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Queensbury, NY - Esther Phillips held the mask of a young woman up to her face and looked around at the other masks before her. There was an older, male police officer, a young long-haired man, a clean-cut man and a child.
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"Am I more reasonable than you?" Phillips, a Glens Falls High School junior, asked another student as the small group tried to decide, just by
looks, which of their masks showed the most and least "reasonable" person. Ultimately, the group lined up, the police officer at the head, the child at the end.
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So began "Faces in the Crowd," a workshop to help area students develop awareness of people's
differences and prejudice, part of an area wide youth conference on Wednesday at Adirondack Community College. The conference -- titled "Real World" -- drew 240 students from 16 area school districts, mostly from Warren and Washington counties. Many were student leaders, others simply wanted to learn real life skills or meet with kids from other districts.
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Workshops ranged from the one on prejudice, and another that helped students experience being an outsider, to practical help in managing money and finding the
best Web sites, to relaxation techniques like yoga and T'ai Chi Ch'uan. There was also the Fort Edward Youth Court in action and workshops on creativity and ways to have fun. Students organizing the 16th annual
Youth Conference, sponsored by the Warren and Washington county youth bureaus and ACC, stressed practical skill-building more than in the past, said Washington County Youth Bureau Assistant Director Claire
Strohmeyer. "We've gotten into more of the harder skills you need to survive," Strohmeyer said. Those skills include developing good personal and working relationships. Getting along with others requires
accepting people's differences, Warren County Youth Bureau Director Margaret Sing Smith said.
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"Faces in the Crowd," which featured several exercises using masks of people of different sexes, genders, ages, races and personal styles, intended
to show students that they may make more assumptions about people than they're aware of, workshop leaders Donna Hillebrandt and Jan Kenyon said. Hillebrandt and Kenyon, both Hudson Falls middle school teachers,
brought the workshop home with
them from a week of training on tolerance and diversity they received' at the Los-Angeles based Simon Wiesenthal Center last summer. "When I first went to California, I thought I was very accepting to all different types of people. One thing I discovered, I am actually prejudiced. That's a good start, to be aware," Hillebrandt said. She and Kenyon said that prejudice doesn't exist only regarding the more obvious differences, like racial or religious groups, but also occurs in this area on the smaller, everyday level.
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Hillebrandt doesn't always tell people in Hudson Falls that she's from Schuylerville because of people's assumptions that she grew up on a farm, something
some people look down upon. Kenyon said she' s received her share of "dumb blonde” jokes over the years. "We learned that we can look at different people in different ways," North Warren sophomore Lauren Monahan Said after the workshop. "And not judge people so much," chimed in classmate Amber Millington.
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Students said they found the workshops valuable, Sheena St. Louis, a Hartford High School freshman, said she realized during a workshop on developing good
relationships that some she had been in, in the past, were abusive. The workshop provided checklists of relationships, both healthy and unhealthy. Granville High School junior Keighan Chapman got lots of practical
advice on resolving conflicts, while Indian Lake Freshman Benn Bocinski became more aware of his finances.
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Some students, like Warrensburg junior Lia Palermo, who helped organize the conference, said she was involved mostly to get to know more students. "In a
small district, you don't get to meet too many kids," Palermo said.
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