Tired of talking about violence, charter school holds Day of Empathy
Students, staff played music, read poetry, monologues at event meant to promote kindness, compassion, communication
Not quite a year ago, the staff and students of Tierra Encantada Charter School had to contend with an online threat of violence made toward the school.
Though it was an off-campus threat that did not lead to any incidents of violence, the school’s director, Daniel Peña, began talking with his daughter, Finnley LeRouge Peña, about the impact of such threats and what the school could do to address that impact in the long run.
“We didn’t want to do a ‘no guns in schools’ thing,” Daniel Peña said.
So the two, along with several other students, began formulating a plan for an annual event promoting kindness, compassion and communication.
A Day of Empathy was thus born, and on Friday the charter school held its inaugural presentation of it.
“We’re tired of hearing about violence in schools,” Daniel Peña said in an interview at the school shortly before the event started. “There’s so much love, so much caring, so much empathy here. The kids wanted to emphasize that.”
His daughter, a senior at the school, said the presentation was intended to show people “our words and actions have consequences.”
Students and staff alike played music and read poetry and monologues promoting empathy during the roughly 90-minute event.
Guest speakers — including actor Wes Studi, whose granddaughter attends the school, and Andy Holten, who avoided confinement and death during the Holocaust — spoke of empathy in very different ways.
When he was 5 in Nazi-occupied Holland, Holten, who is Jewish, said his parents made the decision to put him
into hiding with a willing Christian couple, a dangerous act at a time when Jewish people and those who supported them could end up in concentration camps or gas chambers.
“They had enormous empathy,” Holten said. “Empathy ... acts as a balancing force against hatred and misunderstanding.”
Holten’s parents were sent to concentration camps, where they were killed. When they did not come back to Holland following the end of the war, he stayed with the Christian couple until he graduated from high school and then emigrated to the United States.
Studi compared empathy to sympathy, saying the two are like cousins who sometimes get along and sometimes don’t.
Sympathy can be as simple as driving by someone changing a flat tire in the rain and feeling bad for them, but not stopping to help, he said.
With empathy, he said, something as simple as sitting and listening to a friend who needs support can make a difference.
“You really don’t have to do anything other than be there and listen,” he said.
Several of the students who helped organize the event said people can easily become desensitized to how words can be used to hurt others.
Acting and speaking to others with respect and humanity is key to making change in the world, they said.
“If we continue to act as role models, we can help teach society to be more kind to one another,” said Cheyanne Lujan, a junior at the school.
Monique Lujan, a junior at the school, said “there’s never enough empathy” in the world.
“We do need more empathy,” she said.
Last autumn, the school began an Empathy Project initiative for seventh and eighth graders that aims to mix social-emotional learning — the teaching of wellness and conflict resolution strategies like self-awareness, social awareness, and responsible decision making — with social studies lessons on the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement.
Friday’s event drew about 100 people, and Peña said he hopes attendance rises as the school makes it a yearly event every April.
“Start with small steps,” he said. “Small acts of kindness.”