In 1998, Sandra Roberts, a Language Arts teacher at Whitwell Middle School, was invited to help create a voluntary after-school Holocaust education program focused on teaching tolerance and diversity. When her students, mostly white and Christian, struggled to grasp the enormity of six million Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust, they asked if they could collect something to represent each life. Together, they decided on paper clips, one for every soul. This effort became known as the “Paper Clips Project” and grew over several years. In 2001, the school dedicated the Children’s Holocaust Memorial, which features an authentic German railcar filled with a portion of the more than 30 million paper clips collected. Thank you, Sandra, for using your classroom as a platform to help your students understand tolerance and take a stand for humanity.
