Local teachers share Classrooms without Borders experience

YOUNGSTOWN -- While many have interacted with World War II's history through lectures, history books or videos, Rebecca Baxter of Howland said her trip to Holocaust sites in Poland was a "brain-changing experience."

"It (the trip) made it into a very four-dimensional kind of experience that is transformative -- like you're sitting in this area, and you're walking on the grass, and you can hear the rocks crumbling underneath your feet," said Baxter, a Champion Local Schools Title III coordinator and science and multi-language teacher. "And you know that you're not the first person to walk here, but you're still a person that is alive."

"We would sit on the side of the bunkers where the Holocaust victims were forced to live for years, and you imagine them living there -- and you feel the breeze. When we were there, it was so hot. It was a historic heat wave -- 110 degrees."

Baxter was just one of four area teachers who traveled to Poland to study the Holocaust in the locations where it happened for 11 days in June -- visiting former Jewish communities, ghettos, concentration camps and extermination camps to understand the destruction of European Jewish lives and what existed before it happened.

The journey was courtesy of Classrooms Without Borders, an organization that seeks to open minds and hearts via learning experiences designed to empower educators and transform education while fighting anti-Semitism and other types of bigotry.

Brian Bugos, a history and psychology teacher at Newton Falls High School who chaperoned six students on the trip and toured Poland last year with the program, said this year's trip was equally overwhelming, but different because he was experiencing it with those students.

"To watch those students, those young kids have those experiences and to hear them reflect upon those experiences, was really powerful for me as an educator," Bugos said.

He said one of the locations on the tour was House 88, the home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss, where his children lived.

"If you look out their bedroom windows, Auschwitz is at most 15 yards away. Like, there's a very clear view of the buildings at Auschwitz, and the gas chamber's about 40 yards away out of a large pane glass window," Bugos said. "There's many experiences like that, that the kids had, that one was very powerful, and it was hard for the kids to try and understand how any parent could put their child in that setting."

Baxter, like Bugos, noted that the trip was the "best professional development that a teacher could go on," with Baxter adding that Classrooms Without Borders organizers told them that their learning isn't over and helped them create projects from the trip to bring to students.

Baxter said that, with her mixed background in science and languages, she's starting to partner with the Mahoning County Amateur Radio Club after she was inspired by a Holocaust speaker who spoke about making homebrew radios because her family couldn't have outside contact outside of Nazi propaganda.

"We are going to partner together to set up a lab, an experiment where the students take found objects that would be available for Holocaust victims to make, and it's called -- it's a crystal radio," Baxter said. "Then the second part that is tailored to my class, is the communication piece -- English language learners have to work on reading and writing, but listening as well."

Tim Nowery, an English teacher at Bristol High School, who noted that there were 90 other people on the trip, said he's also made some friends in the Cleveland and Pittsburgh area because of it.

"You travel alone at first, and then we came home and we knew a lot of people," Nowery said. "One of the weirdest parts of the trip was how heavy some of the moments were, but then, at the same time, you have this huge amount of camaraderie, where you're on the tour bus and you're sharing a candy bar, after a really tragic story."

The fourth teacher who made the journey was Diana Farrell, a history teacher at Union Area Middle/High School in New Castle, Pa.