Anti-Defamation League program
Hello! My name is Kyle Sullivan, and I am on the executive board for our schools’ Anti-Defamation League program. Administration founded our program in November 2018 and appointed Mrs. Greenberg, Ms. Prescott, and Ms. Sladky to be the advisors, who have been invested since the start of our meetings. Following an application period, admitted students met and created weekly meetings to discuss what the program will encompass.
We hit the ground running in December 2018, scheduling trainings with representatives from the Anti-Defamation League in order to officially affiliate our program with the organization. Throughout January 2019, a representative trained our group on how to be efficient Student Leaders. Following the trainings, we started to implement what we learned into a formal curriculum. Our lessons brought to Norwell Middle School targeted stereotypes, individualized identities, superficial & internal diversity, and forms of prejudice. These lessons took place in the spring of the 2018-2019 school year and proved themselves successful.
However, our enticed overachievers were chasing that next fulfilling “step.” Our advisors proposed the idea of educating our freshmen on lessons they learned last year from their ADL curriculum on a much more intense scale. We decided to move forward, creating topics involving identity and applying differences to a group, diversity, the role diversification in school communities, understanding prejudice, discrimination, avoiding assumptions, stereotypes, biases, and understanding privilege, and how privilege affects communities. Thus far, our group taught four lessons and scheduled three more before COVID-19 became an issue. Based on feedback from fellow Student Leaders, teachers, and administrators, the lessons are coming across as worthwhile and valuable to the freshmen, which was our primary goal. As always, nothing is perfect. However, our group has an intense motivation to educate younger students and end defamation in our society and worldwide.
