The Black History Month Committee will be holding events during block lunch everyday in February to celebrate Black History Month.

“Well, this year, [principal Scot Finch] Finch allowed me to create a committee,” English II teacher Jason Snipes said. “We decided to come up with programming for every day of the month for Black History Month. So this will be the second year we’re doing a program that’s set aside during school hours for us to educate and entertain our audience at the same time.”

The events include open forums, where students can openly discuss a topic each session, and appearances from various universities.

“We are holding truth forums, which is where we openly discuss issues of race, cultural appropriation, and all of those ideas,” Snipes said. “As a matter of fact, the first forum will be Thursday [February 1]. We’re going to talk about the N-word, what the N-word means and who should or shouldn’t be using it.”

The Black History Month Committee is made up of teachers and a few students. Snipes said the students on the committee are the larger reason for the open forums, because they provided the topics they felt needed to be discussed.

“Most of the committee is teachers, so they wanted some students on the committee to get their input on what they wanted as well,” committee member sophomore Sumana Syed said.

The Black History Month program will be held Feb. 16, during B block, in the auditorium. This is the main event celebrating Black History Month.

“We’ll have performances, we’ll have dramatic recitations, we’ll have the arts and a dynamic speaker to deliver the message,” Snipes said. “I’m looking forward to that celebration. I want to encourage everybody, both students and staff, to come out and really educate ourselves about one another.”

At the end of the month, there will be a spoken word session where students can recite poetry or talk.

“[The spoken word session] is kind of like a poetry slam and students can express themselves,” Syed said. “That’s going to be at the end to kind of celebrate what we’ve learned during Black History Month.”

Snipes said everything planned by the committee was what they thought the student body needed to hear about.

“I want to give an opportunity for not only voices to be heard but an opportunity for people who would not normally hear those messages to listen,” Snipes said.