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Dear Community,
It has been a very intense week here at school filled with so much emotion for me and many others. The emotions have taken on a full range; fear, hope, frustration, anger, gratitude, joy and sadness. I have been given the opportunity to listen to so many stories, thoughts, opinions, histories and perspectives from parents, staff and students and I am trying hard to hold them and weave them together into our next steps. As we said last week, hate has no place in our school. We are taking this event as an opportunity for education, and a time to remind ourselves that we, as a school community, stand for civil rights, respect, inclusion and love for each other. The Cottonwood School is a place where each and every one of our students, families, staff and greater community should feel safe, welcomed and free to be exactly who they are.
I want to give you a small update on some of the work that has been done about this at the school this last week:
- We invited our families last Saturday night to come together to listen and share our feelings and hopes. We all ended the meeting hoping for more opportunities to meet like this and so, as a school we would like to offer our space for affinity groups to gather and to offer our services in helping to connect individuals and families with each other. If this is something you are interested in pursuing, please reach out to me and Jenny and I will work to connect you and make space for you.
- Our 7th and 8th grade classes talked and reflected at length about how it made them feel as individuals and a community that a symbol of hate, racism and war, the swastika, had shown up in their classroom. They discussed the possible intentions of the graffiti and discussed deeply the swastika symbol itself: its meaning, history and impact. As a group, they grappled with how to repair their classroom community. The students worked together to remove any and all markings from all the tables and benches in their classrooms. The students also discussed the concept of micro-aggression as well as several reflections about what it would be like to have hate symbols targeting you show up in the bathrooms or the public transit you use.
- On Wednesday afternoon, Randy Blazak, director of the Hate Crimes Coalition, came in to talk to the both the 7th and 8th grades. He covered the history of hate crimes in Oregon and talked about why they are so traumatic to people. He talked about the importance of being an upstander and disrupting hate in whatever way you can. He also spoke about the different rings of trauma, like ripples in a pond, and how acts like this not only impact the targeted individual directly, but also those closely related to them, the community around them, the greater community, and the place in which it takes place. Three takeaways from the discussions were: 1) The “not in my town” response to hate 2) Empathy: making sure victims know we have their back and care about them, and 3) Making sure the perpetrators know that we care about them too and that everyone deserves a second chance.
- On Wednesday and Thursday, I interviewed individually many of the 7th/8th graders to try and determine who drew the swastikas and check in on how kids were feeling. I am not confident that we will know with certainty who did it.
- On Thursday, Lisa Eisenberg, the middle school art teacher, shared her perspective on the swastika incident through art. She read aloud a selection of "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. It is a comic that tells the story of the author's father's survival of the Holocaust, but drawn with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. She discussed the significance of hate symbols in light of recent events and shared her perspective as a Jewish person.
- As a staff, we will continue our work together to strengthen our social emotional curriculum. We hope to find more age appropriate ways to address this issue in our classrooms and continue to build a community of thoughtful, empathetic up-standers. To this end, we will share a resource from Teaching Tolerance that is part of their anti-bias framework to help guide the work. They are anti-biased standards that are organized around the topics of identity, diversity, justice and action and are broken down by grade band- K-2, 3-5 and 6-8.
We want to remind our parents that several of the kids mentioned how prevalent discrimination is online, especially in social media. We worry that this uninformed exposure can diminish the power of these very serious issues that affect us all.
As school administrators we vow to you that we will continue to strengthen and build upon our social/emotional curriculum, work that we have been doing for the last two years. We will continue researching resources to share with our community, in the hopes that we can help to set up a framework for you to continue these difficult yet loving discussions at home. This is a time to embrace and celebrate our vibrant, diverse, community. It is a time to stand up for all. It is a time to focus on kindness and gratitude for all we have, and to continue to strengthen our empathy for our neighbors.
With Gratitude,
Amanda
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