On Tuesday last week, Mr. Erik Gundersen, the Superintendent of Schools in the Pascack Valley Regional School district, Mr. Tom De Maio, the principal of Pascack Valley High School, and Mr. Joseph Orlak, the Supervisor of Instruction in the district, went to Bergen Community College in order to learn about its tolerance program at its Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation.

After The Smoke Signal published an open letter to the school written by Pascack Valley’s Human Rights League, the issue of tolerance at Pascack Valley was brought to the forefront of the minds of both students and the administration.

In response to this, Gundersen and the rest of the administration have been working furiously to promote tolerance within the school system. They are currently in contact with several organizations and will soon be reaching out to more.

“The primary purpose of these interactions,” Gundersen said, “is to get information about a variety of different resources and what we’re going to do is bring in a larger group of people, students included, to be a part of the conversation on what we need to do moving forward.”

The Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation consists of a group of professors at the college that focuses on resolving conflict by creating a better dialogue between groups.

“It’s probably not too different from a peer leadership program,” Gundersen said. “But most of it deals with areas of bias and intolerance, cultural or religious differences, things like that.”

Founded in 2009, it has had a large focus on the Armenian genocide and how a denial of human rights among other thing played a factor in other genocides. It also advocate integrating the information into classrooms.

“One of their big focuses this year was the Armenian genocide,” Gundersen said, “and taking the historical aspect of the Armenian genocide and bringing it to modern day life.”

It gave them an opportunity to discuss how to “take historical events and tie them to curricular events that help students form a more global, broader acceptance of others and their differences.”

Gundersen found that “the amount of experience and expertise they had” as well as their “willingness to play an active role in helping Pascack Valley” was the biggest takeaway from the meeting.

They plan to follow up with Bergen Community College on the resources that they are able to provide, including a program called “Teaching Tolerance,” a project founded in 1991 by the Southern Poverty Law Center that provides free material to teachers that will help educate about tolerance and improve intergroup relations.

“We have a two-pronged approach,” Gundersen said. “Number one, solicit information from various resources and number two, gauge the pulse, the cultural of Pascack Valley High School.”

“We’ll use that information,” he added, “along with the resources to help drive our program forward.”