South Fayette students SHOUT for diversity
A program developed in the South Fayette Township School District has snowballed into a regional effort to promote diversity and inclusivity in schools.
The idea was the brainchild of Chuck Herring, who serves as director of diversity, equity and inclusion at South Fayette.
SHOUT, which stands for Social Handprints Overcoming Unjust Treatment, started in October 2019 under a different name — the Student Diversity Leadership Committee.
It morphed into SHOUT in July with chapters in the works at several local school districts.
The mission of the program, which boasts about 20 members at South Fayette, is to make schools more culturally responsive safe spaces for all students, faculty and staff.
“We are not only a social justice club. We are really a club that teaches, mentors and develops leaders,” Mr. Herring said.
Mr. Herring said having an organization like SHOUT in schools is “imperative because it provides support for those students who are on the margins, like students of color, students of different religions, students who have special abilities or students on the gender or sexuality continuum.”
He said he came up with the idea for SHOUT after meeting Greg Norris, the director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“He is an environmentalist. He speaks about environmental footprints and handprints,” Mr. Herring said.
An environmental handprint is the “good” people do for the environment to help negate the “bad,” which is referred to as a footprint.
“I already understood the footprint concept, but handprints were a new idea to me,” Mr. Herring said. “Once I mulled it over, I began to think about how footprints — intentional or unintentional acts that cause harm to someone or something — and handprints — intentional acts to overcome or offset a footprint — could be used as a social justice framework.”
From there, Mr. Herring developed the “handprints heal footprints” framework and began looking for students to start a social justice club.
Yamini Yepuri and Berfin Bircan helped found SHOUT. They have since graduated.
“It just manifested like a flame,” said Mitch Howard, a South Fayette senior who is in charge of public relations for SHOUT.
Mitch joined SHOUT over the summer shortly after George Floyd was killed while in the custody of Minneapolis police. His first event was helping to organize a peaceful outdoor rally, which he said was well attended.
Then he emceed a “privilege walk,” at which he read statements and participants were asked to take a step forward or a step backward based on their responses.
For instance, participants would have taken a step forward if they were male or white but a step back if they were raised in a single-parent household.
“You kind of found a commonality between women of color in the back and Caucasian American men toward the front. We would take pauses and just look around,” Mitch said.
He said a goal of SHOUT is to change the culture in schools.
“It’s high time that happened. We’ve kind of just been tolerating these injustices or racist undertones or things that people might not see at first glance. So we’re tired of it,” Mitch said. “Through SHOUT we have been able to try and make those changes.”
This year SHOUT also held a virtual “religions of the world” event with the Green Building Alliance during which speakers from several religions, including Roman Catholic, Hindu, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, participated.
Mitch and other members of SHOUT have also met with local and state legislators as well as the state Department of Education’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force.
A book titled “Raise Your Voice: The Stories of SHOUT” is also in the works.
Mitch said he hopes to expand
SHOUT regionally and even nationally. He’s already been in touch with two schools in the Philadelphia area and a school in Allentown and has been talking with a few out-of-state school districts.
Locally, there are SHOUT chapters in the Fox Chapel, Hampton, Kiski Area, Avonworth, Chartiers Valley, Seneca Valley and Canon-MacMillan school districts.
In the Chartiers Valley School District, the SHOUT club will start at the high school level this year, and the district is opening to expanding it to other grade levels.
“We want to make Chartiers Valley a place where all students feel safe and accepted,” said Meghan Watelet, assistant principal at Chartiers Valley High School and the school’s faculty adviser for SHOUT.
Ms. Watelet said the district implemented the Anti- Defamation League’s “No Place for Hate” initiative in 2015 and is looking forward to expanding those initiatives with the SHOUT club.
“We are always looking for ways to focus on diversity and inclusion, and we are excited to improve our efforts through this new club,” she said, adding she’s hoping to collaborate with other districts to share ideas about their SHOUT clubs.
More information can be found at www.handprintshealfootprints.org.