In the past few years, this school has faced acts of racism, from swastikas and n-words on desks to the printing of the n-word 1000 times on the school printer. Students say that these acts were improperly addressed by our administration. After the changes our school has undergone due to these acts, like the change in principals from Principal Douglas Nelson to Dr. Joseph Bostic Jr., a student may still be left questioning if this school’s administration is doing enough.
Despite this school’s diverse student body, the most recent data showing 37.3% White, 11.8% Black and 38.3% Asian, and the student unions that support minority groups, students have been subjected to unnoticed and unaddressed hate and racism that our administration has done little to combat. For example, Muslim students report feeling mistrustful of and unsupported by administration. Muslim Student Association (MSA) sponsor Amani Elkassabany said, “It’s just very easy for students to make insulting or offensive remarks about Muslims that kind of go unnoticed, and the students themselves, I would say for the most part don’t feel that there has been a trusting relationship established between the Muslim students in this school and the leaders in this school, so they don’t always feel comfortable going to those leaders and talking about how they’ve been stereotyped, insulted or just made to feel excluded, so I don’t feel that recently the school has done an adequate job of supporting Muslim students.”
Most recently, the event that sparked a walkout held by Black Student Union (BSU) on Dec, 6 (click here to read more) left students and staff with a similar feeling of mistrust with this school’s administration. “It is very traumatizing to come to a place every day where you encounter overt examples of racism, and there are adults in the building who do not disrupt the examples of overt racism. It is equally traumatizing, in my opinion, to confront daily microaggressions, microassaults, microinvalidations; there are various ways in which it is communicated to Black students and Black staff that they are not valued or respected in this space,” BSU sponsor Lindsey Vance said.
One major issue with how the acts of hate are addressed is that the majority of them haven’t been addressed in a timely fashion, which according to MCPS policy would be within 24 hours of an incident, and have rather been handled like an inconvenient matter that only needs to be addressed because the country says so. “I feel like the administration has honestly done the bare minimum. It feels as though they do what the county tells them to do but nothing beyond, which really just makes it feel like another thing they need to cross off a to-do list. That makes students, at least me, feel like they truly don’t care all that much about what’s actually happening as long as they look good when they do their jobs. I’ve heard the phrase so many times from our admin that ‘their hands are tied’ when presented with a racist incident or a proposition for how to deal with it, and that is so frustrating because if they really wanted to, they could try to find a way around and really troubleshoot, but they don’t,” senior and Jewish Student Union President Anna Lizondo said.
Students say peers may be adding to the hate and racism in this school. “I think for an entire community to be flawed, there has to be flawed precedents and norms that the whole community accepts. I don’t think you can blame the community though: the system in power is at fault for allowing or perpetuating these precedents,” senior and MSA president Meymuna Oweis said.
This school has also fallen short of allowing everyone affected by recent conflicts to voice their feelings. “Last year, there was a heightened awareness of the conflict in Gaza, and there were many students in our school who felt they could not even talk about it in their classes or with their friends because if they expressed any kind of solidarity with Palestinian civilians they were automatically labeled as antisemitic, and that was something that was very troubling for many of them, and I think still now a lot of them feel like they can’t talk about it. They can’t express support for Palestinians or sympathy for Palestinian civilians without arousing suspicion about themselves and what their attitude toward our Jewish students is, so it is becoming increasingly clear to me in our school that that is a huge need that has gone unaddressed,” Elkassabany said.
While it cannot be expected for this school to change overnight, we haven’t grown as our diversity has increased. Our student unions have been around for years, yet those students still feel unheard and out of place in our community. “I don’t think our school does enough to foster a space that is safe for all students. If we’re specifically talking about race, I think that there are many factors that contribute to our school not doing enough. I think that the demographics have changed significantly in the past 10 years, and yet our structures, our policies, our practices, have not significantly changed, and so the school is not meeting the needs of the students in front of us, but instead, we are meeting the needs of a student population that graduated 10 years ago,” Vance said.
For student unions it feels the only way to make change at all is by holding the hand of administration. “I feel like administration has attempted to protect the Black community but I think that feeling fully protected and welcome involves the staff being able to welcome Black students without [BSU] leadership holding their hand,” sophomore and BSU Co-Communication officer Zikora Okeke said.
Administration has made a recent effort to create a space for students to voice their opinions and concerns. Assistant Principal David O’Shell said that it’s hard to trust that something will be done, especially with what has happened recently. For that reason, O’Shell said that along with the steps administration must follow, “It’s another step to kind of circle back with everybody and check in again and say ‘I followed up on this. I can’t share everything that happened as a result of this, but I want you to know that I handled this, and if anything like this happens again, I want you to feel comfortable coming back to me and telling me about it,’ so kind of reestablishing that connection is something I’ve really prioritized here in my work, checking in with students, making sure that they are OK, so they don’t feel like ‘oh well I reported that but I don’t know if anything was done about it’. We have to get better at following back up after serious incidents.”
Our administration has fallen short creating an environment that is welcoming to everyone in our school, and unless they change the way they handle the racist acts in our school, our students will remain mistrusting of administration.
