By Vickie Bonnema and Olivia Jones

In a perfect world, schools wouldn’t need to be worrying about what labels students carry or what their personal life is like, because there wouldn’t be any problems. But this isn’t a perfect world; everyone needs to remember that you don’t fully know someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. This is the message Fossil Ridge High School’s Diversity Club wanted to show their community; that you can’t judge people by what you hear about them, and that what is seen on the outside of a person isn’t the only thing that matters.

Diversity Day incorporated the entire FRHS community and was sure to leave no student out.  Each Advisory class was given a packet of rice paper, markers, and stickers.  Each student wrote something negative that other people had called them, and put in on their shirt.  Then, students explained to the class why they put that label on. They soon removed their negative stereotypes and put on a sticker with a positive “label” that their other group members had given them.  Students also wrote a false label for the FRHS community on the rice paper, took it down to the commons, and put the slips in water.  The labels slowly drained out of the paper, creating a swirl of rainbow colored water as well as symbolically washing the negative stereotypes away from the FRHS community.

Once the class was done writing their labels for FRHS, they took a leap of faith and did one of the bravest things that they could do.  Students wrote their personal stories and struggles on slips of paper that were hung up around the entire school, for anyone to read—although granted, they weren’t signed. “After our video was shown and after the stereotypes were dissolved, our school felt like it was closer in a way… we weren’t all labeled.  As a school, we got rid of all those together,” said senior Samie Trujillo, a student in the Diversity Class. Most people would be scared out of their mind to put their personal life up for everyone to read, but every student participated. “It gave me more of an appreciation for the students that we do have here,” said Mrs. Vasa, the advisor of the Diversity Class. “Reading through the stories was touching and difficult and just made me see and remember that there’s always more than just a student at Fossil.”

The day’s mental struggles, however, weren’t without physical challenge. “We had a lot to get done with preparing all the kits and making sure everything was ready,” said senior Terry Lou Bettis, a student in the Diversity Class, “but the week before, some of the kits fell apart because paperclips broke so we had to make them again.”  Along with the event the class also was communicating with Ridge TV, who helped them make a video to show during Advisory.  The video showed students who may or may not have been well known throughout most of the school and the struggles they go through, along with their everyday life.  “It reminds people that there are many things that make up a person,” said junior Andrew Conrad, a student who was featured in the video. “Logistically, the hardest part was making sure every teacher had everything they needed to do the lesson, and brainstorming what kind of video and making sure it was effective.  Emotionally the hardest part is excepting what you do or how you do, not everyone will understand the message, or be reached by the message,” said Vasa.

Despite all the struggles, in the end all the planning and hard work was rewarding.  “For me personally, this class in general and the ideas that it promotes made me feel valuable in school and it felt like I had done something worthwhile,” said Bettis.  The Diversity Day at FRHS is inspiring Fort Collins High School and Rocky Mountain High Schoo lto start up their own Diversity Day.  FRHS did a Diversity Day last year as well, and with all the positive feedback they received about this year’s day, they aren’t planning on stopping any time soon.  “Having time to honor and appreciate differences has always been a part of advisory, once this class began, it fit in with our mission. It was our goal to coordinate that with our school,” said Vasa. “My hope is that it spreads a message of acceptance, and despite what others may think about our differences, that they know and recognize that we are all people.”

Diversity Day was so much more than making colorful crafts about how we high schoolers view ourselves; it was the exploration of how we perceive ourselves in others’ eyes and the abolition of false stereotypes. The initial idea for Diversity Day, in fact, was sparked by the want to make a change in students’ hearts and minds. Senior Cesar Lopez wanted to join the Diversity and Leadership class to make a difference in his community and asserted that the class as a whole “wanted a day where we could all accept each other and hear everyone” rather than being left to our own discriminations.

Senior Yoni Ephraim had a similar goal when he joined the FRHS Diversity and Leadership class, seeing it as “an opportunity to get his voice out into the school” as well as a way to provide answers for the problems of the school. The most interesting problem was not diversity itself, but the idea that diversity is a negative part of our school. On the contrary, students in the Diversity and Leadership class were all constant in their views of diversity itself. Ephraim described it as “the way we see life… different perspectives.” Similarly, Lopez stated that “diversity has a positive effect on people. It shows more than just one story; everyone’s different, everyone’s unique.” The common misconception is that diversity is a bad thing, often confusing it with prejudice. Truthfully, diversity is a very healthy part of communities and the diversity class’ goal is to enlighten the school on what diversity really means.

Diversity is “the inclusion of different types of people”, or more generally, “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements” (merriam-webster.com). On the contrary to popular beliefs, diversity is not the separation of different groups of people, but the joining of many peoples into one group. The Diversity class not only strives to introduce this idea to FRHS through Diversity day, but through the way they act on a daily basis. Even their perceptions on the way a classroom should interact with each other differ from high school norms. Bettis described the Diversity class as much more than a class. “This class is pretty much my family at this point,” said Bettis. The greatest effort of the Diversity class was to join our school as a whole, to make it a kind of family. Through the bravery it took to admit the struggles in our lives, the students at FRHS have taken a great step towards unity.

It is true that our school is not perfect, and far from it in fact. People are people, which means there are problems, dramas, struggles, miscommunications and misinterpretations. The great misinterpretation our Diversity and Leadership class was trying to abolish was diversity itself; diversity is not bad. It is, in fact necessary in a healthy community as the indicator that defines us all. The stories that each of the students of FRHS posted around the school were not just stories; they were tools to pull people out of their comfort zone, to show that every single student has the capability to take their stories in a serious light and show their peers in a mature way. The stories were signs of strength from every single student in the school, and the day itself was proof that anyone, even the lax students which filled the Diversity class, can change our community.