When Mrs. Malick’s fifth-grade class at Oakland Hebrew Day School headed to camp in Napa last month, the boys took up residence in Empathy Town while the girls bunked nearby in Assertive Town.
No, this is not a metaphor. Rather, it is how things go at the Mosaic Project’s Outdoor School, a social justice-oriented educational camp where the students spent their annual end-of-year field trip.
The Mosaic Project brings students of diverse backgrounds from the Bay Area together to build an understanding of peace through social and emotional learning.
For four nights and five days, the 15 students from OHDS joined fourth and fifth graders from Berkeley’s Rosa Parks Elementary School and two other Oakland schools — International Community School and Piedmont Avenue Elementary — at the Mosaic campsite. Together, more than 80 students from all racial, religious, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds worked, ate, swam and learned together.
Each day began early, with a long list of activities that emphasized social and emotional learning skills, particularly involving conflict resolution, empathy, assertion and difference.
Students from all four schools were shuffled into camp cabins, about eight students per cabin, where they got to spend after-hours time talking across cultural divides.
For many of the students from OHDS, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school, it was the first time they’d had sustained interactions with children of other religions and races.
“The girl who slept in the bunk below me was a different race from me,” said 10-year old Bekah Bravmann, one of Rebecca Malick’s students. “And it made me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever really known anyone that didn’t look like me.”
It was also the first time many of the students from other schools had spent time with Jewish kids.
“A lot of people would ask me why we had to eat separate food or why we were wearing things on our heads,” said Avraham Cumming, 10, also a student at OHDS. “But it was always done really respectfully. And because everyone there was different in some way, I didn’t feel self conscious about the things that make me different.”
A lot of planning had to go into making sure that, as a school that adheres to strict kashrut rules, observes modesty and prays together every morning, OHDS would be able to send students to Mosaic without compromising their rituals.
Because it was important for the OHDS kids to eat meals in the same dining room as the rest of the Mosaic campers, OHDS got a copy of the Mosaic menu in advance and faculty members worked to replicate it for their students.
“We worked to match our kosher options almost exactly to what they were serving, in order to make the difference as innocuous as possible,” said Malick, an English/algebra teacher who accompanied the students to the camp.
For example, if the rest of the Mosaic campers were eating hamburgers for dinner, the OHDS students had veggie burgers.
“They were incredibly accommodating, and gave us a section in the kitchen to prepare all of our food,” Malick said. “We were there making sandwiches and cooking dinner alongside the professional chefs. By the end, some of the other faculty even came over to help us.”
OHDS utilized morning break periods for prayer and mandated that students could swim in the pool only if covered by a T-shirt and shorts.
“I was nervous, going into it, that they wouldn’t feel comfortable having to wear clothes over their bathing suits,” Malick said. “But then we got there, and it was no big deal at all. Lots of kids were wearing T-shirts over their bathing suits.”
The camp normally would have cost OHDS about $8,000, said Tania Schweig, the school’s general studies director, but the kosher food cost about $500 and “we had to pay an additional $500 to send a second faculty member to oversee kashrut and to make sure that the Judaic studies aspects of our program were in place.”
The school, faced with a $9,000 bill, went to families and recruited their assistance in fundraising. Over the course of a few months, the fifth-grade class had bake sales, cooked a school-wide pasta lunch and was sponsored for a variety of volunteer work. The students raised $2,000, which was matched by an anonymous donor who has a philanthropic fund with the Jewish Community Foundation of the East Bay.
“We wanted the kids to not only help raise money, but also increase their personal investment in the trip by playing a key role in making the trip possible,” Schweig said. “We really didn’t want the kids to take this experience for granted or to just be in the ‘receiver’ role.”
At one camp activity, students played a game called “Stand With Me” in which all the kids lined up in a row and a Mosaic counselor stood at the other side of the room, calling out statements. Kids were told to move toward the counselor if they identified with the statement.
One OHDS student, Rebecca Miranda, 10, said she was particularly affected by the game.
“The counselor called things out like, ‘If you’ve ever been bullied or teased for being a different race or wearing glasses, or if you’ve ever lived in a violent neighborhood come stand by me,’ and it was the first time I realized how those experiences have affected me,” she said. “And also, how many other people have been hurt by those things, too.”