Students ask that special week be official

By HAROLD GWIN

gwin@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Ten city high school students want the Youngstown school board to declare an annual “Nonviolence Week” each October.

The students took part in “Sojourn to the Past” in April, a 10-day historic/ educational journey into the South to study the places and people involved in this country’s civil-rights movement, and came back with a plan to bring a message of nonviolence to their peers.

A key element of the “Sojourn” journey involves learning how nonviolence was used in that movement. City students who took the trip in 2009 launched the district’s first Nonviolence Week last October, persuading the school board and administration to allow them to organize the event.

Those students wrote and presented nonviolence workshops for all three high schools, wrote public-address announcements to be played in the schools highlighting Martin Luther King Jr.’s six principles of nonviolence and designed T-shirts with nonviolence slogans on the back and the logo “Nonviolence or Nonexistence” on the front for students and faculty to wear during the weeklong event.

They even approached the mayor and city council to have the city declare a nonviolence week as well.

The 2010 Sojourn students approached the school board Tuesday, asking the board to make the first week of October this year “Nonviolence Week” in the schools again, and that it be made an official, permanent event.

“On our 10-day trip, we saw that nonviolence was used by the civil-rights movement to gain equal rights and to change our nation,” they said in a prepared statement.

“Violence causes people to be hurt physically, mentally and emotionally. We believe that we need to have a week where we focus on nonviolence to show the students of Youngstown that we do not need to fight or argue to resolve a conflict,” they said,.

Lock P. Beachum Sr., the board vice president who chaired Tuesday’s meeting, advised the students to get their request to Andrea Mahone, chairwoman of the board’s Policy Committee, so it can be reviewed and presented for board approval.