Diversity Education for Kids

An article in Sunday's Birmingham News described a new video that will be used in Birmingham Schools. The video was produced by Leadership Birmingham and features kids from area schools including Epic School and Alabama School of Fine Arts and Shades Valley High School.

The video will be used in a character education program to help teach values and morals.

Diversity is about more than just race, according to these children, who included sexual orientation and social standing and language differences as some of the issues that should be included when considering diversity.

"Diversity, I think, is too often confined to the limits of race and class," said Anna Turkett, a student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and member of Birmingham's Youth Leadership Forum. "Racial differences these days don't mean as much anymore."


"We wanted a tool for teachers to have classroom conversation about diversity," said Howard Bayless, a member of the leadership team who is corporate director of development for Bradford Health Services as well as a member of the Birmingham Board of Education. "Children typically listen to other children before they listen to adults."

Diversity video to be used in character ed project for schools

The group donated enough copies of the video for every school in Birmingham and plans to distribute copies to all surrounding school systems in Jefferson County.

"We hope they will choose to use it in their character education program as well," Bayless said. "It can be the start of a great classroom conversation."

Let's hope that Bessemer uses the video in their school system, where it seems from anecdotal reports that homophobia is common among the students. Well actually, the student's parents, but everybody could use some education and diversity training it seems.