Schools encourage students to 'mix it up'

Mathematical formulas built into the school choice program spread students between schools, ensuring racial diversity inside each school building. But the district's desegregation agreement didn't address common student tendencies to gravitate to other children like them, whether it be race, age, gender or socioeconomic status.

Bonita Elementary is hoping to nip that propensity in the bud on Tuesday by partaking in national Mix it Up at Lunch Day, when students will be assigned to different tables in the cafeteria to sit with children they do not know. The goal is to find commonalties in other students that they ordinarily wouldn't discover.

"We don't have a huge issue with cliques or with one ethnic group looking down on another," said teacher Jodi Partin, coordinator of Bonita Elementary's new Students Against Destructive Decisions club. "Here, we've never really had that problem, but we wanted to encourage kids to meet students from other grades."

The 15 children in Partin's class, for example, will each be assigned a number that corresponds to a cafeteria table. When they sit down, their tablemates will be children from other grades, genders and races.

Fifth-grader Jacob Flores, 11, admits he is a little nervous about the experiment. He usually eats with his buddies, but has one concern about his new lunch dates.

"That they're girls," Jacob said, squirming after thinking about the prospect of getting "cooties."

About 300,000 students nationwide are expected to participate in Mix it Up at Lunch Day, which is coordinated through tolerance.org, a Web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The organization acknowledges that students tend to segregate themselves during lunch to sit with peers who have similar backgrounds. But the center hopes that crossing social boundaries can create school environments with less bullying, conflict, harassment and violence.

Lee County's desegregation agreement automatically balances different races between schools, but many administrators have noticed that student social groups reflect the district's diversity. Three Oaks Middle, for instance, requires students to eat lunch with their classmates at one table, so their lunch group reflects the school's overall diversity, according to assistant principals Michael Carson and Clayton Simmons. Three Oaks also requires its students to wear uniforms, a strategy many schools have adopted to decrease social divides that arise based on clothing.

(Contact Staff Writer Dave Breitenstein at 213-6033 or debreitenstein@naplesnews.com )