60 Sibley Students Study Ethical Dilemmas in Rotary Seminar

Sixty Henry Sibley High School students got a chance to discuss ethics and integrity Thursday during a seminar hosted by The West St. Paul-Mendota Heights Rotary Club and the University of St. Thomas.

Students, Rotary volunteers and members of the local business community sat around tables and talked about ethical quandaries.

Nancy Allen-Mastro, the District 197 superintendent, told the Southwest Review that students were selected for the seminar by their teachers on the basis of leadership potential.

“This is really when they’re shaping their views and establishing their behaviors that they’ll carry into their work,” she told the paper. “If they don’t have those tools to process things, then they might be more subject to negative influences.”

The Southwest Review wrote more about the event in a preview story:

At the event, students will be seated six to a table with a Rotary volunteer, who will act as the table monitor. The event is sponsored in part by local businesses at a donation of $100 per table. Representatives from sponsoring business are encouraged to attend lunch and talk with students about how ethics play a role in their business practices.

Allen-Mastro said the involvement of local businesspeople is especially important, because it gives kids concrete examples of ethical dilemmas from people who might well be their future employers.

“They put the kids in touch with the real world beyond the classroom,” Allen-Mastro said.

After lunch, students are assigned distinct roles within a quasi corporation and then presented hypothetical situations to work through, with prompting from their table monitors.