My first diversity training for Opn Wyd was on May 5th at Lower Merion High School. Mark Good, manager/founder of Opn Wyd had a prepared a training on Sythesizing White Privilege that he prepared for 10-15 faculty members at the high school. I won't get into the details of the training other than that it used white literature to demonstrate the absence of other races/ethnicities. What I will share is the tour I took of LMHS. I had never been in there before and it legit reminded me of a college. Growing up in Worcester and going to North High School, I was not use to seeing a school that had a swimming pool, lounge/study areas, every student in the building had their own Macbook, and the cafeteria had booth seating. Perhaps these features sound commonplace, but for me it was amazing! I could not believe that this was a public school, nor could I understand why almost half of the parents in the district still sent their kids to private schools, when LMHS totally rates. Also I quickly renamed the LMHS to the Kobe Bryant school, since his face appears all over the building. I later found out that because he attended LMHS for a year or two he recently came back and donated some money to the school.
The health fair on May 10th was set up with multiple booths. Each booth had a game where kids could win prizes and in order to participate students paid in tickets, almost like an amusement park/fair. The booth I was responsible for was the condom races. I had three students at a time race to see who could correctly put a condom on a banana quickest. The prizes for the competition were silly things like clappers, tops, glasses with a mustache, and Chinese finger traps. I had brought in my computer for two reasons: one to play current pop/hip-hop music to attract the teens and second to have a video of a condom demonstration looping so that kids who were waiting to race could watch how to put a condom on. I had created a brief set of instructions/rules for putting on a condom. When the youth came to my booth the first thing I did was go over the steps for how to put on a condom with a model. I placed the condom with the expiration date down (to make sure they flipped it over and looked) and then hollered go! If a youth missed a step I made them start over. I'm pretty sure I yelled "Don't forget to pinch the tip" more than anything else that day. It was by far the most popular booth at the fair and I had a great deal of fun. It was an interesting dynamic, I easily had twice as many girls compete. I had one kid tell me that one of the girl's cheated. When I asked him how she cheated (even though I had clearly watched her put it on appropriately), he responded by saying "She had prior experience!" Hands down the funniest thing I heard all day.
