Every two years, Marblehead High School and Team Harmony host the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) peer training program, which began in Boston in 1985. Team Harmony is a club that works to promote diversity and combat bias at MHS. Over 60 million people worldwide have been trained as a part of this program, and over 200 people have been trained at MHS, where the training has occurred on and off for twenty years. Laurie Meagher was the first person to bring MHS students to the ADL Youth Conference, and she brought the training to Marblehead. It is now organized by Candice Sliney, the faculty advisor for Team Harmony.
This year, eleven students from grades 9-12 participated in the training. They learned about the meanings of and differences between bias, discrimination, and prejudice. The workshop also included information to help students recognize and address situations that may arise at school and in the community. Julia Greenway, a sophomore who attended the training, said that the activities from the training were unique because students could interact and work with each other instead of just listening to someone else speak for hours on end. For one activity, students were put into groups to talk about different types of bias and examples of when they might occur. This opened discussions about personal experiences the students had with bias and how they reacted to those situations.
The lessons and skills the students gained during the training will have a lasting impact on Team Harmony and the school community as a whole. The entire club meets twice each month, and the officers have two separate meetings per month. During the meetings, club members practice activities from the training. In second semester, Team Harmony members go into freshmen health classes to run a presentation that includes information and workshops from the ADL peer training program. After these presentations, many freshmen are inspired to join Team Harmony so that they can help in the mission to make the school and community more accepting. According to Candice Sliney, “One of the most important principles of ADL is that equality cannot exist for anyone unless it exists for everyone.” Ideas like this are spread in Team Harmony meetings and in the presentations in the freshmen health classes until people across MHS are equipped with the tools to create an accepting community.