A small fish in a big sea is the reality for many Berkeley High School students surviving the 3200-per- son student body. Finding friends and community is no easy feat and many turn to their small school core classes to connect with their peers. Within classes, groups may form from pre- existing friendships but truly unifying all the students in a small school can be tough. Pushing for more small school and class-wide bonding events is crucial as it will help students engage more in their classes and truly enjoy going to school.
Bill Pratt, a current Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) history teacher, believes in the importance of community. As one of the founders of the small learning community (SLC) of CAS in 1997, Pratt knows how crucial unity can be. “We (group of teachers) saw BHS as a school that had a lot of great things going on
but some trade-offs of being large and a kind of pervasive sense of anonymity and alienation among some students,” Pratt said, explaining why CAS was created.
CAS has taken students to Cuba for two weeks, Viet- nam, Tanzania, and sum- mer trips to Mexico. On these trips students are put in a “challenge zone,” encouraged to share parts of their identity or experiences that are important to them that during school can be glossed over. The positive benefits of these retreats are clear to Pratt. “When connections get forged or deepened at the retreats, you see a whole different dynamic when you come back to the classroom. The willingness of students to engage with each other and the kind of trust that they have in each other changes.”
Leo Harris, a senior in CAS, testifies to the effects of the retreats. “The retreats have been an amazing experience that I’m glad I’ve gotten to partake in for the past couple of years," he said. While this is an ideal
model for smaller groups of kids, it takes a lot of energy for teachers with hundreds of students to organize.
Melissa Jimenez, a Berkeley International High School (BIHS) teacher and teacher coordinator, has organized a field trip for BIHS sophomores to go to the Oakland Museum of the Arts.
Jimenez also looks to incorporate community building time into her class- es and assignments. “You can't function at 100 percent all the time. We all need to sometimes just relax and have fun. It keeps every- body more fresh and ready
to learn when you get that mental break,” she said.
Successfully fostering community is also a problem around the world. Ac- cording to a study published in the Journal of Counsel- ing and Development, only about 50 percent of youth in schools feel connected or engaged in school.
“I think because of the retreats we are all able to learn more because we feel free to be ourselves,” Harris said. Teachers and administration must try their best to increase the level of engagement at BHS by organizing more events to cultivate community.