On Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, school was closed and a science teacher offered to take 70 high school students to see the Holocaust movie "Schindler's List," although they begged to see "House Party 3." When a trip to the ice-skating rink was thrown in to sweeten the deal, they accepted.

But the field trip ended abruptly when theater patrons complained that some of the Castlemont High School students, most of whom are black, had laughed at a scene in which a Nazi soldier casually shoots a Jewish woman. The theater owner stopped the projector, turned on the lights and told the students to leave.

Although students publicly apologized a few days later, life at Castlemont High has been disrupted ever since. The incident has put the school in the intense spotlight of the news media and drawn the attention of government officials. Several classes have been canceled for assemblies and workshops, where students have listened to historians, psychologists and counselors talk about tolerance, black history and the news media.

On Monday, classes were canceled again for yet another assembly. This time, the speaker was Steven Spielberg, the director of "Schindler's List."