Today, I sat down with Anne Thompson, faculty adviser of the Civil Rights Team at Oak Hill High School, to talk a little bit about the shirts that were made for the team. Recently, Torch, the newsletter of the Maine’s Civil Rights Team Project, featured the new shirts designed by the Oak Hill Team. They used Wordle at http://www.wordle.net/. (Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can change your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.)

The Civil Rights Team Project is a school-based preventative program to combat hate violence, prejudice, harassment and bias in the schools. The CRTP builds a collaborative of students, faculty and community advisors who work together to create a safer environment for all students and to lower incidences of hate language in the school community. Students learn intervention strategies and peer education strategies to reduce intolerance and build an understanding of Maine Civil Rights Acts in the entire school community. They also attempt to create a structure within schools whereby teachers and students work together in a coordinated effort with state and local law enforcement to change the climate of intolerance and violence within schools. Equally important, the CRTP seeks to create alternative mechanisms through which students could alert someone of harassment before the harassment escalates to serious violence.

For the creation of their shirts, the team put together their choice words, and then kept changing the format until they found several they liked. From there they selected the words they wanted for sure and decided how many times to type in each word in order to get the size they wanted for each word. Next they took the black and white final printout to Action Screen Printing in Lewiston. They made up the shirts for them and included our school logo and Civil Rights Team on the front while the wordle took up the back of each shirt.

I went to the site to create my own jumble of words. And, to say the least, it was fun! You could use this design technique to accentuate any item of clothing, book bags, cover pages, numerous random projects, scrap booking, and many more uses. It is easy and fun to use and you can make it your own.

The team was very proud to wear their shirts to the state-wide student training held in Augusta on Tuesday, December 9. Anne Thompson and assistant Brenda Mansir took 12 students to the workshop. The students try to wear their t-shirts on Fridays during school, since that is the day for the Civil Rights Team meetings. Since then, team members have created bulletin boards posting multicultural holidays, posted information about Martin Luther King, Jr., and arranged for video streaming of the inauguration on January 20.