3
Wallkill Valley Times, Wednesday, March 13, 2019
O dyssey of the M ind winners
Orange/Ulster BOCES photo
E.J. Russell Elementary students celebrated their first-place finish in the Mid-Hudson Regional Odyssey of the Mind Region 5 Tournament, Saturday, run by Orange-Ulster BOCES. They won a
first-place in Problem 4: Structure Toss and will advance to the New York State Odyssey of the Mind Tournament on March 23, 2019 at SUNY Binghamton.
School district again responds to anti-semitism charges
Continued from page 1
of 2,300 Pine Bush students surveyed,” the letter stated.
Attorney Ilann Maazel, attorney with Emery, Celli,
Brinckerhoff and Abady, said the district needs to do
more to combat anti-Semitism, such as introducing
harsher punishments for students who commit acts of
racism.
“There is still a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic
conduct in the school district, and that’s unacceptable,”
Maazel said. “It needs to change, and I hope the school
district redoubles its efforts over the next year to attack
this problem.”
Five Jewish students sued for discrimination and the
district’s inability to react to that discrimination in 2012,
citing drawings of swastikas, white power chants, Nazi
salutes, harassment, bullying and more.
In 2015, the suit ended in a $4.48 million settlement
from the district, who also agreed to implement changes
to its curriculum and policies to combat bullying, racism
and anti-Semitism and to conduct student surveys such
as this one to track its progress.
The school launched an aggressive response to the
lawsuit with programs in conjunction with the Anti-
Defamation League (ADL), the Southern Poverty Law
Center, Sandy Hook Promise, Safe School Ambassadors
and the Orange County District Attorney.
Examples of programs include the No Place for Hate
campaign, the training of middle and high school peer
leaders, the ADL’s anti-bullying “Be an Ally” program,
student assemblies and programs designed to specifically
address bullying, bias and discrimination with follow-
up classroom discussions, and educational curriculum
initiatives such as lesson plans from the ADL website.
Other examples of new curriculum include the Sandy
Hook Promise programs “Start with Hello,” and “Say
Something,” which teaches elementary students to reach
out to others they don’t frequently socialize with and
recognize signs of at-risk behaviors.
Students, parents, staff or anyone else in the district
can report incidents through the SpeakUP app, which
allows individuals to text or call a phone number or
email the district to report threats of violence, bullying,
weapons brought to school, peers in crisis and other
urgent situations.
The district has also brought Holocaust survivors to
speak with students and provided training for teachers in
conjunction with Israel’s Holocaust Center, Yad Vashem.
The school districts’ programs focus on three main
areas: prevention, intervention and correction.
Prevention educates students about each other’s
differences and teaches them they can get along with
someone who is different from them. Intervention
quickly responds to incidents of intolerance and stops
the negative behavior. And correction teaches students
who commit acts of intolerance why their behavior is
wrong and how to correct it.
Superintendent Tim Mains said the district is doing
everything it can to stop intolerance. The district’s job is
to teach students to respect others’ differences and how
certain behaviors may be hurtful to other people.
“I think we’re already doing all the things we need to
do,” Mains said.
Mains added those programs will continue indefinitely
and the district is constantly tweaking and adding to
them. If the district discovers different avenues to combat
intolerance, it explores and adds new programs too.
The survey did show improvements.
In the 2018-19 survey, 32 percent of students selected
agree or strongly agree to the question, “Since September
2017, students in our school have heard anti-Semitic
slurs, observed inappropriate actions in conjunction
with anti-Semitic epithets, or observed swastikas in our
buildings.”
In the same question in the 2017-18 survey, 44 percent
of students selected agree or strongly agree, a 27 percent
decrease.
The positive trends in Pine Bush come as anti-Semitism
surges in New York. According to the ADL, the total
number of anti-Semitic incidents increased by 90 percent
from 2016 to 2017, and incidents in K-12 schools doubled,
from 18 in 2016 to 36 in 2017. New York experiences the
most anti-Semitic incidents out of any U.S. state, with one
out of every five incidents occurring in New York.
“The fact that you look at statistics around the country
and this problem is increasing elsewhere and it’s not
increasing here, we must be doing something right,”
Mains said.
Mains said that while there are always consequences
to negative actions, harsher punishments miss the area of
correction, and aren’t as effective in stopping intolerance.
“We don’t just react and punish,” Mains said, “we try
to educate.”
The survey question the law firm referenced was
created by that firm. Mains said the question was flawed
because it had too many examples, confusing language
and language that many high schoolers and most middle
schoolers would not understand.
While the surveys provide useful information, they do
not capture the number of actual incidents, Mains said.
The district will always be concerned about any acts
of intolerance, Mains said.
“Any time we see or hear bias it concerns us,” Mains
said, “and our responsibility is to teach, to help kids learn
how to be successful in a pluralistic society.”