Cautiously, I enter the high school cafeteria. I look around anxiously. Do I know anyone here? Are any of my friends here? There are lots of people I don’t recognize. Will they like me? Will they be kind to me? I wander around, trying to find someone I can make contact with, someone to reassure me, make me feel like I am in the right place and that I belong.

No, this isn’t one of those horrible recurring dreams that comes back even thirty years after high school. No, it isn’t a character study for a character in my next novel. It was my experience as I entered the cafeteria at Simsbury High School this afternoon. All of those difficult feelings from three decades back come alive as I visit the CT Youth Forum, a monthly gathering of high school students from around Connecticut to discuss the important issues of the day.

I step outside the cafeteria and see Pat. He is the organizer of this event. Standing next to him is another person looking for a friendly face. We get into a discussion about the Youth Forums. Another person joins the discussion. They are both youth leaders. It is clear that the youth forum means a lot to them and they go out of their way to attend. One is black and from Hartford. The other is white and from Plainville. The Plainville student talks about having had a chance to interview Richard Holbrook and talked about it in her application to University of Pennsylvania, where she hopes to go to study to become a financial analyst. Three very different people standing around, waiting for the event to start.

We head back into the cafeteria. All the seats are full. Some students sit on the floor. Others sit at tables hastily set up at the back of the room. I had intended to sit with the students. Yet there weren’t any outlets for me to plug my aging computer into. So, with the good seats at a premium, I sit with the teachers gathered at a table on the side. They are busily grading papers as the event begins.

They run through the list of schools attending, asking students to stand up. Simsbury, Prince Tech, students stand, others applaud. American School for the Deaf, many people wave their hands in the air in the ASL version of applause. At the front of the room is an interpreter. I think through all the important meetings and political events that I’ve been to in Connecticut where there was no ASL interpreter. CT Youth Forum is setting an important example for the adults here.

With everyone greeted, the topic of the day is announced and launched into. ‘The Skin You’re In.” Pat asks a series of questions, requesting students to stand up if they identify themselves as white, black, Hispanic, Asian, if they have close friends who are a different race and so on. Just about everyone has a friend that is a different race. Just about everyone has had arguments about race. A student asks others to stand up if they have family members that are a member of a different race, and many stand up.

With the topic defined, the ground rules are established. It boils down to this; treat everyone with respect, whether or not you agree with them. Talk from your own experiences. Everyone agrees to these ground rules, and, with CT Youth Forum setting another important example for the adults, the discussion takes off.

Pat and Jasmine, another facilitator, work the room like Dr. Phil and Oprah, handing the mic from one person to the next to try and get the kids to talk about race. What does it mean to talk about race? How do we determine our race? Is it skin color? Ethnicity? Does our religion play into it? How about our family backgrounds? A student asks how people who are adopted think about race. An Asian girl who has been adopted by white parents talks about her frustration about her parents concerns about who she hangs out with.

Do people feel they are treated differently because of their race? One black girl talks about being followed around by a store clerk whenever she goes to certain stores. Another talks about being called names, including the N word.

Students from Hartford who attend schools in the neighboring suburbs talk about being called, ‘Hartford Kids’; a not so subtle racist put down. A deaf student signs to the interpreter who speaks those that don’t understand ASL about how her mother judges her for having friends of a different race and how she feels offended that she cannot invite her friends to her house. I feel like I am watching a re-enactment of a scene from “Patch of Blue”, forty-two years later and it makes me sad.

I think back to my high school years, those painful times of trying to define who I was in light of how other people were defining me. I listen to the students as they talk about their own efforts to figure out who they are and I am impressed. I wonder, what sort of difference will meetings like this make. With something like 176,000 public high school students in Connecticut, this forum is reaching perhaps one tenth of one percent of the high school students in Connecticut, and this is mostly just from around the Hartford area.

Yet my mind goes back to the great quote from Robert Kennedy,

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

So, what do we do to spread those tiny ripples of hope, coming from these spectacular students at the CT Youth Forum. I hope they go and tell their friends. I hope you read this post, and think about getting schools in your area involved. The CT Youth Forum website says, Live It. Learn It. Pass it On! I hope the students and all of us, find new ways to pass it on.

At the end of the forum, Pat tries to bring it all together. He asks if any of the students have had their impressions changed. One student volunteers, “I came here thinking you were all cool, and I'm glad to find out that I was right.” It is great to see students valuing talking honestly, openly and respectfully. We can all learn a lot from that.