By Shauna Scott Rhone
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Western Hills sophomores participating in Mix It Up include (clockwise from left): Amber Wilkerson, Marcel Freeland, Sosena Erco, Ryan Johnson, Deborah Brown and Brandon Domineack. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

On Thursday, hundreds of Tristate students from 36 elementary and secondary schools will do something they've probably never done before.

Some of them intend to "mix it up" in the cafeteria by sitting down to eat lunch with students they don't know.

Teachers such as Patti Lenahan at Western Hills are looking forward to it. She signed up her 10th-grade English class for Mix It Up, an anti-discrimination event sponsored by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center's two education projects, Teaching Tolerance and Tolerance.org

"It's hard to sit with someone you don't know," says Ms. Lenahan. And she said "there's no loitering allowed in the hall" during the school day, so students routinely travel from class to class in clustered teams with little or no interaction.

Deborah Brown, 16, of Westwood is one of Ms. Lenahan's students. She says the school's structure makes it difficult to make friends with classmates who are in other groups.

MIX IT UP

These Tristate schools are scheduled to participate in Mix It Up, a one-day project designed to help students stretch their social boundaries and, ideally, make new friends. Adena Elementary Brent Elementary Carthage Paideia Academy Cincinnati Hebrew Day Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy East Clinton High Eastwood Paideia School Eden Grove Academy Hilltop Elementary Holmes Junior High Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary Lighthouse Community School Little Flower Elementary Mason Middle School McAuley High School Milan High School Milford Main Middle School Mount Healthy High New Burlington Elementary Rapid Run Elementary Roger Bacon High Ross Senior High School St. Bernard-Elmwood Place High St. Gabriel Consolidated School St. Henry Elementary St. Mary's Hyde Park Elementary St. Joseph Villa Academy St. Peter Claver School Simon Kenton High Tichenor Middle School Village Christian School West Union High Western Hills High Wilmington Middle School Wilmington High Winton Woods High

And after all, these are school kids. High school students, especially, have a natural inclination to hang with the kids they know and like. Mix It Up is an effort to broaden minds.

"Some people won't do it because they're used to doing things the way they do them," Ms. Brown says. "Some kids (who were together) last year still hang around each other this year."

At least one student in Ms. Lenahan's class doesn't have that frame of reference. Sosena Erco, 16, left her native Ethiopia a month ago when her family moved to Cincinnati. Ms. Erco says she is determined to cross as many barriers as she can while she's here, and Mix It Up offers an opportunity.

"If I meet someone I don't know," she says, "I might change my attitude about that person. Knowing each other and exchanging knowledge . . . may encourage you to go to outsiders . . . you might get a chance to work it out with other people" and learn something new about yourself.

Western Hills student Brandon Domineack, 15, also believes in the mission of Mix It Up. He says he hopes the school will embrace the project. "I think a lot of people here will be in it. It's really nothing to be scared of, it's nothing personal. It's just a chance to meet somebody you don't know."

Says Jim Carnes, director of Teaching Tolerance, "Despite the gains of the last 50 years, many unspoken rules continue to divide people by color, religion, class, ability, sexual orientation and other factors. Nowhere are those boundaries more evident than in the average lunchroom."

One educator who has studied the issue of self-segregation among students in school lunchrooms is Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Basic Books, $14). She endorses the project as an opportunity to cross social barriers to help create a "climate of learning."

"There is nothing wrong with sitting with people like yourselves some of the time," says Dr. Tatum, now president of Spelman College in Atlanta, "but we also want young people to learn how to interact with people whose backgrounds are different from their own, and to be able to recognize the social inequities that reinforce the social barriers that often exist."

More than 400 teachers in Southwest Ohio, Northern Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana, who participate in the Newspapers In Education program, received information on the one-day project.

Most of the schools who responded have at least one class that will "mix it up." Three schools, Tichenor Middle School in Erlanger and Wilmington Middle and High schools in Wilmington, have as many as three classes signed up to participate..

The national response has also been impressive. Teaching Tolerance spokesperson Janel Bell says more than 3,500 elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools have signed on for Mix It Up.

Ms. Bell says the preliminary numbers represent 20 percent of all high schools across the country.

"We're inviting people to examine the boundaries that exist and why they exist," she says. "Many schools are inviting parents and local celebrities to participate so we expect great cooperation."

The Enquirer intends to talk to some of the students participating in Mix It Up about how the one-day boundary-busting experiment worked for a follow-up story. For more information on Mix It Up, visit www.mixitup.org.

E-mail srhone@enquirer.com