Community members are accusing Park City School District administrators and Board of Education members of not doing enough to address a rash of anti-Semitic and racist incidents within schools.
The incidents include a drawing of a swastika and the N-word found on a desk earlier this month in the Park City High School classroom of a social studies teacher, who says he has documented more than 60 recent incidents of this kind.
“The vandalism in the classroom was anti-Semitic and a painful attack on all of us,” Josh Goldberg, who is Jewish, said Tuesday at a Board of Education meeting. “It wasn’t just on me.”
Goldberg said he knows of a number of incidents that were reported to the district, “which were not dealt with or swept under the rug and I think people have had it.” Many of those incidents occurred at the high school, Treasure Mountain Junior High and Ecker Hill Middle School, he said.
“We need a cultural shift, a major significant and cultural shift, to occur from the top on down,” Goldberg said.
Park City High School Principal Roger Arbabi emailed a letter on Feb. 10 urging students and members of the community to report any hate speech they encounter.
“The administrative team in conjunction with our counselors and teachers will be working to provide learning opportunities for our students to identify and stop hate speech,” the principal’s letter says.
Arbabi — who has met with teachers, students and leaders of minority communities about the situation — also reiterates in his letter that language that espouses hatred has no place in the community.
The Board of Education members released a statement on Tuesday saying they stand with those who have been targeted by hateful actions and that they will continue to investigate the incidents.
“How we respond together will dictate how we move forward as a community in combating hate and bigotry,” the statement says. “When our students use graffiti and words to spew hatred it must be a teaching experience dealt with by not only our schools but our entire community.”
The statement also says some community members have responded to the news of the incidents with harsh words and accusations that the board and Superintendent Jill Gildea are “complicit in the propagation of hate.”
“Email campaigns and personal attacks and nasty comments on social media against the board and administration are misplaced, unnecessary, and further perpetuate division in our community,” the statement says. “It feels particularly harmful given that the majority of the school board is in fact Jewish.”
Gildea released a separate statement on Tuesday saying any incident of racist messaging is additional evidence of the need to find ways to talk constructively and respectfully about diversity, religion and race.
“I am encouraged by the efforts of our staff and students to lean into challenging conversations about race by creating a task force to further research, review and generate action plans that halt intolerant speech or behavior in its tracks,” Gildea’s statement says.
But in a letter published in The Park Record, Rabbi David Levinsky and President Casey Lebwohl of Temple Har Shalom claim there still are no plans to treat the hate speech occurrences as a systemic problem and that the board has not presented a coherent vision of how to change the culture of the schools.
“This is not an isolated occurrence or simply the actions of a teenager trying to be cool and edgy,” the two say of the incident in Goldberg’s classroom. “We have a cultural problem in our schools that allows such behavior to continue relatively unchecked. The district and the school board remain respectively ineffective and silent to our calls to treat this as a larger problem.”
The letter calls for Gildea to institute district-wide changes that include anti-bias training by a nationally recognized organization and a K-12 diversity curriculum.
“I feel that the way to address this issue is not to treat it as individual incidents but to treat it as a larger cultural problem, a Park City cultural problem, a school cultural problem,” Levinsky told The Park Record. “We would applaud any district-wide effort while continuing to advocate for cultural change in our schools.”
In response to a request for comment about the assertion that the incidents are not being treated as a systemic and cultural problem, Gildea said Thursday in an email to The Park Record that the district is in the process of enlisting the support of both internal and external partners “to provide insights, ideas and resources.” She said several state agencies have offered assistance.
“Moving beyond regulations and procedures such as implementing consequences and restorative practices when a breach or violation of policy or rules occurs, we are called to do more — examine bias or unconscious bias, ensure training is provided to all so that we recognize … when an incident occurs and immediately correct and redirect it,” Gildea said.