Education Week - August 22, 2018 - 17

Photos by Daryl Peveto
for Education Week

WHERE HATE-RELATED SPEECH IS REPORTED
Students who attend schools in the suburbs are more likely to report being the
target of hate speech, compared to rural and urban areas.

Council Rock High School North in
Newtown, Pa., where a series of
hate-fueled incidents have
caused many students to feel
unsafe.
BELOW: One of the many planned
communities that make up
Newtown, Pa. Part of Bucks
County, Newtown was a former
farming community that has since
been developed into a suburban
enclave of Philadelphia.

8.3%

SUBURBAN

6.5%
URBAN

4.9%
RURAL

Note: Refers to the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) status of the respondent's
household as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Categories include "central city of an
MSA (Urban)," "in MSA but not in central city (Suburban)," and "not MSA (Rural)."

STUDENTS REPORT SEEING HATE GRAFFITI ON CAMPUS BY RACE
27 percent of all students reported seeing hate-related graffiti at school in 2015,
a decrease from 36 percent in 1999, when data were first collected.

29% 25 27 30
18
the words "Council Rock criminals."
Last year, a middle school teacher in the
Council Rock district draped a Confederate
flag on her classroom wall, while a district
contractor showed up at a school during a
session of basketball camp with a large Confederate flag hoisted from his truck. After
parents on the diversity council said they
were offensive, the flags were removed.
Schools have long been a venue for bias
and harassment, where targeted students
can feel threatened and unwelcome and
where parents worry about their children's
physical safety. And administrators often falter in dealing with the ugliness-in both the
immediate aftermath and over the longerterm to confront deeper-seated hate and bias
in their school communities.
K-12 leaders must first investigate and
identify the motivation for the incidents,
Temkin said, and then establish whether
there are solutions such as anti-bias training and multicultural education that could
address the problem.
"We know how adults respond to incidents
affects the entire climate of the school, as
in saying that these incidents are not okay
and not the norm," Temkin said. "However,
there is some assumption on the part of the
parents of what a school should do that may
not align to what a school should or can do."

Often, Temkin said, school leaders and
teachers may feel pressure to discipline those
who commit the hateful acts, but doing so can
undermine aiming for a more sustainable
outcome in trying to push back on the bias
itself. The two main areas to focus on should
be making sure kids who were targeted feel
safe and delving into why the perpetrators of
the bias incidents are acting that way.
While data on hate-related incidents in
schools is skimpy at best, the U.S. Department of Justice polls students periodically
about the issue as part of its National Crime
Victimization Survey. In 2015, the most recent school crime survey, more than 25 percent of students reported seeing hate-related
graffiti in their schools. That same survey
also revealed that the majority of students
who reported being a target of hate-related
words attend suburban schools.

The Pain Runs 'Deep'
Public schools in America's suburban communities are increasingly likely to be the
most diverse, with majority white student
enrollments giving way to an influx of students from a variety of racial, ethnic, and
cultural backgrounds.
Schools like Council Rock North High,
where 88 percent of students are white, 1.5

White Black Hispanic Asian Other
Note: "Other" includes American Indians/Alaska Natives, Pacific Islanders, and persons
of two or more races.

SOURCES: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2015.

percent are black, and 2 percent are Latino.
For Jayla Johnson, 17, who graduated from
Council Rock North in June, the post-election spewing of hate and intolerance was not
new. The African-American student said she
had heard classmates use racial slurs and
praise the Ku Klux Klan.
"I don't think my classmates and teachers
really grasp the pain we feel," Jayla said. "It
runs deep."
Her older sister Janai, who graduated in
2013, had encountered a racist threat written
on a wall in a girls' bathroom during her sophomore year: "I'm going to kill all the niggers."
The names of black students were listed,
PAGE 18 >

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