 Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Lucy Kurtzer Ellen Bogan and the director of our Israeli, Palestinian and broader Arab-Israeli conflict programming here at USIP. Welcome. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces, equally wonderful of course to see some not so familiar faces. We hope you become familiar faces. And I know that we are all very appreciative and looking forward to the opportunity to engage today with members of the hand-in-hand school community from Israel. I'm going to introduce a panel to you just shortly and I want them to do the work of introducing the hand-in-hand school to you talking about what it's about, what it is, what they do. But by way of brief introduction to sort of situate our conversation today, I believe everybody in this room is probably aware that just a couple of weeks ago now, three weeks ago almost on November 29th, the Max Rain campus in Jerusalem, which is the flagship campus of the hand-in-hand school networks and actually the photographs you're seeing on this slideshow that's running are from that campus. My colleague Britt Manzo and I were there just a couple of weeks ago, a few days after this happened that this being a particularly ugly attack on the campus of the school. Thankfully nobody was hurt in this attack. Two first grade classrooms were set on fire. There was racist and anti-assimilation graffiti plastered on the walls. But I think what makes this, the attack particularly ugly is that this attack very explicitly targeted the very core, the very heart of what the hand-in-hand schools are about. Namely, an in-brief and again you'll hear much more about this in our conversation. The idea in reality of a society shared by Jews and Arabs in Israel. Now again, not to in any way minimize the attack, but what one could say is that perhaps a somewhat positive byproduct of what happened in the wake of this attack was the remarkable outpouring of support that you saw from outside the school community, from Jewish and Arab communities around the school, from in fact all across the country, from politicians who also had a lot of media attention international and otherwise, and also as you'll hear, the way the community itself came together in the wake of this attack. And I think all of that underscores what a unique, and I don't use that term lightly or choose to use that term lightly, we're going to have Ned comment on this from his perspective later, but the unique role that the hand-in-hand school networks plays in Israel, but in the peace-building community more broadly. And so to talk more about that today, I'm thrilled to introduce and have here with us Rebecca Bardak, who is the director of resource development and strategy at the hand-in-hand schools, and can also speak from the perspective of a parent of two students, a first grader and a second grader, both at the Max Reign campus in Jerusalem. We also have with us Moran Ibrahim and Imbar Vadi, Imbar Shakad Vadi, who are both ninth graders at the Max Reign campus in Jerusalem. And last but certainly not least, a long-time friend and associate of USIP, Dr. Ned Lazarus. Ned is currently an assistant visiting professor at George Washington University, a former peace scholar here at USIP when he was working on his dissertation. And I think it's fair to say that there are few people out there who have the breadth and depth of expertise that Ned has on the field of Israeli and Palestinian peace-building. He's done a lot of work, including some work that we're fortunate enough to do with him here at USIP on impact evaluation of peace-building initiatives in the Israeli and Palestinian context. And we're going to be asking him to draw on that and to comment from that perspective, situating hand-in-hand in that broader context. So welcome, everybody. And without further ado, Rebecca, could you start off, actually, and do the situating for us? What is hand-in-hand? It's mission, what it looks like, what you do. Okay, thank you very much. So first, it's important to understand the broader context in which hand-to-hand is situated in terms of the educational system in Israel. There's basically a tracked system by language and by communal preferences. There's a Hebrew language, an Arabic language school track. Within the Hebrew language track, there's a religious and secular track. As a parent, you have to choose which of these school choices do I want my child to go to. There's no school track which basically brings Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, together in one school framework in which they can go up together, understand each other, understand each other's histories and cultures and differences, nor to understand what their commonalities might be, and therefore no opportunity to create common ground. That's one thing when you're students, but it's much more significant when you think about the fact that these students become our citizens. In 1997, it's a few histories, religions, cultures, and we want to create something that's shared. With that started 25 kids in a first grade class in Jerusalem and 25 kids in the Galilee, Jewish and Arab. Now, 2014, we now have five schools throughout the country. Jerusalem is our flagship school. It goes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Last year was our fourth graduating class of twelfth graders with 620 students this year at that campus. An established school in the Galilee and in Falkara, an Arab village in the Wadi Ara area, the Triangle area. It launches a 10-year plan of expanding our network to 10 to 15 schools throughout the country, each with a strong adult community surrounding it. Great, thank you. I'd like to talk a bit more about the adult community around it and the impact on the community a little later in the conversation. What I'd like to do now is turn to Imba and Moran to introduce themselves because I think having had this introduction to the school, the next question is, well, who are these students? What is sort of a profile of students who go to this school? And we'd love to hear from you about who you are, what brings you to the school, your experience. I did want to mention, if you don't mind, that we're particularly grateful for you to be here. We know you've had a packed schedule, including last night lighting the hanukia at the White House for the White House Khaana Kapati. And we do have a picture outside of that. And hopefully you might talk later. I can ask you about the hanukia as well that you were lighting. But for now, we'd love to hear you introduce yourselves in your own words. So my name is Moran. I live in Jerusalem with my mother, sister and grandparents. I'm a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship from a Muslim family who has been living in Jerusalem for generations. Those are all my, those are all my important parts of my identity. So my grandfather was a very well-known person. He was a singer. He was a famous singer. He has his own band. So I'm 14 years old. I went to school, went in hand at hand school when I was in third grade, six years ago. I was a gymnastic girl riding horses. And I like dancing, listening to hip-hop music. That's all. Wonderful. How about you? I'm in Var. I'm also 14 and I'm a Jewish Israeli. My parents were born in Israel, but my grandparents were all from Eastern Europe and they moved to Israel before World War II. My father's father was in the palmach and he helped build Israel. And my mother's father was more in the academic. He won the Israel Prize a few years ago for Persian linguistic. My family is all very academic. My father's a professor and he teaches classics in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And my mother also teaches there, academic writing. I'm a vegan and a feminist and a supporter of the gay community and I believe in all human rights and animals rights. And I also spend my time reading and watching movies and ballet dancing. And in Bar, how long, Moran, you said you started, when did you start having a third grade and how about you? I started in pre-kindergarten. In pre-kindergarten. Okay, and can I ask the follow-up question? You know, at the age that you started school, maybe this was your parents' choice, but at this point you can talk about why hand in hand, what that means for each of you and why that choice, either for you or your parents or both? First, when I was young, that was my mom decided to me. But when I grew up, I wanted to learn in Hebrew and to be able to succeed in Israel. So I wanted to be in hand in hand school to keep fighting for our rights in the school and to never give up. And how about you? Also, my parents chose the school at the first place, but when I wanted to go to high school, I could choose if I stay in the school or move to an art school to learn dance, but I chose to stay in the school, especially after the summer we had with the war in Gaza and everything. I decided that it's really important to stay in the school, because the school is really the only place where you can make a change as a kid, because there are lots of organizations and workplaces where you can... But when I grew up, I thought that it's my school, so I have to keep fighting for it and it's a message. We have an important message to show the world that Arabs and Jews can live together and to affect the world that we can live together. Thank you. To switch gears for a little bit, I want to talk about the fire that I mentioned on November 29th. Rebecca, if you could just describe what happened, but then the timeline. Some of you, hopefully all of you, saw on your way in. We have poster boards up of the timeline since the attack on November 29th, saying what the school did starting almost immediately. Rebecca, you could talk us through some of that and then I'd like to hear from Moran and Imba their reactions. Saturday night of November 29th, our school principal, one of our co-principals, Naja Kinani, who's also a founding parent and one of the founding teachers of a lot of the work that we do, received a phone call that there was perhaps some sort of fire, there was smoke at the school and she should come. She thought, okay, fires happen. Should I change out of my pajamas? I guess so. She shows up at the school. It's dark. There's, you know, there are flames coming from the first grade area. They come in and she's trying to figure out what's going on. And then she sees the first of the graffiti on one of the walls of the first grade area. And it says Kahana was right. And then she sees death to Arabs and there's no coexistence with cancer. And she realizes with this that this is not just a regular fire. She said then she saw the pile of books that they had burnt on the floor in the center of the first grade classroom area. And she thought, this is it. It's over. No parent will ever send their kid to the school again. And she said she felt totally alone. And then people started coming. And you had tens and then hundreds of parents and staff and students and alumni and the municipality and different figures within the municipality coming to say, I'm here. What can I do? And after the first shock and horror of realizing what had happened, we realized, okay, at 7.30 tomorrow morning, less than 12 hours from now, you got 620 kids and their parents and the staff coming to school. And we have to be ready for that. So with that, everyone kicked into action. And we immediately said, okay, what are the two classrooms that will set up instead for these kids? So we took the 10th grade classrooms and we set them up with little chairs and little mats for the little kids. Immediately the older kids in our community organizer began to do beautiful signs. We refused to be enemies and just bright, cheery signs to greet the kids as they would come in. We realized that there would be the teachers would have to have discussions with the kids first thing in the morning as class started. Well, to do that, you have to be prepared yourself. So we had immediately a psychologist came in, worked with the staff who was there. We sent out a message to all the staff what had happened. You have to come to school early. We'll do a preparatory session. You'll then hold classes. What message do you send to the parents? Get everything translated into Hebrew and in Arabic so that all the messages are going out in both languages, which is what we always do. And this again, so this is all between so 7.30. At this point, it's between 9 p.m. and on. Okay. Yeah. Sitting with our key municipal figures, you know, what to do, how to do it, immediately, what's renovation, when can it start, how quickly can it happen. Okay, come on in. Come into school. And basically what then followed was an absolutely unexpected outpouring of support that throughout that morning and that day, and then the next day and the day after and throughout that whole week, hundreds and thousands of people coming from around Jerusalem, from around the country, coming and calling and sending messages to say, we condemn this attack and we support you. Jewish, Arab, religious, secular, an unprecedented amount of support for on the one hand where public schools were under the government system or Ministry of Education schools, but still what we do is complicated in a conflict zone and not everyone is supportive of it and no one expected it. Everyone within was tremendously strengthened by that and it gave them this resilience. You know, the parent who said that Saturday night, I can't come back. I can't keep sending my kid here within a day said there's absolutely no other place that I want to be and lots and lots of people saying, you know, as they're seeing the outpouring of support saying, it strengthens me. This gives me the determination to keep going and at the same time that people were coming saying to us, I came here depressed and upset and distraught by what had happened and now that we're here and we see you and we meet you and we see what you're doing and we see how you do it and the joy and the simplicity with which you do something that's complicated. We are inspired and it invigorates us and we take this message back to where we, you know, our communities and our offices and our schools and there what we began to see was this incredible cycle of we being strengthened internally by this support, but also that other people were taking this away and realizing that what we're doing in five schools and communities throughout the country with 1200 students and 5000 parents and staff and community members is a viable and scalable reality of Jewish Arab shared living and I think you mentioned when one bread and I were just there a couple of weeks ago you were talking and one of the things that struck me was this notion of people from the outside coming to see what you were doing and I think I don't want to misquote you here, but one of the things that that I heard you saying which resonated quite powerfully for me was the notion that people realizing you were onto something that they needed your help in understanding how how to deal with this because they knew this was something that you had been dealing with throughout the years of your existence. So even before this incident in a month before this incident incident there'd been another graffiti attack of death to Arabs on the walls or the threshold of the school outside of the school at the school entrance also not the first we've had a few prior to that and that attack had been enough that the local educational authorities of Jerusalem had said you know this is coming in the broader context of growing voices of extremism and intolerance and a lot of anti Arab sentiment that's been strengthened by various events taking place in Israel over the past months especially and they said we're struggling with this issue in our schools in our classrooms in the teachers rooms throughout Jerusalem and this the last death to Arabs attack you know graffiti attack is making us realize that we need to really grapple with it in a new way they brought all of the elementary school principles from throughout Jerusalem some 40 principles to our school for an intensive session on grappling with racism and intolerance and it's it's set off a series of things with government several different governmental figures including President Rivlin and Trachtenberg and others who've been already over the past month coming to us and saying what is it you do and how do you do it and how can we start to extract some lessons from that as we try to deal with this much more broadly within our society right thank you I want before we turn to Ned we're on a bar if I can just ask you you know I just have Rebecca describe what happened and how they in the school community kicked into gear after the fire how did you experience this as students what was your reactions what were your reaction when I heard and I was shocked and I kept thinking about the children who were drawing in their own notebook from the beginning of the year and asking their own parents where where's my notebook well it's on fire after I heard news that our school is on fire I didn't want to come to school but my friends because I was scared but my friends reminded me that they that's what they want so we did the opposite we came many school schools came to support us there's a Jewish girl and told me that I hope one day and Arabs people and Jews people can live together in my own language and I was surprised and speechless because she said she's a Jewish girl and she said it in Arabic and we we will keep on fighting for our school so and I heard I don't think I felt anything I think I had like dropped for a second my father went there went to school that there was anything they could do until the fire was put off but just to stand there to be with everyone to see what what can what's going to happen next so I I think the first thing I did after I kind of recovered from the shock was opening the WhatsApp group of our class and I saw that many kids didn't want to come any kids were scared to come after this kind of thing and me and another girl in my class and our teacher tried to convince them that it's it's really important to come especially because exactly that's exactly what these people want they want to stop the effect of our school. We want to stop the dialogue that we're having but we can't let them win in this we have to keep fighting and keep coming to school and doing what we do every day because that's exactly the reason we're here and we've been dealing with this kind of things for a really long time and we know how to handle it and we have media all the time it wasn't it was bigger but it wasn't anything special and and after we came to school and we saw the support and we saw so many people from the government and people that we never thought would be on our side came and supported us and you know it makes you think you Rebecca you had a piece up on the website and actually I think we print it with out on one of the handouts we had out there and just listening to Invas speak one of the powerful lines I think of that piece you had I'm just going to quote said the question we asked ourselves was not why did this happen the context of conflict in which we live provides an answer to that question on a daily basis the question we asked ourselves was what can be done you know on that notion what can be done we've sort of talked about the broad notion of what hand in hand stands for what it is but one of the things that we've had the chance to discuss before and I know Ned has also looked at we've had conversations about is you know it's very easy to look at projects like this sometimes and say well that's very nice but how attached to reality is it or you know how much are people really grappling with the real issues and just living in a bubble and what I'd like to talk about if I just ask you briefly to address Rebecca and then I'd like to turn to Ned for some perspective on this is one of the things that you've said when we've talked before is that unlike other peacebuilding programs let's think of say a dialogue activity what often happens when things get tough there's a challenging political environment to terrorist attack something like this people walk away they tend to fall apart and as you said this is because this is where people go to school it's not that easy you can't just walk away from it so if you can talk a little bit about how you grapple how the school actually grapples with with the reality of the conflict while educating so I think first and foremost sort of the guiding principles are we agree to disagree it's okay to not all be on the same page we're not trying to force everyone to come to the same same some sort of you know common agreement about the situation or what ought to be done we allow for open honest discussion about everything as it happens the fact that it's a daily framework the fact that you have a school framework where every single day you have students coming back to the classroom we have a co-teacher model for all the younger grades of a Jewish and Arab co-teacher so you have the language and the representation of all the things that come with that means that you must find a way to talk through the issues in a way that's real and honest but will not destroy your inclusive framework and it's something that you know again as you say that it's in many of those sort of coexistence types projects when things are difficult it's hard it's hard to come together and those are hard emotions that come and how do you deal with that or there's you know maybe you know border issues and not going to cross over and we have to grapple with the way of how to do it you know there's many people who do believe in this idea of togetherness coexistence some sort of broader solution but how do you make it happen how do you implement that idea because we're a school where every single day you're coming back together again you have to figure out how to do it you have to find the way to do that you know tomorrow morning the school bells gonna ring and you have to be ready to walk into that classroom and that right there you know based on that with the starting factor that everyone's saying we're committed to this and we're committed to making this happen then everything flows from that sort of core principle so Ned I know that you've looked at a lot as I mentioned earlier peace building programs it's very closely as well at hand-in-hand school and something that strikes me when I think of this broad you know I use the word unique before and you know again correct me I from Rhonda but when I look around what I think of a similar and I had the word similar here because I can't think of anything identical similar models and other conflict zones where I my understanding is people have tried something like this if I think of say Northern Ireland or Bosnia-Herzegovina my understanding of those is a lot of times it might be bringing people together but it's it's not necessarily grappling with some of these issues head-on so if you could just talk about the implications of the hand-in-hand school model from a peace building practice and maybe resilience perspective sure I think I well one of the themes I think we've all heard very clearly has been as you said resilience and this very powerful response to the to the recent crisis and having been privileged to spend some time with the program in the last few years to see the different campuses and to see the community events where they bring together parents and people from the neighboring communities to hear the stories of how how this developed and this is only the latest in a number of incidents that hand-in-hand has gone through but I think the larger picture is that hand-in-hand is it's a response to a crisis meaning everyone in the country is living in an unresolved crisis the way that that is dealt with in the majority fashion is through separation as you said tracked schools where people don't interact and they don't talk about the content of that crisis I in northern Ireland and in Bosnia Herzegovina two of the locations you talked about in the post conflict setting there have been some integrated schools where people from the conflicting groups go to school together and they occupy the same physical space together but in most of those cases they don't in Bosnia they often don't occupy even the same sort of curriculum curricular space together and sometimes even go to school at different times in the day in northern Ireland they do go to school together but the way they agree to disagree according to most of the studies is largely just not to talk about the conflict so they they learn science they learn math they learn that the others are human beings they build relationships and that is that's all positive but they don't go there they don't talk about the crisis that they that they live in or that they're in the populations of it hand-in-hand they they go there they they deal with it head-on it's very it's very open it's very prominent there's there's not a dichotomy between being together as human beings and being who you are as a Palestinian as an Arab as an Israeli and a Jew that's all that's all dealt with very openly I think the most remarkable example of this you have to think about what that entails I mean I don't want to give the idea that this is a simple process or that this is harmonious or or easy that wouldn't be real at all it's it's very challenging it's very complex it's messy because that that's what it means to actually engage with this with this reality but in hand-in-hand every every year from beginning on March 30th and then going into into May they have five what are what they call national days so this is part of the Israeli and Palestinian national calendars which are all laden with historical memory and conflict events on March 30th there's land day which is a memory of protests by the Palestinian citizens of Israel in which people were killed protesting against land confiscation and then next comes holocaust remembrance day there comes the memorial day for Israel's fallen soldiers which goes right into Israeli independence day and then the last did I get the order correct the last is the palace the power of the Palestinians remember as not Nakba day remembrance of the tragedy that the Palestinians suffered the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the war that followed the creation of Israel and they have mixed classrooms at all grade levels they have teachers teaching together they have parents who are watching and are care about the content of what their children are learning they have a ministry of education they have lots of eyes on them all the time and every year and every one of those grades and every one of those schools every one of those classrooms they deal with each of these each of these issues and that's that's remarkable that's something that's a subject that very few people in the entire country are willing to engage together but they're raising their children in a way that's very aware that there's a dissonance here that there's an issue here that we are different groups and and they're trying to raise them in awareness even of that history and even of the the painful parts that are unresolved I think the remarkable way in which I saw I saw this happen was actually in the hand-in-hand teachers workshop that I attended in summer a couple summers ago so they brought together all the teachers from all the different schools for a three-day workshop and and the teachers actually designed many of the sessions to work on you know challenging issues that they all face so there was there was a session about the national days and you know how do we deal with how do you deal with this in your classroom it's it gets very nuts and bolts very down to okay what are you going to do what materials are you going to share with the students how are you going to present this and you know that was a very very well attended workshop lots of teachers were there they all shared their different experiences their different challenges the responses of students responses of parents but there was they did an exercise where they took out photographs and symbols like the key of the refugee the refugees key to their home words in Arabic and Hebrew symbolizing the knock upon the displacement this is very politically charged stuff in Israel if you know the context this is there's been legislation to try and prevent this from from happening but these teachers took all these things out and they had each you know different symbol and different word and they scattered them on the floor and then worked together in Jewish Arab pairs you know taking out each one of these and talking about how they had dealt with this issue in their classroom and it was remarkable to watch them among all of these images of the 1948 war and all of these symbols that are so charged and they sat down together and pick them up you know and they were just sort of wandering around with the images of the war and the narratives and the conflict all around them together and talking about it and it was really was it was a remarkable scene and something I haven't forgotten and I thought I didn't kind of embodied the courage that they have the courage and also I think for people who say this is naive I think it's quite quite the opposite they're actually engaging with the hard reality you know we keep using the word remarkable I think you know we sort of as I said this there's something going on here that is certainly different and noteworthy to start talking about some of the challenges because obviously as it raises this is you know this could not possibly be a model that doesn't come with challenges and I think there are layers of challenges here there's a layers of challenges of doing what Ned just described which in many ways seems to me experimental on a sort of sort of broad international scale of peace building but there's also the challenge that comes with any school and all the layers of that school right the it's it's dealing with with those kind of conflicting narratives and identities there's wanting it to be a place that's academically challenging rigorous there's dealing with teaching bilingually I mean you have all these layers of challenges so Rebecca if you if you could talk about I mean I maybe have named just some of them maybe there are others and and how you how you begin to address some of those first of all it's a school the schools are schools and we and we're under the Ministry of Education so the first challenge is providing a top notch academic experience and doing it within the Ministry of Education system and using that curriculum and then what do you add to that how do you build on top of that how do you develop what's become sort of a co-teaching model of a Jewish and Arab co-teacher working together how do you deal with religion so obviously in Israel you have the Jewish calendar is the primary calendar we've got kids who are Muslim and Christian and Jewish and the core guiding principles of the of the hand in hand framework are that we should be equal and bring in everything so we do all the holidays don't worry with the same number of days on is off how do you teach art and music and the things where you can bring in different cultural perspectives and of course how do you teach history and how do you talk about current events and the for us it's really a question of you know as Ned points out we this is how we deal with the conflict the choice of the parent no parent ends up at the school by accident you choose it as a as a way of basically giving you agency to choose something else in the reality in which we live and to make a personal decision and choose a path that is basically building something together you know I'd say an art with our ministry of education officials the relationships in the beginning of sort of working with them as we've established any one of our schools it's often a slow process they start up a little suspicious what is this about you're outside of their bureaucratic boxes of tracking and we're outside of the social constructs and the social boxes in which we all live and then we find over and over and over again is that with time as we start to work with them they have become our biggest fans and you know the work that we do is as you say fully understood fully known what we do how we do it what's the spirit of it what's the content of it and we have over and over the the local educational authorities being our biggest advocates both back to us and sort of saying you know giving us positive feedback and recognition but also as we've started to expand into other municipalities that we've you know brought for example when Tel Aviv and when Haifa were considering do we recognize a school in our locales we brought them to Jerusalem we said come see with this idea that we're talking to you looks like 15 years in and they come and they see and they meet and and then they meet our local educational authorities who say including you know the one of the most senior people with a keep on his head a very orthodox man and he says what this school does for the city of Jerusalem is amazing and every city in Israel should have a school like this and that kind of warm full support is what we start to get over and over in each of our locations but that's something that takes constant you know constant working and openness and cooperation so those are what about now this the total student body in the network of schools is is how many across our five schools it's about 1200 about 1200 and what proportion of that how does that break down in terms of Jewish Arab student population so our goal is that every single class and every single community activity should all be perfectly 50 50 it's about 60 40 across the board of the schools in terms of 60 percent Arab and 40 percent Jewish okay and the Jerusalem school goes all the way through 12th grade at that point and what if you just lay out the other schools where they where they are at this point the other so the other schools are what he is in the triangle area that's a car and the galley and then jaffa right but where what grades those sorry sorry no that was my so the other the galley and the calcala school are through elementary and the other two schools are at the moment preschool but growing quickly now I you know something else that we've talked about before is is that that balance you said is hard mean you're now at you said 6040 which is is moving up but if you could speak to some of the challenges that you know because obviously there are different interests here from the different segments of the community who choose to go to this school they're looking for maybe different things the school coming for different motivations and how that's impacted you know your numbers and the retention rates right so first of all you you know say on average a Jewish family is coming for more ideological reasons and on average an Arab family is coming because they see this as a path to social mobility basically in Israel to have top language skills etc and with that also come sort of different general preferences of those communities the Jewish parents tend to prefer much more in humanities and sort of a good social experience and the Arab families want to have top notch in math and science etc and so how do you find to the right balance between those different cultural expectations that come and what we found for example in our Jerusalem school which is you know going from pre-kate to 12th grade means that you've got kids for some 13 years let's say so if you start with a class of 30 and it's 1515 in terms of Jewish era breakdown and then a couple the Jewish kids go somewhere else in the you know along the way to move cities or go to another school because they have a lot of school options it's very hard at sixth grade let's say to bring in another whole you know five or six Jewish kids to replace the Jewish kids who might have left but now at our high school for example the starting grade of the high school is Dublin numbers and even in numbers and that's because of the hard work we've done at making the high school a rich program for everybody at our Jewish at the new preschool in Jaffa and also in Haifa the numbers in the classes are balanced and the waiting lists are even balanced in numbers so it's something that is it's appealing to people from both communities and and people are bringing that out into their communities in terms of the impact so turning back to Ned now to talk about you know I mentioned at the beginning that that much of your work in the peace building field has been focused on impact evaluation so when you have looked at the hand in hand school the way you have and again in the context of other endeavors you've looked at what have you seen or and what have others who've looked at this scene in terms of the impact this structure and system is having both on the on the student level and maybe on the broader community level and then of course I'd like to hear from in Balmoran about the impact you would feel you would describe it as having on you individually but Ned if you could just say a little bit about that sure I think what we've heard is that they have they have a strategic vision really it's it works at multiple levels so you have the level of the school itself and there you're looking if you're asking about impact you would say okay what's the impact on the students what added value comes to students going to this kind of school instead of going to normal separate schools and then perhaps participating in a peace education program outside of school you and what I found very quickly is that you don't just look for impact actually among the students but among the teachers in the way that they that they have to teach together and that they have to teach this content that's looking at both histories and both narratives as well as the parents I think were mentioned many times so the circles that are impacted by each school actually grow in that sense but Rebecca and Shuli Dichter the and the last deed the education director I all articulate a broad strategic vision in which you don't just have the micro level you don't just have the impact on the school but they've actually built now a program and gotten large grants to support it for having what they call shared communities so each school is meant to be a community space and at the Jerusalem school there are language classes where Jews come to learn Arabic and Arabs come to learn Hebrew there's a basketball team mixed men's basketball team which I think won the city championship last year and there are a number of activities there are events in the Galilee in the Galilee where the school is actually it's the only school located in an Arab municipality where Jewish students attend go to school but in that area in Wadi Arra on Ramadan they had a huge festival I had that I think it was about 400 people open air nighttime gathering I took the took people on a tour of Um El Fahem afterwards and Um El Fahem is one of the places in Israel where the majority of Jewish Israelis would never even think of going but they went to you know to enjoy nightlife there in Um El Fahem so there's there's a concerted effort and to bring this you know to turn the school into more of a not just a school but also a community center also what's what might be called a touch point or a space of shared community that's bringing people together from outside and giving them experiences tastes of this possibility and then of course they're trying to expand the network of schools so that it gets into more and more areas in the country so that more people are exposed to Shulia Dichter when he's the executive director when he talks about it he has a very strong vision he also has a vision about what he calls turning it into a civic power and he's he has this vision of in 10-15 years I'll tell you there will be schools in 10 to 15 areas and they will represent a voice of shared society of a segment of the society that does want to engage with each other that does want to live together or live in engagement between the Jews and Arabs to have a shared vision and that's of course that's only that's only one group in the society it's a very large society there are other groups that would not agree to that vision at all but he what he's pointing out is that that's largely missing that that voice isn't there but they're they're hoping to bring that voice into the national conversation and I think actually what we see in the response to the current crisis to the arson attack on the school in the way that even the highest level authorities the president of Israel the president of the United States have responded is that in an event like that where you actually see this resistance from radical elements you also see that they are a voice that they're achieving larger levels of recognition they're becoming a voice in the conversation it's becoming something that the wider community is learning about you did ask about impact and and I you know I would say that you know I think it's visible in that in that recognition I think it's visible in what they've constructed over time this is a project I believe you said started in 1997 and it's it's important to think about the context we all know what's happened in the Middle East conflict since 1997 we all know the second to fata the separation vary are the failures of negotiations the escalation of regional conflict all of the things that have happened in that context this network of schools has grown its count it's almost counter intuitive in the context of escalating racism and extremism that's been coming out in segments of Israeli society this network has grown it's gone to more places there's actually demand in some communities where they haven't been able to to build the schools yet so I think you can in fact see that there's a good deal of impact terms of the students themselves there have been a number of studies and the primary thing I think they found speed of ecumen who's been researching hand-in-hand for quite a while said that's the difference between control groups if he'll interview a control group of students from the normal school system and then a group of hand-in-hand students is that students from hand-in-hand speak with much more complexity and nuance they're much more articulate and much more complex and much more nuanced in a way that they address their own identity the others identity and the conflict so it doesn't mean that they all share the same political opinions it doesn't mean that they're all peace activists but what it means is that through this experience they're gaining a much more nuanced perspective and much more awareness they're both more aware of identity but also able to think about it in a much more complex way that was one of the key findings another one said that they don't essentialize the other group they are very aware that the other group is made up of different individuals has internal diversity and so I think those are both on the micro level and then on the larger level I think we can see actually some very strong signs of impact thank you I'm not not essentializing we you've just heard lots of us talk about you and what other people have said about you so let's hear I'd love to hear on this issue of you know Ned was talking about the school and the reactions from the community outside the school how is it for you when you interact with your friends or members of your community who are not part of the hand-in-hand school what is that experience like for you well some people really support some people are really excited when I tell them I go to the school the first reaction is oh cool so you know Arabic and you can speak can you write my name but there are people sense the summer since the war in Gaza sometimes I'm scared to say that I go to this school because people react badly but and and and they think that I'm they think that it's crazy or that it's weird or that it or that I'm learning with enemies or that I'm friends with that if I'm friends with one person I'm I'm supporting terrorists and I'm just not true because like in every society there are good people and bad people and it's not that all the Arabs are terrorists and it's not that all the Jews are and how about for you also my friends are excited that I learn in hand-in-hand so they they're so excited that I speak Hebrew and what and Barsid but outside of the school sometimes I'm afraid to speak Arabic and even on the phone because and I'm afraid so but in the school inside of the school we have something to share with other and I'm and I feel myself inside of the school so it's safer if I can ask one more question I want to put open to the many questions I know that we must have in the audience but just you know you've heard lots of descriptions of your school is doing something unique and on the other hand one of the things that when Britt and I were there we remarked at the time on the campus that one of the things that you really notice about the school is feels like a school right it feels like any school you know you go to school and it's it's you recognize it and then you stop for someone like me coming outside you stop and you realize that this is something different going on the way that Rebecca has described it in that particular context when you are there and you both have now been there for a number of years do you feel like you're aware constantly on a daily basis that this is something different or does it just feel like school usually just feels like school feels like the place that your parents forced you to go to in the morning when you could get a few more hours sleep and they forced you to sit in class for eight hours a day and learn about things you don't really care about we should have started with this question after since people started talking about us on the news and asking us how does it work for the languages and how does it work with the religion and we start to see that outside of the school people see us as different and we start to see ourselves as different moron would you agree with that yes totally I think our school is special of course and not all the people and agree with us but we do I think we do the right thing that we can make different people share together something so yes I agree with them well thank you actually just yes the community stuff just to articulate a little bit more about the community work because what we realized a few years ago this idea of expanding the network wasn't just about schools core issue there that we were thinking a lot about was you can't dump solving this broader conflict on the shoulders of 12 or in this case 14 year olds it's not realistic it's not feasible we certainly can't wait for them to become the 55 year olds to become the decision makers it's it's got to be upon the shoulders of the adults who lead the way who make this viable and with that we began in a very concerted and conscious process of institutionalizing the communities around each of the schools naturally as in most schools there's some sort of community activity that takes place by adults by parents but it sort of comes and goes depending on who's the eager parent to lead some sort of process what we realized is each school has to have a strong adult community that's organized that has a combination of one could say being and doing of community fun activities excursions picnics just enjoying being together but also doing learning language learning in particular for Jews to be learning Arabic because that's where most Arabs know Hebrew dialogue groups text study and when necessary social action to have an opportunity to respond to what's going on around us but the schools be schools even within all the unusual things that we're doing and let the broader process of social change be led by by adults who are the ones responsible to make this path a broader path and then amplify that out it's not enough that we're doing this within our school walls it has to be something that's open to the broader public and heard about by a much broader public ultimately it's true now with five locations and we certainly that much more true with 10 to 15 locations 15 to 20 thousand people involved in that day-to-day experience of shared life you can perhaps not like it you don't have to believe in it but you can no longer deny that it's viable nor that it's scalable because both of the case thank you you know I hope also in the questions we'll get to you know you mentioned social action there's so much we didn't talk about in terms of the videos the walks and the action that happened this summer and again since then I would like to open to questions do we have a mic that's going around but we have a mic at the front so people want to ask questions want to come up and if your question is to somebody in particular please on the panel please know that otherwise we'll sort it out among ourselves who takes the question so yes sir I'm sorry I didn't catch the your name the Palestinian student moran moran I want to ask and moran what did you learn anything in the school about your hearts mode and how do you feel about what you learned and in bar did you learn anything about the Nakba day and what do you feel about what you learned a lot about Nakba since I went to the school because I had no idea about it or about any other day I mean I didn't I didn't know about the Holocaust I think before I went to school but we learned them together it was something that happened and something about the history of this place and we had to learn about it we do feel we feel sympathy to all of these national days we have activities every Nakba day about the country about the villages that were ruined about people that were kicked out of their homes we talked to them we know them some of the kids in our classes are all descendants of people so we we we feel sympathy we understand them we know that that just because we celebrate the independence of our country means someone else lost in every war there is one side wins the other side has to lose and we know that and understand that I also learned a lot about Jews Holocaust Holocaust yes and when they feel sorry we feel sorry for them when they're happy we celebrate we share everything together when we learn together so of course I learned a lot about the Jews Howard thank you thank you and welcome it's great to see you I saw you on the video with the president last night I thought it was terrific so Ned you talked a little bit about impact and one aspect of impact is what the future holds for the kids who graduate from this program you talk about that the schools had 17 or 18 years of experience and you have some graduates are out there and the Jewish kids head for a very different future than the Arab kids Jewish kids are heading for the IDF the Arab kids going to college going to work whatever they're doing and I think there are a lot of issues about about Arab identity and how they come out of a program like this I tell a very quickly I have about six questions so I'm going to ask this one but they a very quick story from when I was working in Israel and I had Arab staff as well as Jewish staff and I was in Gilboa we had a meeting with authorities from Gilboa and Janine and we're always trying to put people together and get some projects going and there was a Christian Arab Jaffa staff member of mine who was who was there with me and since some of the language in Bessil she was interpreting and she did a fine job interpreting the Hebrew that the Gilboan head of council spoke and then when one of the Arabs from Janine began to speak and I turn turns and you know can you interpret for me and she couldn't do it she's a fluent of what I would describe as a fluent Arab speaker but growing up in Jaffa she learned Hebrew she went to school in Hebrew and she had as a Christian Arab from Jaffa very much a Hebrew identity and so and I saw this in a lot of the staff and the question is how do the adults who come through programs like this grapple with that identity issue Rebecca so first of all just to be clear that we've only had this past June our fourth graduating class so the kids are for the most part still either an army or a university respectively so it's sort of the long-term results have yet to be seen but the Arab kids are a lot of them at top universities in Israel or elsewhere internationally and what I would say in terms of identity that we're the kids grow up within our framework with a very clear sense of identity that you're by nature of learning together learning about each other understanding each other's differences and who we are individually means that you're getting a lot of identity clarification in terms of the language component of that in terms of how high quality is your let's say in this case Arabic we also have been through an evolution of our model meaning we're creating a lot of this model of language of learning from scratch so in the early years for example there had been a decision we want no separation because the ideological premise of the school of no separation even in language class so okay when you're in kindergarten that's one thing our first grade let's say but as the kids started to get older and they were all learning things together all language instruction invariably it it it slows to the the level of the lower kids so that when you were doing Arabic it would tend to be close to the level of the Hebrew speaking kids to be able to keep up eventually we found that the Arabic of our students of the Arab students in national tests was below average well obviously that wasn't what anybody intended and so we said okay let's revise the model that's a nice ideological principle of zero separation it's not working so for language instruction per language instruction that's now done separately at a mother tongue and and foreign language level basically and now the Arabic has gone way way above average of our Arab kids for the Jewish kids their Arabic is is far better than any other Jewish kid is going to be because you're growing up in a fully bilingual environment but still is it at the levels we want both in terms of the written in the spoken which for those of you know Arabic are very different so there too we're sort of revising and continually upgrading and trying to figure out our own measurements in order to improve it obviously language and and identity are very linked and it's an important aspect to us that both you know within our framework that these kids are coming growing up with a clear sense of identity the research shows that as Ned's mentioned our kids are going up with it many kids in Israel in a homogenous framework people grow up with an essentialist understanding of identity that they see people as Jews and Arabs as essentially different fundamentally different at some you know almost like different types of human beings level in our framework they understand difference they understand what those differences are they have knowledge about it they have empathy towards it but they don't see each other as essentially different they see each other is essentially the same and upon that we're building what we're doing I think the question that Howard asked I'm sorry about my voice the question that Howard asked is an important one it just brings up the challenge of what they're doing this is a fundamentally asymmetrical context these are societies that are different there's structured differently culture is different and because of the conflict there are these very stark divergences such as the Jewish kids being drafted into the military at 18 and the Palestinians are not and having looked at other programs that work with youth this is a tremendous challenge youth who have been very active in peace building for a number of years who have been very dedicated are now forced to join not just separate contexts but to be part of the conflict and to represent sort of the you know the violent end of the conflict at least in the eyes of their peers so this is a tremendous challenge there isn't there isn't an answer to that there's not there's no perfect answer to that there's only trying to deal with it as best as they can and I think there's not enough I think there's not yet a critical mass of their alumni to look at that but I think it's a very important question is how they will give them the forums to try and deal with that to try and talk through it it's it's inevitable and it's very difficult but this is this is part of the challenge they take on by being willing to to integrate their their education and have their kids grow up together in a fundamentally asymmetric context one more item on that one of the reasons that you might not know enough about it is that one of the crises one of the challenges they faced is that in the early years of the development of the Jerusalem school after sixth grade a great good deal of the Jewish students left to other schools in their first groups because they have a number they have a whole bunch of different options available that will help prepare them for the army that will get them ready for you know for college and they have all these different options so they didn't stay after sixth grade and so the first few classes came out I believe majority students and this is a you know fundamental challenge for them they didn't stop at that point and now they've taken very serious measures and campaigns to address that and to keep the Jewish kids in the school through high school I think as you said the ninth grade class is now fully integrated and that's a tremendous achievement in this context so it's important that you've brought out you know what is the reality that they're working in and it's equally important and not not to be taken for granted that they they are in fact dealing dealing with these challenges pretty pretty impressively but in other words this is a longitudinal impact evaluation in the making I mean we're sort of right I mean this is this is what it's eventually going to head towards when there's enough data to get there. Adina. Okay so many many moons ago when I was in 11th and 12th grade I was among I was a participant in one of the in some of the first Arab Jewish activities in Israel so things have come a long way and the two things that I well two of the things that I that stand out for me the fact that you feel sometimes that it's just a normal school is actually a symbol of its success because that the whole point is that even though you're doing something with purpose every day it's also just it should be a normal thing that that's how people interact and the the second thing which will be to my question which is tackling it's not like that the parents and teachers are instilling or imparting knowledge on you about what the answer should be but rather that it's a work in progress with everyone taking place being that that's the case we know that in Israel well in general but in Israel there are many more cleavages than just the Israeli Palestinian one or the Jewish Arab one and so my question is how given that you're tackling so many things in the conflict I know for example one of my things I work on is the cleavages among Jewish groups which I think is intrinsically connected to so so Mizrahi and Ashkenazi is intrinsically connected to Jewish Palestinian in many different ways over and not so over what's the breakdown of the Jewish and the Palestinian populations within the groups in terms of in terms of the not just numbers obviously in terms of origins places of origin of the parents backgrounds ethnic and religious so I mean we have a pretty broad range within within our schools and it tends to reflect the local population so in Jerusalem you've got it say of the Arab population it's about 30% Christian the rest of Muslim of the Arab population in each of our school locations it reflects the local groups on the one hand you know yeah you probably have a higher percentage of middle upper middle class educated but you have a growing number who are of all social backgrounds and also Mizrahi background and also you know arrange the bigger you get and the more you just know also as a good school then the more attractive you become to a broader range of people you know not huge numbers of religious Jews let's say but also growing numbers of religious religious Jews who might be on staff or some coming to the school also in attendance so I would say that the the fact that we are forever understanding things from different perspectives means that you become more nuanced not just about the Israeli Palestinian conflict but about everything about social social realities but social challenges and our students tend to become critical thinkers and and able to really identify and analyze a range of social issues but without judgment per se and with a tremendous about amount of empathy for different perspectives and different realities okay thank you my questions along those lines can you give us a breakdown on what percentage are religiously observant or devout in Jewish Christian Muslim groups both faculty and families we're not tracking that specifically I would say amongst the Muslim families you get a range of religious and secular which is more visible with certain of the women with the hijab let's say amongst Christian families you get a range of the level of religiosity I think is less of a less of a factor in the broader context in which we're working of the Jewish side we do have like I said some Orthodox staffs a few Orthodox or conservative Jewish families by nature of the tracking system most religious families are still going to choose a religious track school even though I do have a number of people who say I would love to go there but I don't want to miss out on the religious text study that I get at a regular school but we have a few families who've joined this past year who have been very eager to start to their Orthodox families they're observant and they say I want this to be my primary framework and we'll figure out an enrichment program which they're sort of piloting along on the side independently under the school framework you know and the building on Fridays which is a day off for school there and they're trying to make that work and so hopefully that's something that can be you know but for right now the Jewish students tend to be from secular background secular or religious but not highly not not sort of halachically strictly observed and I was interested in what neighborhood where are you located the Jerusalem school is in the pot neighborhood near Bait Zafafa is an Arab part of it's an Arab used to be a village it's along the basically the 1967 border runs along the side of the school we're on the pre 67 side of that I just wondered about the reaction of the local community geographically not always keen from both you know first from the Jewish neighborhood in which we're situated but you know we're growing on them okay so I wanted to comment let's ask a question first of all and my name is Oded Leshem I'm Jewish Israeli from Israel and I'm doing my PhD now in the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution George Mason University I'm a Jerusalemite myself and I just wanted to remind us that there are forces that are trying to stop these kind of initiatives both in the political arena and in the social arena so these kind of beautiful initiatives the schools and other Palestinians slash Arab Jewish partnership programs are trying to be shut down by either political forces or by just the public so if you see I'm just saying it because you of course have to present the positive sides but there is also the negative context of the Israeli society reactions to the to what happened to two weeks ago where all some of them were very supportive of the school but some of them were not supportive and support supported the attack so actually if we look at the future if these kind of programs do not expand the forces that are trying to decrease them might win this kind of battle so we always have to continue and strive to expand these kind of initiatives and I would say that this could be also something that USIP should try to think about not only like in the context of the Israel proper society. Thank you. Sorry Ned, you wanted to jump in that. No, I think what you're saying is what you're saying I think also dovetails with what you ask. I mean this does not in itself reach the entire society and it doesn't in and of itself change the conflict but I think you know rather than imagine that they can go from zero to a hundred percent it's more actually important to look from reality that this has been built up from the ground and that it's actually that it's grown increasing support for it is very important. I had a very interesting focus group with people exactly the same age as Zinbar and Moran just a few months ago at a normal Jewish Israeli school in Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. Ninth graders I asked them you know some different questions what do they know about Arabs? What do they think? What do they think about the conflict these kinds of questions and I expected actually because of all of the negative things that we've heard I expected to hear some very hostile opinions and there were a couple of people 15 kids in the group there were two of them that had very hostile opinions towards Arabs and thought they shouldn't be in the country and but the majority did not and the majority of the students there had was sort of mixed between feeling threatened and things like that but also saying no but they're they're good people and bad people and I asked them do any of you know an Arab person your age and none of them not one some of them knew someone to work with their father or think something like this no one knew someone their own age. I asked would you like to meet someone your own age and all of them except the two that I mentioned previously said yes they really would and I said do you know any ways to do that and there was only one person in the entire group that knew despite all of the programs that we talk about and we know about and we think about all the time there's only one person in that group of ninth graders that knew of any way possibly to meet an Arab their age and it was someone who had a Jewish friend who goes to the Max Rain School in Jerusalem. So I think it's very important to say that there is actually there is potential demand out there that isn't reached because the capacity isn't there yet because as much as hard as they're working and they're working unbelievably hard they just they don't have the capacity yet. There are measures to support this right now I think there's a measure and in the House of Representatives for an international peace building fund that would support this on an annual basis. You know things like that could really certainly could increase that amplify the voice of the school and of programs like this. And I think also that what Hand in Hand is always saying that it's not it's not that this I think Hand in Hand thinks pretend in any way that it is representative of what is going on around them but rather I think it shows what is possible and with a constant eye to how does one amplify that how does one scale up and out while very aware I mean even I'm glad the question was asked about your physical location because I think another striking part is for people who suggest that they're living in a bubble in the very geographic location itself is is sort of loaded nothing surrounded with all the dynamics that go on in Jerusalem that that I think that this is you know again seeing this as a as a sense of what is possible that needs a lot more work to amplify than what is I just want to add one thing sorry to this I think we all find ourselves forever hovering on the seemline between despair and in our case determination that this summer especially I think really we've found ourselves poised on that seemline all the time and it's easy there's a lot of reasons to be perpetually overwhelmed by all the reasons why this doesn't work and it will never work and we don't have that choice we as hand in hand parents and community members we as citizens of Israel we as people who live in this region and we as people who live far away but are in many ways affected by this at all times don't have that choice and there are a lot of people who don't want this to be their ongoing reality and who are choosing otherwise and who would like to choose otherwise even in our framework of hand in hand we've got many more people who are on our registration list we've got as I said we're in the process of selecting our next school and community location we have parents and community saying we want to be the next there is no greater agents of change than a parent who desperately wants their kid in that school that in another year or two they will age out of we're harnessing that we want to open our doors to every single one of those people not just because any school wants to have the reputation you know that would merit long registration lists and waiting lists but because it's a process of social change and there are many people want to be a part of that and one of the key things is to enable that to give them those frameworks be it the kids who might always be at a homogeneous school but are still looking for it or be it the families and and community members who say no this is what we want to be our daily reality and we even have with all the challenges of government also more and more governmental officials coming on board for that and that is not undermined you know that's not a there's obviously complicated things at governmental level in terms of people are very for and very against this also but the point is how do you strengthen the voice and that's what we're doing every day and I I cannot stress it enough because when we give into the despair about this we basically accept that that's the reality and for those of us who live it we can't accept that in the interest of time looks like we have three more questions so what I'd like to do is take all three questions together and I'll make sure we take notes of what they are and then handle answer them all that way so great I wanted to ask and bar and have to get to school so I mean I'm assuming you have to go through some checkpoints so you have to get up early and go through them or not no no okay public bus right or public traffic traffic within and you've got that so within so you live how far away from the school half an hour but I take the public bus ah okay okay so this is thank you for clarifying so I'm bad in three to four years you may be at a checkpoint where you will hold Moran from entering or moving and what I would like to ask is the following this is good this may or may not happen is the school preparing you to either process that possibility or to think through what kind of options would you have if that happens well first of all I know personally that I'm not gonna go to the army in any way I mean no way so that's it but we do talk about it we do think what are what options do we have if we don't go because there aren't many some of us can go to show it low me not sure this or go to the army or go to jail that's basically what we can do so some of us choose to go to the army and I know that it hurts some of my some of the Palestinian friends that yeah they stop them at the checkpoint and so but we do talk about it a lot but no no one tells us what to do because they can't really tell us no you can't go to the army they try to make us say what we think but not talk themselves so so they won't tell us what to do when it will come out the wrong way thank you I'm so impressed thank you thank you I just wanted to ask quickly if you could talk about some of what what your methods or strategies are for dealing with flareups in the classroom whether it's sort of after an incident has taken place or a political conversation sort of how the teachers deal with that maybe if there's a specific sort of training and how that's implemented and if we just take this last question that will answer this question I'll definitely keep it brief I'm interested in learning more about your community outreach projects and beautiful are there any initiatives to build partnerships particularly academic partnerships in other schools who can possibly adopt the same model so that it could be a widespread spread message instead of being limited in just hand-in-hand model thank you okay okay so brief responses and then you know we've been doing this for 15 years so I'm happy to answer questions afterwards for those of you want the again a lot of the work that we're doing in terms of the teacher's training and how to be adept at dealing with conflict in the classrooms not all of it is conflict about you know the broader conflict it might start with the basics of sharing toys etc I mean you're done with conflict resolution at all levels at all times in a school and so it's just part of a continuum in many ways and and it's built into what we do you know even your co-teaching model of a Jewish and Arab co-teacher forget about Jewish Arab then the fact that you're co-managing a classroom and then you're often doing it where one teacher speaks both languages and the second teacher will speak one language and then on top of that you're dealing with representation and then on top of that you're dealing with the broader reality in which we live so a lot of it's sort of core principles of sitting down working it through talking it through but also giving guidance to that allowing for first kind of the processing outside of your professional role standing in front of a classroom and about and preparing people for for those discussions again this is this is the the the core idea behind this basic guiding principle that might sound very simplistic we can agree to disagree because if you say everyone has to come to a point of agreement then you can you can you know you could never go home from the classroom to try to get everyone on the same page once you say we're allowed to have different opinions and we're allowing for the honest discussion expression and listening and sometimes they can get to be heated arguments but that's that's a principle that can take you pretty far especially when you're built upon these two core ideas of common citizenship and common humanity the other question about the community outreach I'm sorry remind me of your question again about partnerships so we a lot of energy is definitely sort of within the day to day and making sure this works and expanding this to more places the partnerships that we're building with the municipalities start to have impact also on the other schools in varying ways you know not always so direct but the way that it starts to influence the way the municipal figures see a lot of things and and I think a lot of our idea of the influence is really about doing what we do well and amplifying that out and then that sets an example that other people can can learn from partnerships are intensive and to do them well it takes another set of resources but we do have various partnerships that we do at different levels with other schools with other institutions between students between teachers and there's now a lot more of demand for that with what's going on so we'll continue I'm sure to do more of that now we have gone over time and obviously there's so much that we we still haven't covered I want to thank you for coming I particularly want to thank all of our panelists and Ingvar Moran I understood I just learned that that there was actually a lottery to decide which students got to come the school so we're very glad that you both won that lottery I hope it's good a good experience for you and thank you thank you very much very much thank you