Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us on our parent university webinar for the power of belonging the importance of affinity groups. We'll be starting in just a few moments. We're going to let everyone come in from the waiting room and we'll get started in just a few.
Good afternoon and welcome to our parent university. We're just welcoming everyone in from the waiting room. Um, but since we have such a short time with all of our students who are joining us in the middle of the day, we're going to get started. U my name is Jessica Smidley. I'm the director of counseling in West Windsor Plainsboro Regional
School District. Joined here today with our affinity group me uh leaders in our high in both of our high schools and uh Miss Pemma Nodong um who is our DEI coordinator for the district and in charge of today's event. So, just a couple quick housekeeping things before
I pass it off. Um, and that is that we are recording this webinar. So, it'll be available to watch if you're not able to join us for the whole thing. We'll have it uh posted on our YouTube channel by the end of the week. Um, and uh the transcript will also be available. So,
if you are looking for that, you can go right to our YouTube channel. Also, we have the chat function turned off on this webinar. So, it's just an opportunity for you to hear from the students. So, we will not be taking any questions and answers. This is really just a presentation opportunity for them. If you do have any follow-up
questions or concerns or suggestions for additional parent university topics, uh there will be a form when you close your Zoom window that you'll be able to fill out with that information. Okay. So, Miss Dong, you can take it away. Thank you. So, good morning everyone. I am
Pamema Nodong, the diversity, equity, and inclusivity coordinator for West Windsor Plainsboro School District, and I'm super excited to welcome you to our panel discussion regarding the power of our student affinity groups. As a district, we're committed to cultivating a diverse and inclusive community where
members of every race, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, ability, religion, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and national origin are welcomed, valued, respected, and celebrated. Our student affinity groups are a big part of how we make this goal
real. Listed here are the affinity clubs from across our two high schools, as referenced by Sutterero, our chief equity officer. in the March 18th board meeting where our board of ed released a statement affirming our shared and continuing commitment to diversity,
equity, and inclusion. We're excited to hear directly from our student leaders today about what these spaces mean to them and why affinity groups matter in our schools. We hope that their stories inspire all of us to think about ways we can build a more inclusive community
together. So, let's get started with our introductions. Um, Aiden, can you start us off please? >> I'm Edwards and I'm the president of the Black Student Union at High School South. >> Hi,
Mishka Mata. And >> I'm Raapati. >> Um, and we are the co-presidents of the disabled student union at High School North. >> Uh, we have we had invited a member from our GSA to participate. We think she might be having some technical
difficulties. We hope she'll join us later. >> Hey everyone, I'm Vidant. My name is Surya. >> And we're from Hindu Stud the Hindu Student Union, uh, HSU for short, and we're at High School South. >> Uh, my name is Dylan. I'm the president of Jewish Community Youth Club.
>> And I'm Ella and I'm the vice president of the Jewish Community Youth Club at North. >> Hello everyone. My name is Mortisa and I'm the president of MSA. >> I'm Ayan Zahed and I'm also the president of MSA, the Muslim Student Association at High School North.
>> So, um I am going to just moderate and be offering some questions and we'll hear what our students have to say. So, my first question for you is how has being part of your affinity group or club shared your own sense shaped
your own sense of belonging or leadership? Uh that's a great question. I think we could take this one. Um speaking personally from like speaking from my experience, I just think having a club, having a a meeting group uh of people
who are like-minded, who have the same ideas, same beliefs as you. I think it just helps you find helps you feel like you belong, right? I think at high school, we go to schools that are so massive. We have almost probably thousands of thousands of students. And honestly, sometimes with that amount of people, it's difficult to really find
people you belong with. So I think having these clubs, having these affinity groups creates a sense, creates a community where you can attend, you can be yourself, you can find people who also believe the same things as you. And speaking on like the leadership part of it, I think on my personal like
experiences um being like co-president and co-founder of the club, I think it just taught me so much about learning how to speak in front of a group, learning how to take accountability for more than yourself and just and just knowing that it's more than just you. because at a certain point you also have to take responsibility for your club,
right? And I think that's taught me a lot. >> Um, for me personally, I'd say that while like growing up um, in America especially, it's really easy to lose track of your culture and lose touch with your culture and the traditions you come from. And I think founding the Hindus student union um has actually
brought me closer to my culture and traditions just because it provides me with a space where I can like obviously lead others but at the end of the day we're still um like meeting with the goal to celebrate our the culture and traditions and talk about that. So, I think it's kind of brought me closer to
my culture in that way. >> And then bouncing off what Vant and Syria said, like the clubs, they're not just clubs, even though they're technically called clubs. It's a space where you can build a community. And as like the president of the Black Student Union, I've always tried to be involved with the club just because I want to be
in a space where I feel comfortable and make other people feel comfortable in a space where they feel like they don't have to code switch in front of certain groups of people or certain people. So that's kind of my main goal. And with the leadership part, you know, I've done panels for the Black Student Union, for teachers, and for kids in younger school
that are local middle school, Grover Middle School, so that when they come into high school, they know they have a place or they have a community where they can be theirelves or they don't have to switch what they say and stuff. So, um, with the idea of belonging, I believe that with the goals of our
individual clubs as well, um, the goals that we put out into our district and the work that we do creates a larger sense of belonging as we're trying to um, collectively work together to make
make the environment and make the um district a better place and um a more accessible place for people with um disabilities and um people and just people in general. >> Yeah. And additionally, just being able
to connect with the type of people that are the same that share the same values as you, same ideas as you and who generally have the similar schedule to you, right? This idea is just it allows you to make so many more friendships and so many more bonds that actually help
you in high school because not only will you connect with these people in high school and perhaps you'll continue this relation beyond high school. Through those people, you also meet many new individuals and sometimes even teachers. And overall, it's just a a web of infinite connections that you're just tying to yourself. And that's what
diversity is. It allows all of us to be empowered towards a brighter and a more stronger future. And I think these clubs perfectly play that role to allow us to go into this development. >> Yeah. And to add on, it's not only about belonging as well. Being in this club for four years from freshman year, I definitely learned how to become more of
a leader. And I definitely learned how to connect with other people and just bring a whole sense of environment and community to the whole school, not even just a club, with our vast different events as well. So, I think being in a club or affinity club helps a lot with
your leadership skills and your sense of belonging as well. >> Yeah. to kind to kind of add on from like a leadership aspect at least for me like leading the de-stress fest day sessions like has really helped me with
my speaking and presentational skills and it's like sort of enabled me to become comfortable speaking about different topics in front of other people and extending my culture to others. >> Yeah. And also on top of that, leading meetings and like having meetings with other people has helped me a lot like find my voice and like talk to people
who like are part of my culture and just like create changes in other like important areas around the school. >> So I have a question for you based off of that. Do you have to be of the same culture or religion um to be part of your groups? Can anyone speak to that?
>> Yeah, I think we can definitely speak to that. I mean, we've gotten a lot of questions from different students saying like asking if they can join our club if they aren't Jewish. And our club is open to anyone and I can't really I mean I can speak for every other club when I
say that theinity groups are open for anyone to join and we want we encourage other people to join to learn. >> Yeah. Uh, I definitely agree um with Ella and just bouncing off of that. Um, I think a lot of people think that because um like the Jewish culture club
um like we are a religious club or like have a religion in our name. So, a lot of people think that that kind of like forbids people not from that religion joining, but that's completely wrong. And anyone is really welcome to join. And it's more about just celebrating um what makes it's like celebrating a per
like someone's culture and the traditions that come with that religion, not so much like teaching it itself, >> if that makes sense. >> And just like bouncing off those two answers, one thing I wanted to add is like the reason we started these or personally the reason we started this affinity club at HSU was we wanted to
educate students who didn't know about the religion, right? Didn't know about the culture. So I think I can't speak for other clubs but when we started this club we knew that we wanted students who weren't Hindus, students who didn't know anything about Hinduism to come to our club to be able to experience our stories, to be able to learn about our
culture, to be able to eat our foods. So I think that's like a great thing that we've been able to do and I hope to continue. >> A lot of people um ask me whether um you need to be disabled in order to join our group, which um is no. Um you don't have
to be disabled. Um you can uh we we allow anyone to um join our groups same as everyone else. Um, personally, I believe these affinity groups um that we've created as like a whole is meant
to not just um specifically like target what um the goals that we have um aspired to, but rather we're targeting um like a sense of humanity and um community that um we want to establish
at um within WWP. I would like to add on to that. I think our main goal, I think I can speak for all of the affinity groups, is not only for specific ethnic groups or racial groups or people are disabled to fit in and
feel included, but also for other students to like explore um new cultures, new religions, new um uh clubs, which which is I think the main reason why we have affinity groups as
the whole point. I think this is a perfect transition to our next question. Um, can you share a specific project, event or initiative that your group has led that helped build inclusion or educate others about diversity in our school and district
community? >> Um, we can go first if that's fine. Um, so I think one of like the biggest highlights from our time in HSU has been the parent or I'm sorry, the um student teaching teachers event. Um, and so for those who aren't
familiar, it's what we did is we had a panel of students come on and we asked them questions to kind of like share their experiences with Hinduism and specifically in the like the school curriculum and what others thought of it. And our audience was actually teachers and faculty from High School
South, which was really interesting. And it was a really rewarding experience just because we got to like shed light on some inaccuracies, um kind of um address some misconceptions. And it was really rewarding for teachers to come up to us afterwards and then um ask us questions
like, "Oh, how can I better support my students? How can I kind of make this seem more accurate? How do you think I could do that?" And it's just them coming to us after kind of showed us that we really made a real impact on them >> and we had some play or some role in
changing that. >> And like one anecdote from that that like I think really stuck with our club is the day after like the music teacher, one of the music teachers at school emailed us and reached out to us and he said he was he never knew that the he like he was always interested in like he
always knew about Dvali and stuff but he never really knew what it signified and stuff. So he said that if there was any certain type of music or something that he could that could be played on Dvali or like outside the school that would be something that he would be interested to. It's just that he never knew of that before. So I just seeing visually seeing
the impact we had just really showed us that you know we could act we can actually have an impact and just motivates us a lot. >> Yeah. to add on. Um just two weeks ago we had our uh HSN affinity event where we actually hosted this with JCYC and in
addition to the great turnout that we had. We had lots of diversity, lots of different types of food and anyone from any different affinity group, different clubs, different religions was able to come and participate in the event. And then in addition to the food, we also
had like a little bit of like fun competition where we mixed people into different groups to create like a sense of belonging and then we allowed them to play volleyball and there was like a tournament style as well. So in addition to belonging, we also have a sense of um
creating new types of friends with different people that you never really would have known if you didn't come to the event. >> Yeah. So our attendance in this event was actually over 100 people and the thing that I saw was amazing was that they were we had like less than 100 RSVPs but we ended up getting over 100
people. So what that did was that as people saw that oh this is a big group of people and they have they're doing all these cool activities they joined in and I got personally like so many people asked me that day they were like oh um do you need to like sign up to do this or do you need to be in like a certain club to do this? And I was like no this
is for everyone so you guys can recognize that there this happens in HSN where we actually celebrate and join in to unite and celebrate our diversity. So the message was spread in that way and essentially this event allowed us to to spread the message of the presence of
these clubs in our school and also show that what we can do and how great of a magnitude we can come in with. I have to say I just want to say kudos to the JCYC and the MSA for coming together to collaborate to organize that. Last year was their first um time
doing that event and then they're grow they grew it this year to the second um second annual hopefully um potluck and diversity affinity alliance event. So great job with that. I think Aiden you wanted to say something. >> Yes. So bouncing off of what both the clubs have already said. So at High
School South, again, Black History Month being the Black Student Union, we kind of create and get to, you know, we have to develop everything by emailing the library to getting people involved with our culture by doing different announcements. But one of our biggest events is Black History Month family and night, which we started three years ago,
where we invite kids from K to five down from the different district schools to High School South, where we put on different events, show different dances from our culture, different step shows from different groups. Last year we brought we paid for the buses of different schools to come down and just
show that cultural diversity. We also had different panels and slideshows to educate with different stations around the school. We had a hair braiding station. We had a station where kids could color in mask and educate their and we educated them about a different African culture. So that's why related
to the different affinity groups, I think the goals of these events is to go beyond the club standard and go beyond what go beyond the community standard and teach the allies how the community is strengthened in numbers and what it really means to join the club. So like
three years ago, we only had 20 people there. It was a basketball game. We didn't have a lot of people show up, but last year we had over we had 50 to 100 kids show up. A lot of parents enjoyed it. I had a lot of parents personally email me and people in the club saying they enjoyed it, their kids enjoyed it.
So, it was a good it was a good time. But I think that's the goal that's the goal of these different events from the affinity groups to not to make an isolated community within the school, but to show that these communities can all work in unison if you get to learn a little bit of culture from every community in our school district knowing
it's diverse. And that was a great collaboration between the two high schools, BSUs and adviserss >> there. Um we al similar to what HSU um has done um
with the um faculty panel. We also um go to different schools within WWP such as like Maurice Hawk for instance or uh >> Dutch Neck. >> Dutch Neck. Yeah, we also went to Dutch Neck. We go to different schools in um
WWP and we present to the teachers on how to make um their teaching and um their um their activities more accessible to the um >> students >> students with disa um with disabilities.
So um we were able to they were able to gain like a lot of insights from our present presentations and um I hear um like specifically with like Maurice Hawk, there was one teacher who really
um appreciated the um effort that we put in to create that presentation and um hopefully u make the schools um more accessess ible and more friendly to those with dis with disabilities as she
mentions within her time. Uh she didn't really see much of the effort being made. So um that really in that instance really inspired us I believe um because we believe that we were really doing an impact within um the different schools.
We also presented at Milstone River. Um we our topic was microaggressions and a lot of the teachers like came up to us and were telling us that this was like beneficial which um we we personally like felt really like like accomplished because we actually like made an impact
like the other groups have already met said. So I and we still want to continue to do that. I I have to say I was um in the audience for the presentation that um your club did at Dutch Neck Elementary and it was
a full circle moment that your your club founder Maddie um started her education as a kindergartener at Dutch Neck and then founded this club as a high schooler at North and now she's graduated and gone on. But um there were teachers who had her as a little
kindergartener and to see how she had grown into this independent amazing um student who who founded this club that now you are you know keeping on right like keeping the goal moving on even as she's graduated and gone on was a really it was just an amazing thing to be a
part of that audience and see how how impacted and moved um the staff members were and they they came away from that meeting feeling like they had learned a lot. Um so again great you know great work that your all of your clubs are doing. Um did anyone else want to add
before we go on to our final question? No. Okay. So um our final question is what is one moment when you felt your group's efforts really made a difference in helping others feel respected, seen or included? I feel like you've you've
kind of spoken a little bit to that already, but maybe you can think of something another example or anecdote. >> Um, so for the Muslim Student Association, MSA, we annually do a field trip to the elementary school, the most
stone um right down the street for us at High School North. So we basically present about um Arabic history and the Arabic writing um so like calligraphy um Arabic writing preservations basically. So we present on this every every year
and we give the students an opportunity to interact with it. Arabic is a really beautiful language. They get to see the our the colors and then they get to like experience it, draw out themselves, color in themselves. This is something elementary schoolers really love. So last year was our second year doing it. The year before was our first. Um so
when we went last year when we went in the teachers actually remembered us and they were like the kids were really excited for this because they all really remembered you guys and they really enjoyed this event. And I was surprised. I was like wow we didn't know we made such a big difference and this event they had remembered it they were patiently waiting for it and it was just
very amazing to see the type of the footprint we could leave with such type of events and then this obviously uh it promotes that in the future those students will now grow up and they will try to get into these activities where they can do the same for the younger elementary schoolers of their time and overall we we're bringing this chain of
diversity and helping each other out standing up for each other we're promoting all this and I when I saw it with with uh when they remembered us, when I saw this, it was definitely like proof that it's working and we're definitely on the right track.
>> Um I think building off of the um read um what they what MSA just said, I think another one of our really valuable experiences has been readalouds with AAPI month, I'm Asian-American, Asian-American Pacific Islander every May, which we've done for the past 2
years. And so we've been to two schools. We've been to Mory Hawk and Town Center. And both times we were allowed to read two books. Um one provided to us by the school and then a second one was a book of our choosing. So both times we chose um a children's book about Diwali. And
it was really um interesting to see how like we could spread that same message to kids too and just change like the medium of how that information was con conveyed. And it was really interesting. Like Miss Nadong just said, it was kind of like a full circle moment for us, especially for for Town Center cuz
that's where me and Vidant went. So I think overall it was a really cool experience um to kind of spread the message spread our message at the elementary school level too in addition to high school. >> Yeah. So that's a nice story. And during our school's destress fest, so like
keeping it within the school for us at least, like our club, the we have a Jewish community youth club session where anyone can come in and learn about the Jewish culture and holidays. And we really like it because we get a lot of genuine interests and questions regarding our culture. And even outside
of the event, we have people asking what like what they can do, any volunteer efforts in our community. And it just really brings people together. >> Yeah. Most of the time we have like a completely full session and um whether you're Jewish or not, most people just like come in, they just learn about the
culture and it's a really safe space for people to just come in, express themselves and connect. Uh we have like a lot of food there. So most people come in, we just like sit down, just talk about culture uh over food. So >> yeah. >> Yeah. And we get a lot of different perspectives. Like even people who
aren't Jewish, we get a lot of different cultures and people share their own stories and their own experiences. And it's like just a really nice forum for us to kind of have a safe conversation >> and bouncing off the different events that the differentity group said. So the
Black Student Union every spring and fall hosted different trips for students who don't have the access to go to different colleges. So we host our annual H.B.CU CU tour where we take him to schools like Howard, Borg State, you know, visited schools like Delaware State, Lincoln University just to give
different African-American school, African-American students and allies in the school to get the experience to experience what a day in the life of is like at these different colleges. You know, we started this we started this H.B.CU tour trips three years ago and the questions always shaped from what is
the H.B.CU? how do I visit them to okay what major should I go into how much of the colleges so the questions that shake just based off what the club has done and we've just seen the shift of people saying oh I want to go to this school and that school and these school and people are coming to our clubs wanting to learn more about the different HBUs
and what that kind of means for the club and our culture >> yeah another thing that we like we thought that one of our biggest things that we think our most successful was the uh parent link event which Mr. Dong invited to us. It first invited to us, invited us to almost 2 years ago.
And basically, we got to give um information to new parents and new students of WAP about this WP more than just our affinity club. Just teaching students about what it meant to be in WP, how WP work, just helping them feel welcome into their new school. Cuz I
feel like from the outside, when you hear about WP, it can be a little bit, you know, a little bit scary, right? There's all this talk about WP. So I think just bring helping them get adjusted, helping them, you know, see the faces and then also being able to talk about our club, talking about not just our club, but what it like
everything that was offered at our schools. I think that was something that was really rewarding and I think it was also helpful for the community. >> I also see this um same effect within um this um effect of belonging within our
um meetings that we have every Wednesday. Uh within these meetings, we were we were able to have really productive conversations about disabilities and dis disability rights, um microaggressions and all um kinds of
topics. And we um have really productive discussions and debates and about um these topics. and everyone really brings in a wide perspective of um of what they believe and they feel
really um empowered and motivated to bring these perspectives to light within our club. So I believe that um we're making an effect like even within like smaller groups um that we're encouraging
the talking and the um discussion of um certain topics. >> Okay. So it looks like our time is drawing to an end and I just want to say I'm so grateful to each of you for being here for representing all of our affinity clubs across the schools. Thank
you so much for sharing your voice and harnessing your your leadership skills to create safe spaces safe spaces for your peers and to educate your classmates, your teachers, um the greater WWP community about really the
diversity of of our human experience. So, um, and to our audience, I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen to these amazing young leaders and, um, thank you for supporting, um, our affinity clubs.