SGORR To Participate in City Club Race Relations Forum

Representatives of Shaker Heights High School’s pioneering Student Group on Race Relations (SGORR) will join a panel discussion on race and education at Cleveland’s renowned City Club on October 15.

Marcia Jaffe, the founding faculty advisor of SGORR, and Shaker senior Jock Williams, a SGORR member, will be joined on the panel by a student from Hathaway Brown School who works with the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ). The moderator will be Dennis G. Terez, an assistant federal public defender and adjunct faculty member at the Case Western Reserve School of Law.

Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Time: 5:30 pm

Place
The City Club of Cleveland
850 Euclid Avenue

Price
$10 for City Club members
$20 for non-members
$ 5 for high school students

The program is sponsored by the City Club New Leaders. For more information or to make a reservation, please call (216) 621-0082 or reserve online at www.cityclub.org.

About the Student Group on Race Relations
SGORR was initiated in 1983 by a group of concerned students who noticed that often the positive relationships enjoyed by blacks and whites in elementary school did not survive the transition to middle school. The focus was to work with students before the relationships were lost.

Under the guidance of a faculty advisor, the student-led program has done a remarkable job of helping youngsters become aware of the dynamics involved in maintaining healthy relationships. Passed from one graduating class to the next, SGORR has kept race relations-indeed, human relations – on the front burner in Shaker Heights.

About 250 high school students present SGORR programs to some 900 fourth- and sixth-grade students annually. Another 50 high school students bring the group’s message of tolerance to adult groups in the community through an offshoot, SGORR Outreach. Outreach uses the SGORR curriculum, modified to fit into one workshop session, to stimulate discussion among adults. Additionally, SGORR students have introduced their message and their methods to thousands of high school students in Northeast Ohio through youth gatherings, hosted by the Cleveland City Club, Bellefaire/JCB, and Cuyahoga Community College.

SGORR has been replicated in schools from Michigan to Israel to South Africa, and adopted by adult organizations including National Conference on Community and Justice (which developed a human relations program based on SGORR), the League of Women Voters and the Shaker Heights Parent Teacher Organization. SGORR has been the subject of presentations at various state and national conferences, at the Chautauqua Institution and in articles in the Phi Delta Kappan and other national journals.

Awards bestowed upon SGORR include the Ohio Governor’s Youth Award for Peace and special recognition from the Human Relations Commission of Shaker Heights. It has also been a finalist for the American Jewish Committee’s Isaiah Award.

For more information about SGORR, visit the organization’s web page.

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