STUDENT LUNCH, WITH A TWIST.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Whereyougonnasit?

It's a common refrain in middle school cafeterias and, apparently, a new word - stretched this week across the tops of posters promoting national "Mix It Up at Lunch Day" in the hallways of Jefferson Middle School.

Peer pressure. Shyness. Habit. Not wanting to break out of your comfort zone.

Whatever the reason, middle school cafeterias are not unlike other places in our society where social boundaries exist, said Bahati Ansari, Jefferson's Racism-Free-Zone program coordinator, who helped organize Tuesday's lunchroom event.

The idea was to get students to do the unthinkable: sit next to someone else at lunch.

This wasn't about race - this was about breaking down social barriers and giving kids a chance to get to know others they wouldn't normally socialize with, Ansari said.

A committee of about 30 students from various "culture clubs" organized the event.

Student leaders passed out colored dots to classmates as they entered the cafeteria and they were told to sit at tables that had the same colored dot on them.

Sixth-grader Antoine Cater found himself at the "red" table. There, he sat munching on his pizza, next to another boy and five girls. Conversation was nonexistent.

Cater usually sits two tables away, where he is most likely going to sit today, he said.

Who's over there?

"Everybody I know," said Cater, who was wearing a Seattle Super- Sonics basketball jersey over another shirt.

Many students rejected the exercise, sitting wherever they normally did or trading their colored dots with other students.

Seventh-grader Rachael Duerscheidt, a member of the student committee that organized the event, couldn't blame them.

"Yeah, I don't want to eat with people I don't know," she said.

Duerscheidt and classmate SaVannah Johnson deemed the event a success, however.

"Some of the sixth-graders were surprised they were meeting seventh-graders," Johnson said as the first of two school lunch periods - which mixes the two grades - wound down. "They normally don't do that."

As to why it's so awkward for students from different grades to mix, Johnson speculated: "I think it's just because they're sixth-graders. Some of the sixth-graders think they're all that - which they're not."

The survey found that the biggest barrier to students mixing at the school wasn't race, although one-third of the school's 451 students are minorities, but social class, said language arts and social studies teacher Pete Mandrapa, one of the faculty organizers for the event.

Clothing styles, personal appearance and athletic achievement were also found to be culprits in creating social barriers, Mandrapa said.

"We'll evaluate it and see how it went and if we want to do it on a monthly basis or something," Mandrapa said of the exercise.

And it won't just be limited to those at the school who were born in the early 1990s.

"We're going to try and do this more often," Ansari said. "In fact, we're trying it with the staff today," she said of the faculty's weekly lunch meeting. "But they don't know it yet."

Jefferson student leaders decided to participate in the event - sponsored by www.tolerance.org, a Web site of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center - after Ansari discovered it on the Web site earlier this month.

More than 200,000 students at schools across the country participated last year and twice that many, at about 6,000 schools from kindergarten through high school, were scheduled to join in this year, according to the Web site.

CAPTION(S):

Principal Abrella Luvert and custodian Jim Tucker try to organize a full cafeteria at Jefferson Middle School on Tuesday as part of national "Mix It Up at Lunch Day." Students are asked to sit at lunch with kids they don't know. The idea is to promote tolerance and push social boundaries.