A complaint about antisemitic events at Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) has led the U.S. Department of Education to open a civil rights probe into the district.
At the end of July, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sent a complaint to the Trump administration about what it claimed was Jewish students in the district facing “egregious and persistent discrimination,” WBAL in Baltimore reported.
The 22-page complaint offers specifics about Jewish students being targeted with harassing behavior from not only students, but at least one teacher, who, according to the ADL complaint, “threatened to ‘go all Nazi’ on the students in his class and personally directed Nazi salutes towards a Jewish student.”
The ADL complaint also alleges that BCPS knowingly allowed non-Jewish students to bully their Jewish classmates by making Nazi salutes toward them and telling them that “6 million [Jews] was not enough,” and that “all Jews should die.”
In a release announcing the administration’s civil rights investigation into BCPS, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said the allegations were horrifying. “We are not simply talking about contemptible bullying; we are talking about a shocking abdication of educator responsibility that constitutes unlawful anti-Semitic harassment.”
Baltimore Jewish Council executive director Howard Libit told WBAL that, “It’s obviously of great concern to see these allegations being raised about incidents that happened at individual Baltimore City schools.” How the district responds will be the key, Libit said. “How do they work with us? What programming do they bring in to work with kids, to work with teachers to address it?”
Jewish families, according to the station, want the district to establish learning modules covering both the Holocaust and antisemitism. A district spokesperson told the station it was committed to addressing those areas for curriculum and would continue to review the incidents cited in the complaint.
The ADL complaint said the district has known about the antisemitic events for “years” and has failed to gain control. Enough so that it reported that Jewish students attending district schools have been “isolated from their peers, teachers, and administrators, and deprived of critical educational and social opportunities.”
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