Diversity on a diverse day, but wearing the same clothes

I enjoyed the diversity of speakers on the agenda Monday, each bringing a diverse viewpoint to their diverse topics.

We're so fortunate to have Alan Weintraut with us at the institute. Time and again he has shown why he is Dow Jones Teacher of the Year with his ideas and suggestions when discussing matters in informal one-on-one sessions. Our individual situations are so diverse and yet Alan offers sound ideas and suggestions on what we might do in response to questions.

In his session Monday, Alan explained how his diverse staff is set up and how it has evolved. The video of his students giving us a tour of the newsroom was quite something!

The handouts will prove invaluable, I think, and his ideas on the diverse ways he raises funds have me thinking about how I might get around the two-fundraisers-a-year restriction I face.

Then Rick Rodriguez brought the richness and diversity of his life experiences with him, on how his playing sports brought him in contact with the diverse strata of society in his hometown of Salinas, Calif., and how these contacts eventually allowed him as editor of the high school paper to tell the story of people involved with the Caesar Chavez farmworker strikes. Eventually he moved on the the Washington Post as the staff's only Spanish-speaking reporter. (Remember how Robert Redford in "All the President's Men" needed somebody with Spanish-language skills to help with interviewing a potential source?) Then eventually editor of the Sacramnento Bee and now a professor at Cronkite.

(An aside: one of the art teachers at my school was active in the farmworker's movement in Crystal City, Texas, during the time Rodriguez was in high school. The art teacher is a walking history of the era. However, the crop involved was spinach.)

"Tell a variety of stories to get a picture that accurately reflects the lives of students," he told us. "Staffs need to have and reflect the differences in color, viewpoints, backgrounds and life experiences."

Then our group photo. Jessica hit the nail on the head when she brought up the irony of dressing alike on a day we discussed diversity.

After our kind-of-diverse lunch (no potatoes like on the other days!) we heard from Sharon Bramlett-Solomon. Honestly, I was really sleepy and don't remember details, nor did I take notes on her presentation, but she was very passionate about having diverse people in the newsroom. No disagreement from me on that.

However, I think she'd find faults with my staffs. I'm the white guy, there are no African-Americans enrolled in the district, I'm told, and everybody else is all Hispanic, very few boys and lots and lots of girls. Kids segregate themselves by language skills (those who prefer English or Spanish), athletes, preppies, gamers, those who work, those whose parents are middle-class and those whose are aren't, those who read and those who don't and other categories which mean something to the students but nothing to me.

Afterwards we worked on our diverse stories for the online edition, and our diverse videos on coping with the heat.

An interesting day of doing diverse things yet dressed alike.

Mark Webber

Vidal M. Treviño School of Communications and Fine Arts

http://my.hsj.org/tx/laredo/vmt

Laredo, Texas