Students to visit Holocaust museum

By Denise Dick

The Fitch teacher is one of 150 Freedom Writer teachers nationwide.

AUSTINTOWN — Members of a Fitch High School class aimed at changing apathy to empathy travel tonight to a site dedicated to victims of a world atrocity.

Nearly 100 high school students leave this evening for a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. They’ll also visit the Capitol, White House and some presidential memorials. They return Friday night.

While at the museum, the students will hear the story of a Holocaust survivor.

Among those making the trip are 50 students who are members of Steven Ward’s Freedom Writers classes at the school.

“The Holocaust is the most tragic event,” Ward said.

It shows how tragedies can happen when people remain silent.

Ward is one of 150 Freedom Writer teachers nationwide. The program is based on the principles of Erin Gruwell, a teacher in California who guided her students in journal writing, helping them to see themselves and others in a different way.

Ward also uses journaling in his classes.

Juniors Jason Bagoly, Britny Benett, Mohamed Ramahi and Jimmy Kennehan, all 17, and Michael Dulay, 16, are among Ward’s students headed to the nation’s capital.

“It’s not a traditional class,” Bagoly said.

Rather than being given material to learn and then being tested on it, students in Freedom Writers classes read books, discuss them and answer questions explaining their opinions about them, he said.

But you have to be able to explain your opinion and back it up, Jimmy added.

Ward encourages discussion and idea sharing. He believes it’s important for students to learn to speak up and to express themselves.

Before the end of the school year, Ward wants to start a journal that each student takes home for an evening, writes his or her story in it and brings it back the next day.

There will be no names on the entries and no grades, but each student will be able to leave his or her mark, sharing something about themselves, the teacher said.

Both Ramahi and Dulay say they enjoy writing.

“I’m a very expressive person,” Dulay said.

Ramahi started a journal on his computer at home when he was in sixth grade.

“I love to write,” he said. “It’s therapy.”

Kennehan has developed an affinity for writing too.

Writing things that bother you in a journal can help you cope, he said. Kennehan writes in his journal almost daily.

The class where both Benett, a cheerleader, and Bagoly, a star baseball player, are members is one of the teacher’s most profound, he said.

At the beginning of the school year, the athletes, cheerleaders and popular students sat on one side of the room with shy, less popular students on the other. But as the school year progressed, the two sides of the room began to communicate more and friendships formed, Ward said.

The students learned to understand one another better, Benett said.

A tattered piece of masking tape still stripes the middle of the classroom. It’s from what the teacher called the line game where he posed different scenarios, such as who could only afford to buy clothes at a thrift store or who’s been suspended. Those students to whom the scenario applied stood on the line.

It was designed to show students the things they have in common while also demonstrating the difficulties some students face.

“One thing about this generation is there is so much apathy,” Ward said. “I see apathy in the hallways. I want to take that apathy and change it to empathy.”