Charleston High School will not limit the teaching of African-American history to students to the month of February this year.

Instead, the school will present a year-round curriculum that will provide students with information about African-American history in place of presenting specific curriculum and programs focusing on the subject during February.

Assistant Principal Trevor Doughty said the issue is too important to be limited to just one month so the school decided to have it interspersed with the rest of the curriculum throughout the entire school year.

Along with providing students a year-round education about African-American history, Doughty said a student/faculty diversity council was formed this year to present some activities focused on diversity in school.

Members of this council could not be reached for comment.

He said this school year would include an expanded discussion on women’s roles in history alongside that of African Americans.

“We’re teaching black history and women’s history throughout the entire school year,” Doughty said.

He said students would be exposed to African-American history through various social studies classes.

He said one example would be “American History from 1929 to the Present,” a class all juniors must take which discusses the details of the Civil Rights movement.

Sociological and civics classes at CHS will also examine African-American history.

Doughty, who taught social studies for 16 years, said students would be given a more detailed description of African-American history when it is presented year-round rather than all being presented in February.

Charrell Barksdale, president of the Black Student Union, said she believes this kind of drawn-out presentation of African-American history will be beneficial to high school students.

“It’s a perfect opportunity for the enhancement of (the students’) culture,” she said.

However, Barksdale said schools should be careful to avoid stressing African-American history in classrooms and not teaching students about other minorities present in this country.

“You don’t want to play favorites with one particular race,” she said.

Barksdale specifically mentioned the growing Latin American population and said schools should shape their discussions of different cultures around the racial makeup of their school.

She said a school with a large population of African-American students should not focus so heavily on African-American history because many of the students will already have a grasp on that history and the influence it had on America.

While schools with less African-American students, like CHS, should focus more on African American and other minority histories because the students would not have a good working knowledge of other cultures’ history, Barksdale added.

She said BSU presented a forum and panel discussion on African-American voting trends called “Blacks Can’t Vote,” which was attended by many members of the Eastern community.

“There’s been a big turnout for everything,” she said.

While CHS and Eastern will have some kind of recognition of African American Heritage Month, the Charleston Carnegie Public Library will not present any programs for the month because of complications with its renovations.

“We’re still having phasing-in problems,” said Ruth Straith, director of public services for the library.

She said the library usually has some displays or bookmarks in celebration of the month, but this year the construction has kept workers too busy to put on any such event.

Other Black History Month events being presented by the Black Student Union:

-Miss Black EIU Pageant will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday in Martin Luther King Jr. University Union Grand Ballroom

-Discussion of African-American marriages in response to a viewing of the movie “Why Did I Get Married?” at 7 p.m. Feb. in Lumpkin Hall.

Jordan Crook can be reached at 581-7945 or jscrook@eiu.edu.