Unity Week returned for its fourth year, led by the organization No Place For Hate. Lunchtime presentations covered mental health, multiculturalism, gender diversity, immigration, and ableism. Behind the scenes, students and advisers say it takes a significant amount of work to put it all together. 

“We had to decide what the presentation topics will be, create our groups, make the presentations, find the guest speakers, do the posters, do the T-Shirts, get the facility request form. It’s a lot of moving pieces but we have a really good team and students that are very dedicated to their school and making a positive difference to their community, I think that makes it a lot easier,” said No Place For Hate Adviser Fernanda Villalba. 

Task force student groups created their presentations, decide their materials, and even feature guest speakers. For instance, task force lead sophomore Joelle Al Ammar worked with her group to put together a presentation that would help fellow students face mental health issues.

“In the mental health presentation we are going to be talking about the common issues that teens struggle with along with emotional stuff and struggles we all go through. We’ll have a psychologist that is a guest speaker coming in, going through how to cope,” said Al-Ammar.

While in previous years attending a Unity Week presentation had given some students extra credit in their classes, this year’s event did not offer the extra credit incentive. 

“We decided as a task force that based on what advice we got from last year from some of our staff and task force members, we saw some students that just went for the extra credit and weren’t really there to learn, that isn’t our goal,” Villalba said. 

The extra credit bonus had filled the theater in years past, but No Place For Hate wants to prioritize fostering student learning over attendance.

“I would hope that other people would still want to learn about other people on campus and their perspective and reality and how to just understand them better,” said Villalba. 

Another difference for this year’s Unity Week compared to last year’s is that the bell schedule for this time around was not modified for a longer lunch block period. 

“We didn’t have enough instructional minutes for the year [2022-23]. There’s a state minimum for the amount of time you have to be in the classroom. If we do, those extended [lunch] blocks in high schools are tight enough, and can make us above or under the limit,” said Principal, Dr. Manoj Mahindrakhar.  

And this year, No Place For Hate decided to reword some of the topic names. Instead of continuing with the topic name “Race/Racism,” they decided to go with “Multiculturalism.” 

“If our goal is to be more inclusive, we want to make sure that we are not using terms that maybe can be seen as attacking somebody else or in a negative light. We don’t want to focus on race and racism, not that race is a bad term per say, but we want to focus on the positive,” said Villalba. 

After collaborating with the SJHHS Special Education department, No Place For Hate also switched the presentation topic name of “Ability Equality” to “Ableism.”  

“We worked with our professionals through the Special Ed department and that [ableism] is a term that is widely used now. We are always learning and we are always trying to unite through education so we are just trying to use the terms that are now more appropriate and relevant,” said Villalba.  

Mental Health kicked off Unity Week on 2/27, followed by multiculturalism on 2/28, gender diversity on 3/1, immigration on 3/2, and ableism on 3/3.