The Providence Journal - Friday, April 6, 2007
By John Castellucci
Journal Staff Writer
PAWTUCKET — The audience was pumped, eager to hear the rap music, poetry and songs that everyone knew would be the fun part of the program.
But first, a couple of questions.
“I’d like to know, first of all, what you think are the biggest causes of violence,” said Pam Steager, taking the stage in Jenks Junior High School.
“Peer pressure,” one student answered.
“People pushing you into it,” another student said.
“Personality,” someone else answered.
“Seeing your parents fight.”
The answers to that question and to the question that followed — “What do you think are the ways that we could be more nonviolent?” — pleased Steager, who is director of training for the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence.
“Forty years ago this week was when Martin Luther King was shot,” she said, referring to the civil-rights leader who, before he was slain, applied the tactics of nonviolence to the struggle of black people for equality.
“It’s obvious, by us being here today, that even though he died 40 years ago, his work and his hope and his dream go on.”
Steager was followed to the auditorium stage by the half-dozen trainers who had worked with the students, teaching nonviolence, and by several of the street workers whom the institute deploys in Providence neighborhoods to mediate fights.
Several of the trainers said they had had the tables turned on them at Jenks.
“Every time I come to the school, I don’t think I am a teacher. I think I am a student and I learn from you,” one of the trainers, Patricia Taubin, said.
Then it was time for the performers: Devon Bullard and Emmanuel Mendez recited a poem by their classmate, Thalia Marquez-Perez. Lisa Zamarelli sang a pop tune, Crizabell Moreno recited a poem, Idio Cardoso rapped. The audience cheered.
But the loudest applause was reserved for Arnold Barbeiro, who gave a repeat performance of the rap song he had done earlier for the seventh grade.
The approximately 275 eighth graders who filled the auditorium were celebrating their completion of the five-week refresher course that the institute conducted at Jenks, the middle school across from McCoy Stadium.
This was the third straight year that the institute offered nonviolence training at Jenks, though the police say the students there aren’t prone to violence. School nurse Linda Mendonca instituted the program more as a preventative measure, than as a palliative, school principal Susan Pfeil said.
“I think this whole thing started out as response to what’s going on nationally,” Pfeil said Wednesday. “It wasn’t something particular or peculiar to Jenks. It was one of the ways we are building a school culture that is nurturing and safe.”
The nonviolence training was offered under a contract with the Pawtucket public school system. The money came from the school system one year, according to Mendonca. The other years, she said, it came from grants.
“I want to thank the school for allowing us back in,” Teny Gross, the institute’s executive director, said at the end of yesterday’s program.
“Not many schools understand that they need to do day-to-day training in nonviolence,” he said.
jcastell@projo.com: <mailto:jcastell@projo.com>
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