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Chattanooga: Building a community one clip at a time

By: Lauren Gregory
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Alison Lebovitz

Like most people, Whitwell Middle School Principal Linda Hooper used to think a paper clip was just a little piece of metal that wasn’t worth much more than its ability to bind documents together.

But today she wears one around her neck as a constant reminder that the everyday office supply has taken on an awesome new power: the ability to link people of different generations, races and belief systems.

“It’s the little things that change the world. The people who have made some of the most powerful statements are not the most powerful people,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye as she recalled the Whitwell Middle project that started it all in 1998 — gathering 11 million paper clips to honor the 11 million people killed during the Holocaust of World War II.

Staff Photo by Allison Kwesell Linda Hooper, the principal at Whitwell Middle School, stands inside a holocaust boxcar from the Children's Holocaust Memorial at Whitwell Middle School. The boxcar holds 11 million paper clips honoring holocaust victims.

Mrs. Hooper has spent the past decade talking about how Whitwell learned the lessons of tolerance, kindness and activism, a journey so powerful it received international attention through the 2004 documentary “Paper Clips.” Now, with the help of One Clip at a Time, a new Chattanooga-based nonprofit inspired by the film, she is ready to spend the next 10 years helping every fifth grader in the country learn for themselves.

One Clip has developed a pilot curriculum that 16 local public and private schools will introduce this year, said Alison Lebovitz, the nonprofit’s president. Though they won’t actually be collecting paper clips as the Whitwell students did, she said, they will take their cues from that class.

Ten years ago, Whitwell students set out to gather paper clips because they discovered that Norwegians wore them on their lapels during World War II in silent protest of Adolf Hitler’s regime. They originally hoped to gather six million — the number of Jewish victims — but changed their goal to 11 million — the total who died — after receiving an outpouring of media attention and support.

They placed the clips in an authentic German railroad cattle car used to transport Holocaust victims to their deaths. The clips remain at Whitwell in an exhibit that draws spectators to the school from across the globe, according to Mrs. Hooper.

Whitwell Middle has long since stopped asking for clip donations — its collection having ballooned to more than 30 million, with new additions arriving in the mail as recently as this week — but supporters of the program do not want to see its momentum slow.

One Clip will ensure that it won’t, said Mrs. Lebovitz, who each day donates her time to help perpetuate Paper Clips’ lessons. More than 20 new participants already have signed up for teacher training this fall, she said, and she hopes to take the program county-wide and hopefully even to a few other cities by 2009.

“make a difference”

Kathy Lanza, head of St. Peter’s Episcopal School in Chattanooga, is excited to add the curriculum to her students’ lessons on tolerance for the first time this year.

“I had used the movie itself before, but I’m really looking forward to getting into (the One Clip program) with our students,” she said. “The one thing I really liked about the approach is that it’s teaching that you can make a difference. As just one student, you can make a difference in the world.”

Mrs. Lebovitz believes it won’t be long before the program spreads even farther than that — she’s already had teachers from California to South Africa begging her for material, she said.

Mrs. Lebovitz has obtained $15,000 in seed money from the Lebovitz Family Trust to cover startup costs and a $7,000 Community Foundation grant to help cover teacher training. She managed to find plenty of local professionals willing to donate the time to develop a logo, fact sheets and press releases.

She then appealed to several educators to help develop a five-lesson teaching kit that includes ideas for interactive group activities, each stemming from a short segment from the “Paper Clips” documentary.

Though students come away with a good knowledge of the Holocaust — much more than what is covered in the few paragraphs in their traditional textbooks — the One Clip program is about much more than that, Mrs. Lebovitz said.

In one of the activities, for example, the teacher gives students photographs of influential figures such as Rosa Parks, the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the Civil Rights era, and Betty Friedan, one of the original voices of equal rights for women. Students are asked to make assumptions about the people based on their photographs before learning about their actual accomplishments, Mrs. Lebovitz said, and they often marvel over the difference between stereotypes and reality.

“This is tolerance education,” she explained. “It became a way to get students thinking about altering their decisions and making choices that are more accepting and more understanding. It’s a natural transition to making them social activists. The project was one paper clip at a time. Now, we’re teaching about it one film clip at a time.”

focus on diversity

A group of students at Normal Park Elementary were able to catch a sneak preview of the program at the end of last year during a pre-pilot test. By the end of the course, they were raving about it and had developed action plans to better their community, deciding to do things such as picking up litter to help make the world a better place, Mrs. Lebovitz said.

Normal Park Assistant Principal Robin Cayce said she was wary of introducing the curriculum as a fifth-grade teacher last year because she wasn’t sure how the violent images of the Holocaust would impact such young, impressionable students.

But she didn’t have to worry.

“I was surprised and moved often by the maturity of the children,” she said. “We were drawing together as a community, and it really helped us focus on diversity. We realized we were really fortunate to be in a diverse setting.”

Joyce Tatum, Normal Park’s museum liaison, helped design the curriculum and believes fifth grade is the perfect year for it.

“Fifth-graders are not set in a way of thinking that middle-school kids are,” she said. “It’s not all about me when you’re in the fifth grade as it is in middle school. So if we can teach them to think in this way at this age, we can achieve two things: They will be good citizens, and they will be empowered to take action.”

It worked for Caleb George, an 11-year-old sixth-grader who was in Ms. Cayce’s class last year. Caleb said One Clip was by far his favorite part of fifth grade.

“We didn’t do it just to do it,” he said. “We did it to learn and to help people, and see what it feels like to help people. We felt free, like we were able to do our own thing, and that anything is possible.”

Classmate Devin Graham, also 11, said she was so inspired that she’ll use her new outreach skills to collect for UNICEF while she trick-or-treats this Halloween. Her bravado, she said, came from “watching the other kids, and how they figured out how to do something so big.”

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