(WTWO/WAWV)– Vigo County Schools Corporation will begin diversity training for all staff in the corporation tomorrow, as part of their response to incidents of racial harassment at West Vigo High School.

The incidents were first reported back in November, when VCSC launched an investigation. Since then, students and staff have received discipline related to the incident, and interim superintendent Tom Balitewicz has outlined the next steps the corporation was taking to address the situation multiple times since he took office in January. Among the proposed initiatives were diversity training for both staff and students and a diversity task force including members from outside VCSC, among other things.

Balitewicz said at last week’s school board meeting training for staff will begin Tuesday. It will be administered by Matthew McClendon, the chief diversity and inclusion officer at VCSC, alongside the project AWARE coordinator, Dr. Megan Kirk. 

“Mr. McClendon and Dr. Kirk will be giving presentations to staff starting on the 21st,” Balitewicz said. “We’ll do the presentation and those trainings in all of our schools.”

Balitewicz said the diversity task force has held several meetings, and is working to establish what the leadership will look like.

“We have a good group together, we’re still working out a couple of details like selecting a cochair for that committee,” Balitewicz said. “We’ll be working on that. Mr. McClendon is our co-chair for the school corporation.”

VCSC will also work with students to offer reminders of some of the resources in place to help handle bullying.

“We want to make sure our students understand that there is a method and a way to report bullying,” he said. “We are going to be doing some training on that in a couple of weeks just to make sure our students understand that we have StopIt. StopIt is an anonymous bullying reporting application on our Chromebooks, and also we have a bullying reporting form.”

We will continue to monitor this story over the coming days and weeks.