According to a Jan. 2024 report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in the three months following the start of the Israel-Hamas war, anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. increased by 360% compared to the same period one year prior. K12 schools and higher education institutions are no outliers. There have been dozens of hate crimes and clashes that have appeared at college campuses and K-12 schools across the country. These events have raised many questions, including:
- What have K-12 and college leaders done right and what have they done wrong in how they respond to these incidents?
- How can they better mitigate and respond to them in the future?
Campus Safety recently sat down with SEC’s President & Founder, Jason Russell, to answer these questions.
College Leaders, Faculty Struggle to Remain Neutral on Israel-Hamas War
While most college campuses have plans for handling protests, Russell believes the disconnect often lies in leaders’ inability to remain impartial.
“I think college safety and security is more prepared [than K-12 schools] in some ways, but I think college administrators in many ways are less prepared because they have a really hard time staying in that neutral lane, which we see more often in higher ed than we do in K-12,” he said. “When there is an indication from administrators that the university feels a particular way, on one side, it creates permission to do things that maybe shouldn’t be done. On the other side, it creates fear. I think in almost every case they’re indicating to one side or the other that they really support their particular point of view.”
Russell says another challenge is that both historically and today, college and university faculty have shown far more open expression of a particular ideology or stance than K-12 educators, which can create situations where students feel unsafe dealing with particular staff members.
“I think it’s important for universities to express that what you do in your personal life is appropriate, you can do whatever you want, but when it impacts the feeling of student safety in your particular class or on your campus, then it crosses a line that we cannot allow you to cross,” he said. “Higher ed police and security do a really good job because they’ve dealt with this, right? This is not uncommon. There are protests all the time on these campuses. But from the staff and from the administration, I think those would be two groups that I would point to that I think have handled this terribly, quite frankly. They haven’t done a very good job at all of staying neutral, haven’t done a very good job at all of trying to avoid making people feel marginalized on their particular campus.”
Russell does note, however, that plenty of college and university leaders have remained neutral — we just don’t hear about them because they aren’t “newsworthy” or “headline-grabbing”. Colleges are also taking different approaches to mitigating potentially contentious gatherings, such as setting up formal classroom debates, hosting moderated panel discussions, and setting aside dedicated time each day for students to demonstrate their beliefs and opinions.
“Allowing for a structure so that things are planned and organized allows you to put security in place and allows you to do some additional things to increase safety, so certainly to the extent that these can be organized protests or discussions that allow for planning for safety,” Russell said. “The issues become when they’re not planned or organized and they’re kind of spontaneous, and then we see issues because schools haven’t planned for this.”
How Are K-12 Schools Addressing Israel-Hamas War Protests?
While Russell strongly believes college faculty should remain neutral, K-12 educators have even more of an obligation to do so.
“Free speech doesn’t necessarily extend into the classroom because they’re teaching to a curriculum, and the curriculum doesn’t allow for a teacher to bring in political or ideological issues, public school especially,” he said. “So while everybody has the right to free speech, that doesn’t mean you as a staff member or teacher have that right to free speech within your classroom every single day because you’re teaching to a curriculum. And in that environment, you are to remain neutral, whether you have a belief on one side or the other.”
Overall, Russell believes K-12 school leaders have done a solid job at “containing issues” and handling them on a case-by-case basis to ensure kids are safe but also allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Schools are struggling, however, with deciding if they should discuss the war with students. Whether or not schools choose to discuss current events, depending on their age, students are likely consuming information through social media, their peer groups, or at home, Russell emphasized. Much of that information is likely to be skewed, so bringing neutral talking points into the mix can be beneficial. He recommends looking for reputable nonprofits that provide schools with ways to talk to kids about polarizing issues.
“I think talking about current events is certainly important, but the way you talk about them needs to be very delicate because you don’t want to increase tensions or increase issues,” he said. “I think that’s the struggle that schools are finding right now is that it’s really difficult to figure out a way to do it correctly, so schools would rather not do it at all, which I don’t necessarily think is a good idea either. Schools in some ways could model how to bring groups that have completely different viewpoints, and figure out ways to get those groups to have a reasonable dialogue about their points of view.”
No matter how K-12 schools choose to navigate war discussions, Russell says schools have to recognize it’s never going to be 100% received.
“That goes for anything that school administrators do in many ways. We put more and more and more on our educators. We’ve asked them to educate our kids. Now we’re asking them to be security. Now we’re asking them to weigh in on political issues and really difficult ideological issues and that’s a lot,” he said. “We don’t give them enough space. We don’t give them a lot of room for errors or room for trying to see what works. They want to focus on education — which, I want my child to go to school and be educated, I don’t necessarily want them going to school every day for a political debate — but I think there’s some value to current events. But they also have to teach math and science and all the other things that are important.”
Although most college campuses have plans for handling protests, K-12 schools should have them as well. While the content of the Israel-Hamas war protests is new, leading practices for handling protests aren’t and can be applied in nearly all contentious scenarios.
“You want to say, ‘Okay, yeah, we have some framework of a plan for something close to this, so let’s at least start deploying that,’ as opposed to saying, ‘We never really considered this, so now we have to come up with a way to try to deal with it,’ and they just end up being behind,” said Russell. “Make sure that you’ve thought through a bunch of different scenarios that could happen so that you have some plan in place to respond. Whether it be a spontaneous protest or not, we do a really good job of planning for things like fire and weather, but these things that are kind of spontaneous, we don’t really take time to prepare for those.”
However, when a once-peaceful protest starts involving threatening behavior or violence, it becomes “a whole different issue,” said Russell, and schools must switch over to their emergency plans.
“We really work hard for our districts to understand where that line is and how they can optimize the chances of a protest not becoming violent,” he continued. “That’s by creating space, by providing security, making sure that people know where they can be and where they can’t be, setting up perimeters or setting up some rules, but also allowing for that space for that free speech to happen.”
How Schools Can Protect Vulnerable Students, Staff
To mitigate potential violence against individuals most impacted by the continued Israel-Hamas war, Russell also recommends both higher education institutions and K-12 schools teach staff how to de-escalate situations — something he says he doesn’t see schools at almost any level focusing on.
“It’s really a mixture of both verbal and nonverbal, so it’s identifying threatening nonverbal warning signs. It’s identifying speech that could potentially be threatening and how to deal with that in a way that allows you to pull some of the emotions out of the interaction to reduce the likelihood of violence,” he described. “We talk to organizations and schools all the time, and communication is about 80% of what we do as human beings. We’re communicating in some way, either verbally or non-verbally. How do we do a better job of not alienating the person we’re talking to or making them feel threatened? How do I use my words and my nonverbal communication to better communicate with people and not make them feel threatened?”
Russell also strongly encourages schools to reiterate the importance of both students and staff reporting both direct and indirect threats.
“It’s important to stress that we want to know if you feel threatened or if somebody sends you a threatening email or if somebody makes a threatening statement or something that makes you feel unsafe. The teachers, the students, everybody needs to feel like they have a place to take that information. And unfortunately, now we may need to push that down to younger age levels because we are seeing increased threats of violence, even in the K-5 area, which we didn’t typically see 10 years ago,” he said. “And then the school needs to have a plan on how to deal with that. What do we do once we get this information? We have to actually put a plan in action to try to determine if these threats are viable and if they’re real. And if they are, then we need to try to take some action to help bring in law enforcement or bring in whatever we need to do to keep these people safe and secure.”
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