Museum of Tolerance training teaches Santa Rosa City Schools staff to check bias at the door

On the wall of Wendy Anderson’s art classroom at Slater Middle School, there’s a picture of a dark-haired little girl. The photograph is old, black-and-white. It has the girl’s name printed across the top, with her birthdate and hometown along the bottom. It’s been there, next to the light switch, for almost a year.

The little girl’s name is Helen Katz. She was born in Kisvarda, Hungary on Jan. 2, 1931. And she was killed during the Holocaust.

The picture was brought back by Anderson from a trip to the Museum of Tolerance in spring 2016, a trip made possible by a grant Santa Rosa City Schools got from the museum that has so far paid for more than 400 district teachers and administrators to attend the two-day training in Los Angeles, with another 100 scheduled to go this spring. The program, called “Tools for Tolerance for Educators,” gives participants inclusion and anti-bias training through the lens of the Holocaust and other human rights abuses around the world.

The picture of Katz was given to Anderson when she first got to the museum. She didn’t find out until the end of her visit that Katz didn’t survive.

“Once you look in the face of a child who was lost and was murdered, you look at a kid and think, ‘How can I make that not happen to you,’” Anderson said.

The experience had a profound effect on Anderson, who is Jewish.

“I had kind of stepped out of the Holocaust experiences after hearing about it so much as a young girl,” she said. “Growing up, (the Holocaust) became so hard to hear about over and over again, that I stopped putting myself in that position.”

Now, and especially as a teacher, Anderson recognizes how important it is to talk about it.

“We’re here to be compassionate leaders and love these children and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” she said. “And it won’t happen again if we educate kids about how things can snowball out of control.”

It also affected her on a personal level. Always a person to speak out in instances of bias and injustice, she’s even more inclined to do so now. It’s a conversation she’s brought into the classroom.

“We’ve done a lot of self-expression, about this is who I am, this is where I’m from, this is what I care about, where people are able to tell the origin of their story in a really positive, sometimes painful way,” she said.

In one instance, she asked her students to mix a paint color to match their own skin tone - a task she’d long done herself - creating various shades of brown, beige and tan and comparing it to the color their neighbors created, noting what colors went into making it.

“That’s the thing about taking the trip to the museum,” said Elizabeth Evans, a SRCS curriculum coordinator. “It kind of breaks you open.”

But that’s not the extent of bias-training efforts implemented in the district’s Equity and Social Justice Initiative, which in December was honored by the California School Board Association.

Since October 2015, 245 district staffers have attended “unconscious bias” training done locally through the California Teachers Association, and another 65 staffers who weren’t able to make the two-day session in Los Angeles went through a similar local program put on by staffers who made the trip themselves.

“There are ways that our brains react, even when we’re little babies, that are biased,” Evans said.

“So if we’re going to not be biased, we have to make a very conscious effort ... to catch that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.