By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Three years after racial tensions threatened to tear it apart, school officials and students say Lewiston High School is quiet.

“We’ve come a long way since then,” said Principal Patrick O’Neill.

In 2001 and 2002, as the city dealt with an influx of Somali immigrants, Lewiston High School found itself embroiled in a battle. Rumors spread about the new students and preferential treatment. Fights erupted when friction in the community caused friction in the school.

Hibat Sharif, now 16, was a freshman when tensions reached their peak. She still remembers the racial slurs that filled the hallways.

“Everything was hostile,” she said. “Nobody was mixing.”

For the past few years, Lewiston High School has tried to mend broken relationships between groups of students. The school has worked continuously with Stephen Wessler, director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence at the University of Southern Maine. It has also circulated fliers to combat rumors and has trained teachers to pick up on racial slurs and handle volatile situations.

“Snip things in the bud before you get into a pushing match,” O’Neill said.

Many people say the efforts have helped. Rumors have declined and there have been no racially motivated fights this year, according to O’Neill.

It used to be easy for students to get away with racial slurs because other students wouldn’t stand up to the abuse, said Sharif, now a junior.

Today, she said, “They’d be quick to stop it.”

While the tensions have greatly eased, Lewiston High School continues to work on diversity issues. The school climate is better, students said, but name-calling is sometimes still an issue and school spirit remains low.

To help, officials continually try to develop a sense of community, most recently with a weeklong series of events called Blue Devils’ Winterfest.

The school’s Civil Rights Team, which has been working almost constantly since 2001 to improve school climate, has relaxed its workload this year. But the group hopes to showcase various cultures with a special Diversity Day next year, the school’s second since 2001.

Ruth Becker, an English teacher and the team’s faculty adviser, said she would like to see the school offer Somali food at lunch or in other ways embrace students’ heritage every day.

“It would just be nice to build more on what we have,” she said.

But overall, she and others said, the high school is doing well and getting better.

Said 18-year-old senior Amanda Carr, “People have learned to get along.”