This year, the George A. Jackson Elementary School PTA has established a Multicultural Committee. The mission of this newly formed group is to reach out to all families from the community and make them feel more comfortable about getting involved in school activities. The committee was established under the leadership of PTA co-presidents Ruth Damon and Randi Dukoff. "We realized that although our community was becoming more diverse, it wasn't reflected at our PTA meetings and school events," said Damon and Dukoff. "We established this committee to look at ways to make everyone more at ease in our community, and encourage all families to become more interested in our schools."

The committee meets regularly and has developed a very ambitious agenda. First, the group identified some of the difficulties that keep people from getting involved. This included language obstacles, cultural differences, and a lack of transportation. Follow-up discussions explored the many ways the committee might help others to overcome these barriers.

Multicultural Committee members, Ellen Jung, Nazima Khan, Treasa Kozhipatt, Hye Jung (Grace) Han, Kathy Kilpatrick, Sunny Sun, Sehrie Shin (Lee), Surya Basavaraju, Elena Popescu, Lillian Callisto, Jackie Chavez and Jenny Park, will work with translators throughout the year to provide PTA communications in languages including Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Russian. The committee is in the process of sending out a letter of introduction to all families which includes contact names and phone numbers.

In order to make the PTA meetings less intimidating, the committee would like to institute a buddy system. The Multicultural Committee is planning a special presentation at the January 5th evening PTA meeting. The group will contact families from all cultural groups to extend a personal invitation.

The committee is interested in reflecting different cultures at all regular PTA events. The group will set up a table at the Halloween Party on Oct 28th. Children will have an opportunity to create an origami Halloween cat and a multicultural Halloween mask. A display of masks from around the world will give kids some ideas to assist them in making masks of their own.

The Multicultural Committee is exploring the possibility of hosting a multicultural event that would take place during the school day and/or in the evening as part of multicultural week from March 13 - 17. The group will attend the Middle/High School Diversity Day activities in December and hope to invite students from the secondary school to perform at the elementary school. "The PTA is extremely excited to see this committee come together so quickly. Their ideas are creative, fun and informational," said Randi Dukoff. "I believe we will all benefit from a Multicultural Committee at Jackson." Ellen Jung has been appointed as the Multicultural Liaison on the Jackson PTA executive board. For further information about the program, she can be contacted at 433-6979 or elljung@optonline.net.