As she watched her daughter Hannah learn Korean fan dancing during a recent event at Daniel Wright Junior High in Lincolnshire, Brooke Schwartz marveled at the unity on display between students and parents, who represented different backgrounds and countries.
“What a fantastic program this is,” said Schwartz, a Vernon Hills resident who said her family originally came from Israel.
Schwartz and her daughter were among the hundreds of Daniel Wright parents and students who attended the school’s first “Celebrate DW Night,” which Lincolnshire-Prairie View School District 103 officials introduced this year as a way to show off the increasingly diverse set of cultures at the school district.
The event filled the gym, lunch room, library and several classrooms with food, dancing, martial arts demonstrations, musical performances, poetry and more.
“The diversity of our student population is something that’s changed in the last five years or so,” said Heather Santella, an event organizer and special education instructor at Daniel Wright Junior High School. “We wanted to be conscious of all the cultures in our building.”
The new event at the school grew out of a springtime tradition, in which students presented a variety of school projects that they had been working on during the year, organizers said.
The new program still included students showing off projects, but organizers said they added new performances and informative presentations from parents and other adults, who demonstrated the traditions of their native countries.
Attendees, who at one time came from India, gave henna tattoos and showed Bollywood dance styles on the lunch-room stage, while students read poetry in the library and cooks from several continents offered food and dishes from their native countries in the gym.
In the lunch room, eighth grader Alex Lie, of Buffalo Grove, stood by a map of Earth, helping visitors place pins that marked the nations they identified with. About half of the pins were pointed toward Chicago, but others were scattered, marking places in Ireland, Poland, southern India, eastern Asia and other areas.
Lie put his own pin on Hong Kong.
“They’re from all over the world,” he said, looking at his classmates’ pins.
Tania Surane, vice president of the District 103 PTO, was busy working the PTO’s table at the time, but said she came from Panama. For college, she moved to the U.S. and experienced the culture of Louisiana, she said.
“The community has really come together to put on a show,” she said. “As you walked into the room, you could feel the buzz.”
Back in the gym, Schwartz and her daughter walked away from the fan-dancing demonstration, as instructors Inhee Jung and Josephine Lee welcomed other students to join.
Lee said she was thrilled to show aspects of her native South Korean culture.
“Sometimes, we don’t have enough understanding of each other,” she said. “This makes me feel proud of who I am.”
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