Guest column by Steven Sellers Lapham.
In his guest column, “MCPS is Failing to Protect Jewish Children,” Joel Rubin decries acts of antisemitism by young people. Our schools must be physically and emotionally safe spaces, but Rubin’s “solution” is counterproductive. He calls, five times, for punishment, e.g., “start meting out punishment along with education, and … tell the public that punishment has been carried out.” But is this a truly useful solution to bullying? Multiple studies of programs like Scared Straight and zero tolerance reveal that the answer is clearly “no.”
How is an alienated, morally confused thirteen-year-old boy going to feel and think after being “punished by the Jews”? Will suspending him deepen his alienation and isolation? Might that lead to the child’s resentment festering, he ups the ante, and decides to act on fantasies of revenge, perhaps with a gun? That’s an all-too-familiar story in America.
Concrete Alternatives to Punishment
Rubin does mention MCPS’s Restorative Justice efforts. Let’s all learn more about that approach, rather than calling for changes in the school district’s budget, curriculum, and disciplinary policies. As educators and counselors refine this nascent program, let’s give it a chance to work.
A retired school counselor suggests that school staff “should respond to acts of antisemitic bullying as they would to any other incident of bullying” and recommends these practices:
- Schools must create a culture in which bullying of all kinds is clearly described and strongly opposed. Students must hear repeatedly that they must treat each other with respect no matter how they feel about someone. Every staff member in the building needs to model and reinforce that behavior.
- Administrators must investigate bullying incidents carefully. Understanding what happened and identifying perpetrators is not always straightforward; perpetrators can be hard to identify, especially if the incident consists of signs or symbols left for the target to discover. Accusing someone falsely must be avoided.
- The peer pressure to keep silent can be intense on kids. Give witnesses the tools and protection to disclose what they have seen. Keeping witnesses safe from perpetrators is not an easy task, especially in a large school.
- Give victims the tools and the emotional support to help them take care of themselves and find allies to support them. Allies are critical.
- Whenever verifiable evidence permits it, identify perpetrators and confronted them with their behavior in the spirit of Restorative Justice. Often their parents need to be brought in.
- It’s likely that both victim and perpetrator can benefit from counseling. The counselor has to discover the answers to questions such as these: What groups is he following on his cell phone? What kind of “lessons” is this child learning from his parents? And, conversely, what encouragement and support is he receiving from adults to explore and enjoy the healthy activities that a public school has to offer?
- Administrators must articulate clear consequences for continued bullying behavior, such as a loss of freedom of movement within the school during lunch hour, but there is no “one-size-fits-all punishment.”
- Children who bully need adult intervention and support to see the world and themselves differently and to learn better behaviors. The source of bullying behavior is a desire for power and control. Taking away that power to bully is crucial.
- It is not necessarily productive to force a perpetrator to sit down with a victim, discuss the incident(s), and apologize. That can often do more harm than good, eliciting insincere remorse from the perpetrator and/or imposing more trauma on the victim. Making amends, which must happen voluntarily, often requires significant change in the bully’s view of himself and the world. This type of change takes time, and schools alone can’t cause it to happen.
Public Policy about Bullying
If, as Rubin says, we should be concerned with “all of our children,” then the first vital check is to look at mental health resources. Does each public school have a healthy number of nurses and school counselors in the building every day (as recommended by those professional associations)? Without those essential human resources, successful practices cannot be implemented, and there is no hope for improvement. Montgomery County has recently increased funding, commendably striving to meet these goals.
What Data Can Tell Us
Rubin writes, “there isn’t a single word about antisemitism” in the school district’s budget, and “resources” should be “dedicated” to fighting the “scourge” of antisemitism. The mood of his essay is fear and outrage: “ [O]ur Jewish children are being sent into a cauldron of antisemitic hate at school without strong defenses to protect them … .” He links the word “cauldron” to a 2021 police report about “bias incidents,” but does not say what exactly has been reported in schools. Graffiti? Cyberbullying? Fist fights? Finally, he doesn’t acknowledge that age-appropriate lessons on racism and bullying, in history and today, are already part of the district’s K-12 curriculum. (1)
Rubin’s perspective on these matters is, sadly, ethnocentric. We are all vulnerable in different ways, at different times, to different degrees. Racist attacks against people of Asian descent are on the rise. Institutional racism aimed at Black people is ongoing. I’ve seen no evidence that MCPD officers profile, harass, and brutalize Jewish young men for being Jewish as they do African American young men for being Black. (2) Let’s widen the reach of our empathy and find ways, adults and children alike, to live while being “neither victims nor executioners.”
Steven Sellers Lapham is a retired educational editor living in Montgomery County, a PTA volunteer, and parent of an MCPS graduate. He’s written on issues of public safety for Washington Jewish Week and Maryland Matters. He’s on the board of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East. Lapham would like to thank the quoted counselor and five reviewers who made thoughtful suggestions about earlier drafts of this essay. The views expressed here are his own.
Notes
- One essential resource for high school and adult readers is the 44-page “Understanding Antisemitism,” available free from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, https://www.jfrej.org/campaigns/antisemitism
- New items on Black men who recently suffered death at the hands of MCPD officers:
Ryan LeRoux; Finan Berhe; Robert L. White; Emmanuel Okutuga; Kareem Ali; and Peter Njang.