Published in The Algemeiner on 6/4/24; Story by Dion Pierre The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has prevailed in its latest civil rights case brought forth on behalf of a North Carolina middle schooler who was bullied for being “perceived” as Jewish. Last week, the nonprofit civil rights group announced that the Community School of Davidson, a charter school located in North Carolina, agreed to settle a complaint alleging that administrators failed to address a series of heinous antisemitic incidents in which the non-Jewish student, whose name is redacted from the public record, was called a “dirty Jew,” told that “the oven is that way,” and battered with other denigrating comments too vulgar for publication. The abuse, according to the complaint, began after the child wore an Israeli sports jersey. To read the rest of this article, click here.
Published in The Algemeiner on 6/4/24; Story by Dion Pierre The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has prevailed in its latest civil rights case brought forth on behalf of a North Carolina middle schooler who was bullied for being “perceived” as Jewish. Last week, the nonprofit civil rights group announced that the Community School of Davidson, a charter school located in North Carolina, agreed to settle a complaint alleging that administrators failed to address a series of heinous antisemitic incidents in which the non-Jewish student, whose name is redacted from the public record, was called a “dirty Jew,” told that “the oven is that way,” and battered with other denigrating comments too vulgar for publication. The abuse, according to the complaint, began after the child wore an Israeli sports jersey. “This is a very important settlement. It reflects the severity of antisemitism we’re now seeing not only on college campuses but also in K-12 schools,” Brandeis Center chairman and former US assistant education secretary Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “This case also shows the various ways in which non-Jews as well as Jews can be harmed by antisemitic attitudes. The law recognizes that discrimination against those ‘perceived’ to be Jewish must be addressed because it is still bigotry, and it can quickly and dangerously multiply and seep into an entire community.” Marcus continued, “We commend the courage of this family including a child for coming forward.” The student, an eight-grader, was threatened and physically assaulted, according to the complaint, which noted that officials at the middle school were aware of the problem but did not take steps to address the daily bullying. As part of the settlement with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Community School of Davidson has agreed, among other things, to issue a statement proclaiming a zero tolerance policy for racist abuse, institute anti-discrimination training for teachers and staff, and “develop or revise” its approach to responding to racial bigotry. “It would be hard to overstate the impact this has had on my child,” the student’s mother said in a statement. “It is critical that educators not only understand the seriousness and danger of letting antisemitism flourish in their schools, but also that they are capable of taking proper action to effectively confront it and protect our children.” This case isn’t the first the Brandeis Center has pursued on behalf of K-12 students. In February, it filed a complaint alleging that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in California has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment. The problem exploded after Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, the suit charged. Since then, BUSD teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic tropes about Israel, weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high-level BUSD officials allegedly ignored complaints about discrimination and tacitly approved hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body. At Berkeley High School, for example, a history teacher allegedly forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary. The teacher sharply squelched dissent, telling a Jewish student who raised concerns about the content of her lessons that only anti-Zionist narratives matter in her classroom and that any other which argues that Israel isn’t an apartheid state is “laughable.” Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher, whose name is redacted from the complaint for matters of privacy, displayed anti-Israel artworks in his classroom, one of which showed a fist punching through a Star of David. At several schools throughout BUSD, students were recruited to assist anti-Zionists teachers in cheering Hamas’ atrocities as “liberation.” They were called on to join “walk outs” and rewarded with excused absences in return for their participation, another violation of district policy forbidding excused absences for all but the most important reasons. These demonstrations became salvos of antisemitic rhetoric. During one organized at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, students shouted “KKK,” “Kill Israel,” “Kill the Jews,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In another incident, the second-grade teacher who threatened a parent instructed her students to write “Stop bombing babies” on sticky notes. The behavior of BUSD teachers and the benefits they offered in exchange for engaging in antisemitic behavior sent a strong signal to students that hating Jews is normal, socially acceptable behavior, the complaint explained. Acting on such approval, they proceeded to bully Jewish students with impunity. “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” a Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School student allegedly told their Jewish classmate. Another called a Jewish student a “midget Jew,” and throughout the district it became a trend to ask Jewish students if they have a “number,” an allusion to tattoos given to Jewish concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust. “The Jewish community was slower than we should have been to grasp the threat posed by antisemitism in higher education. Now we’re in danger of repeating the same problem in elementary and secondary education,” Marcus told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “It is horrifying to acknowledge, but the fact is that the situation in many high schools is starting to replicate some of our most worrisome campuses. Elementary schools are not safe either. One ramification is that college campuses may get even worse, as entering freshmen arrive after having already been indoctrinated while in elementary and secondary schools.”
Play Anti-Semitic bullying reported at Davidson charter school leads to policy changes videoTextBlockModalTitle × Your browser does not support the video tag. DAVIDSON, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS; June 5, 2024) — A Davidson charter school has agreed to make changes around harassment and training after a complaint was filed that detailed a student enduring anti-Semitic bullying from classmates. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a complaint on behalf of the Community School of Davidson student and his family in August of 2023. It says the seventh-grader faced the remarks for two school years. The complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and centered around harassment that occurred between August 2021 through May 2023. It also stated that CSD’s teachers and even administrators knew about the harassment. In documents obtained by Queen City News, the complaint alleged that the student, who is non-Jewish, was bullied by classmates after he wore an Israeli Olympic jersey of his favorite Major League Baseball player. The complaint described “vicious anti-Semitic” comments directed at the middle schooler that also occurred during a class lecture about the Holocaust. The child was said to have been “distressed and isolated by the daily abuse and degradation he endured.” In March of 2023, he notified his mother who reported it to the school administration. It was later reported in findings by the Office for Civil Rights that CSD asked “the teacher to increase their supervision of the students involved and conducted interviews with the students identified.” However, “there is no evidence that after substantiating that harassing conduct occurred in March 2023, the School took steps to address the harassment with the Student to mitigate its effects.” CSD released a statement to Queen City News regarding the complaint: “The Community School of Davidson (“CSD”) was built on the founding principles of community and inclusion. Our mission is to provide an optimal environment for learning in which teachers and parents work together to create an inclusive environment for all students. We abide by all federal and state anti-discrimination laws and will continue to do so. All complaints received by CSD are investigated in accordance with CSD’s policies and procedures, as well as federal and state laws and regulations. “With regard to the complaint filed with OCR, CSD voluntarily entered into a resolution agreement with OCR. OCR made no findings of any wrongdoing on the part of CSD. Instead, CSD agreed to bolster trainings, policies, and routine school activities to ensure the necessary safeguards are implemented to protect all students and staff from discrimination, harassment, and bullying or any perception of the same.“ However, in its analysis of how the school handled its investigation into the complaint the Office of Civil Rights did name instances of “failure.” OCR stated it found evidence to show the student was harassed, thereby creating a “hostile environment,” and that “OCR is concerned that the School failed to consistently take prompt and effective steps to redress the environment. It was also discovered that the school did not properly document its investigation which could have led to the school not properly identifying the hostile environment which led to future abuse. Read the full analysis of the findings here. Before the investigation was complete, OCR and CSD entered into an agreement that included better training for educators to identify instances of hate speech, proper documentation of investigations into these matters, and a future assessment of the climate on campus in the first quarter of 2024-2025. Read the settlement here. The OCR will also follow up with the school to ensure the changes are in place.
Mother of bullied middle-schooler testified at Congressional briefing this month Washington, D.C., May 30, 2024: A North Carolina public charter school agreed to settle a U.S. Department of Education investigation into severe, persistent, and pervasive anti-Semitic bullying that went unaddressed in one of its charter schools for two full academic years. The settlement requires the school to take concrete steps to address the systemic anti-Semitism it allowed to fester in its community. According to the settlement, the Community School of Davidson has entered into a resolution agreement with the Department of Education to resolve a federal complaint filed by The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law on behalf of a non-Jewish eighth-grade boy who faced daily abuse after he wore the Israeli Olympic jersey of his favorite Major League Baseball player. From that moment on he was treated with vicious, severe and relentless harassment and bullying by a group of nine classmates for being a Jew. He was called “dirty Jew,” “filthy Jew,” and “penny picker upper,” and told to “get in the gas chamber,” “go back to your concentration camp,” “go to your oven Jew,” “the oven is that way,” and “go die Jew.” The bullying occurred every single day all over school, even during Holocaust class, for two years. He was also threatened and physically assaulted. Officials at the middle school were fully aware of the problem yet they refused to take steps to address the daily bullying and physical assaults. “It would be hard to overstate the impact this has had on my child,” said the boy’s mother, who asked that her name and her son’s name be withheld, during a recent congressional briefing on Capitol Hill about rising anti-Semitism in K-12 schools. “As a parent this has been completely devastating.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin, including discrimination against Jews, or those perceived to be Jewish, on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics in educational institutions that receive federal funding. In the settlement, the Department of Education confirmed that the evidence substantiated the Brandeis Center’s claim that the child was subjected to a hostile environment based on his perceived Jewish shared ancestry, and that the school knew about it and did not take prompt and effective steps to address it or the broader hostile environment at the school. The Department of Education went on to admonish the school for failing to properly investigate, failing to take “timely, reasonable, and effective steps to eliminate the hostile environment,” and failing to “put in effective supports for bystanders who may have witnessed the antisemitic comments and experienced the impact of a hostile environment,” and it cautioned that these failures “may have impeded the School from identifying whether a hostile environment existed for other students.” “This is a very important settlement. It reflects the severity of anti-Semitism we’re now seeing not only on college campuses but also in K-12 schools. This case also shows the various ways in which non-Jews as well as Jews can be harmed by anti-Semitic attitudes. The law recognizes that discrimination against those ‘perceived’ to be Jewish must be addressed because it is still bigotry, and it can quickly and dangerously multiply and seep into an entire community. We commend the courage of this family including a child for coming forward,” stated Kenneth L. Marcus, chair of the Brandeis Center and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. The agreement requires the school to take the following immediate steps: Publish and publicize a statement that it does not tolerate “acts of harassment based on a student’s actual or perceived race, color, or national origin including shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics (e.g. antisemitism)”; Review and revise its policies and procedures for non-discrimination and reporting to ensure it specifies prohibited harassment based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics,” including providing examples of harassment based on shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics; Develop or revise procedures for documenting complaints of harassment and actions taken in response by the school; Annual trainings of school staff and administrators on anti-discrimination law under Title VI, including actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics; Conduct annual trainings of staff involved in processing, investigating, and resolving complaints of discrimination and harassment, including “racial sensitivity training, including on the basis of actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics”; Develop a student informational program for students to address discrimination including on the basis of actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics; Conduct audits for the last two school years to determine if any incidents constituted discrimination including harassment on basis of actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnicity, and if they find harassment occurred, the school must take steps to remedy the harassment towards affected students; Conduct an audit at the end of the 2024-25 school year to assess compliance with the school’s anti-discrimination policies and procedures; and Conduct a climate assessment during 2024-25 school year and ensure parents and students have access to a counselor to discuss incidents and concerns. The Department of Education indicated that it will monitor the Community School of Davidson until it determines it is in compliance with the terms of the settlement and the law. “The fact that the school would ignore this is reprehensible,” stated Marcus. “Unfortunately, though, far too many K-12 school districts and universities are taking the easy way out and allowing schools to become hostile environments for Jews, and by default anyone perceived to be Jewish. We urge the Department of Education to resolve other pending cases expeditiously so we can begin to turn the tide on this dangerous wave of anti-Semitism.” The boy’s mother added, “It is critical that educators not only understand the seriousness and danger of letting anti-Semitism flourish in their schools, but also that they are capable of taking proper action to effectively confront it and protect our children.” The Brandeis Center also filed a federal complaint against Berkeley Unified School District and is suing the New York Department of Education for unaddressed anti-Semitism in K-12 schools. And the Department of Education is currently investigating Brandeis Center complaints for unaddressed anti-Semitism on numerous college campuses, including Wellesley, SUNY New Paltz, the University of Southern California, Brooklyn College, and the University of Illinois. The organization also recently filed complaints against American University, UC Santa Barbara, Occidental College, Pomona College, UMass-Amherst, and Ohio State University.