Presque Isle High School students observe A Lot Alike Week

    The Civil Rights Team at Presque Isle High School celebrated A Lot Alike Week April 7-11.  The team’s main goal is to prevent bias behaviors and judgments concerning gender, gender identity, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation.
The team prepared a bulletin board message leading up to the week, placed posters around the school with applicable quotes, made daily morning announcements, and placed different discussion cards on the cafeteria tables each day to encourage students to think about and to discuss how we are all very much alike.
Additionally, the team involved each homeroom in a similarities charades competition, prompting discussions on what the members had in common with each other. Some groups easily found their commonalities, while others had a difficult time. The gym was full of discussion, some laughs, some groans and a lot of great interaction.
Brandon Baldwin, coordinator for the Civil Rights Team Project, Office of the Attorney General, was the featured guest, giving a presentation to the school to support the team’s efforts. Students learned how we all have our biases and he challenged us to look beyond our differences to find our commonalities by giving examples of the obvious differences of people in each of the protected categories paired with their common bonds.
To wrap up the week, students were given the task of finding five differences and five similarities in a picture of a group of people. Finding differences is often easy, but we have to make an effort to find the similarities. The goal is to appreciate our differences without being biased against them.