"We as teachers sometimes are fearful about talking about understanding, about race issues. As demographics change, we have to begin dialogues among students and among teachers about the messages that students are getting [about other races and ethnic groups] in their home environment or their community or through the media. We have to discuss them and check to see how valid they are. It's not a one-time thing. We have to explore that continuously."
Dr. Socorro Herrera, assistant professor of esl/bilingual
and elementary education, Kansas State University

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