As I strolled past room 230 one day, I noticed an abnormally large clump of people. Some faces glowed with excitement, while others looked disappointedly towards the ground. The list of students going on the Spring Cultural Relations retreat had come out.

Cultural Relations is seen as a weekend to step out of your comfort zone and meet new people, gain emotional fulfillment and connect with peers. The retreat is full of opportunities difficult to get in school.

However, from 1993 to 2005, the Bulldogs attempted to culturally relate on weekdays between 7:40 and 2:15.

“It started after the riots of 1993. Garfield wanted to address the racial issues that had been going on,” said Carol Burton, faculty advisor of CORE, the student facilitators. “The intent was to get the kids to talk about the racial dynamic of Garfield and the greater community at a retreat and to develop facilitators to talk about these issues.”

Instead of today’s retreat, which is open to anyone, a large group of facilitators were selected and taken on a weekend retreat to learn leadership skills and how to direct forums with their peers. Then they would come back to Garfield and host Cultural Week, which all students were required to attend.

A few years after this was started the quality of the discussions diminished, students stopped showing up, and teachers became aggravated with their loss of class time and the inappropriate way forums were held.

“There were an enormous amount of issues because it meant you had to give up contact time with your students, and students would run the classroom. Teachers would just sit in there,” Burton explained.

Garfield Language Arts teacher Steve Miranda, who was involved with CORE before ’05, also noticed how upset teachers got during Cultural Week.

“Teachers were trying to do labs, but the whole week we didn’t have a long day,” he said. “It was just cutting into too much class time. It became too logistically difficult to make that work.”

Once teachers expressed their disapproval with the loss of class time, the inappropriate way topics were brought up came under scrutiny as well. This gave Cultural Relations a “horrible, negative stereotype,” said Burton.

“Kids were talking about sex in class, with no guidance or control to the discussions,” said Burton. “And the racial discussions got really heated and weird, but not in a positive direction.”

Miranda agreed that the forums grew to be very tactless and awful. “You’d hear people say, ‘Oh yeah I was in this workshop on sexuality,’ and it just evolved into this conversation about oral sex and who does it and who doesn’t and who does it well, and — you know.”

Once the teachers stopped taking it seriously, and the discussions got to be awful, the students viewed Cultural Week as a complete joke.

Imani Sims, Garfield graduate in the class of ’03, remembers a specific event that showed how disturbing the forums were starting to become.

In 2002, the starting line-up for the boy’s varsity basketball team decided to lead a forum on sexuality in the old auditorium.

They pulled down the projector screen as the room filled up, and in order to teach their peers about sex, they showed a porn movie to all willing students.

Some students were intrigued, but Sims was disgusted and decided just to skip the rest of the forums.

“I had people coming to me saying, ‘Are you coming to the auditorium? They’re sitting in there watching a porno,’” Sims recalls.

While the porn may have been attractive to some, the amount of constructive discussions grew smaller, and the number of students skipping and going to Starbucks or to their friend’s houses grew larger.

Because it was virtually impossible to track down 1,500 kids in this sort of structure, CORE started to focus on the retreat portion of Cultural Relations. The in-school forums were moved to an early dismissal day but again, students didn’t show up. All school forums were soon abolished completely and moved to retreats.

While Cultural Week seemed to be a five-day period of chaos and immaturity, current senior CORE member Dylan Koutsky believes the ’05 Cultural Relations was a turning point because of the introduction of identity talks.

An identity talk is the discussion that takes place on Cultural Relations, where anyone is welcome to talk about their experiences, stories and feelings that shape who they are today. They can be fails or triumphs and can go for as long or short as you want.

“It became more personal [after identity talks were instituted],” said Koutsky. “I like to think it had a deeper impact on those who were able to experience it.”

Though reducing the amount of students attending Cultural Relations from around 1,500 to about 100 is a huge step that may seem negative, Koutsky thinks it was a positive change.

“I think they have evolved for a reason. They both have their perks, but I think the program has changed to cater better to Garfield students now since the school is also completely different than it used to be.”

Despite the unpopularity of Cultural Week at Garfield back in the day, it may make a comeback sometime next year.

“I don’t know that CORE is going to try and organize that now,” said Burton. “It might be something that next year’s CORE should have on their agenda.”

“There are certain kids that you don’t get a chance to reach that probably would benefit from this. But the thing is, if it’s mandatory, you’re going to get the kids that don’t want to be there.”

Even though it’s iffy, because Cultural Relations is such an important and unique part of Garfield, it could be beneficial to bring it to during the school day.

“Whenever you let the teachers be quiet and let the kids speak the truth, there’s a lot of power in that,” said Burton. “I think it’s worth doing, it just has to be carefully crafted.”