By Julie BUTCHER

On Wednesday, April 19, approximately 150 students at Rosemont Middle School in La Crescenta participated in the school’s second annual “Walk, Talk, & Learn” event “to remember and commemorate the Armenian Genocide and all genocides,” explained event organizer Janna Kasmanian.

During the school’s lunch period, seventh and eighth grade students who wished to participate joined faculty and staff on the upper field, grabbed their lunches, dropped their backpacks, and assembled into walking, talking study groups, each with a student moderator, some with Armenian flags and banners.

An older staff member recounted how many years she went without knowing about the genocide.

“I grew up not knowing. I was 19 years old and starting at the university before I heard even the whispers,” she recalled. “That’s what it’s like to live under communism. Even the professors were afraid to speak about the atrocities, but eventually I came to understand what happened to my people.”

The Armenian Genocide is commemorated each April 24, recalling the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey, in 1915.

Rosemont student Anna Arman was 5 years old when she first became aware of the remembrance.

“My mom got emotional and I was just a little girl but I needed to understand why she was crying,” said Arman. “Ever since then, I’ve thought it was important to learn more and I’ve used every opportunity to learn more, to know my culture and my heritage.”

Walking with one of the groups, U.S. History teacher Lorena Leininger told of her group’s discussion.

“That was so cool! The young woman leading our group was so knowledgeable! I learned stuff I didn’t know from her. One student asked what I thought about the reluctance of the Turkish government to acknowledge the genocide and we were all able to talk about the widely different ways North and South Korea look at the same situation. He’s a Korean student and he really got it.”

Rosemont Middle School students will participate in district-wide commemorative events, Kasmanian noted, but wanted to do something special on campus “to shine a light on La Crescenta as it’s changing into a more inclusive community, accepting of diversity in all shapes and forms.”

“Every culture and every group of students here shares a history of genocide, mass killings, war and violence, slavery. Today is about teaching tolerance and inclusion,” she said.

Kasmanian further explained that the famous Armenian rapper, R-MEAN, would be at the school at the end of the day and joked: “We were going to have him during lunch, but then we decided we needed to get work done this afternoon.”

  Julie BUTCHER