WSSD and Community Respond to Racist Video
Wallingford-Swarthmore School District Superintendent Lisa Palmer reported in an email to WSSD families on Sunday that “a hurtful and disturbing video...is circulating within our community.”
The seven-second video shows three kids sitting on a bed. Two of them make racist threats at the camera, using the n-word. All three of them laugh. The two speakers are Strath Haven High School students, according to fellow students who asked not to be named. The video, which is thought to be at least two years old, started circulating widely on Instagram last week.
School district officials forwarded the video to the Nether Providence Police Department on Thursday, May 28. The department is investigating. Chief David Splain said that the results of the investigation will be presented to the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office to determine if a crime was committed and whether to file charges.
The school district has launched its own investigation, according to Palmer. “We are extremely disappointed at the thought that any of our students would be associated with a display of racism and hatefulness of this type, and we condemn the action,” she wrote.
Her email committed to two concrete steps she said will “promote and strengthen greater unity.”
The first is creating a WSSD community-wide diversity and inclusion committee. David Grande, president of the WSSD school board, expressed his support, saying, “The committee will help us work even harder to promote diversity and inclusion and prevent future acts of hate and racism. We can’t strive for any less.”
Palmer’s second step is accelerating the diversity-oriented curriculum review initiated in 2019-20. According to Director of Education Denise Citarelli Jones, the district has been looking at incorporating a global competencies perspective into the curriculum and using a social justice, anti-bias program called Teaching Tolerance.
SRS Big Idea: Pushing for Equity
A group at Swarthmore-Rutledge School has been working for diversity, equity, and inclusion in district schools for some months.
The group, called SRS Big Idea, was formed last fall by parents and teachers who believe the school needs to better ensure that all students, families, and staff “are represented, embraced, [and] celebrated,” as they wrote on Facebook. They have focused on putting together a detailed plan for a WSSD diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership committee. Their proposal calls for “an equity lens” to guide administration, teachers, and staff in decisions about curriculum, hiring, budgeting, and staff development. Over 100 teachers, family members, students, and staff from across the school district signed the proposal.
On May 18, SRS Big Idea sent its plan to Palmer and the board. The board did not immediately agree to form such a committee. But Grande responded in an email that they would consider the proposal over the summer.
After the video surfaced last week, writer and podcaster Satya Nelms, an organizer of SRS Big Idea who has four children, three of them in district schools, expressed outrage at the video in a letter to the administration and board. She called for the immediate creation of a diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership committee.
She wrote, in part, “When we don’t create consequences for hate speech and targeted identity-based aggression, we are telling the students and families within this district that are negatively and painfully impacted by the harm that has been done that they don’t matter. We are telling the students who engage in this behavior that what they have done is acceptable.”
Nelms shared her letter with members of Big Idea and others in the community, urging them to send their own letters.
Jill Fenton, the white mother of a black 10-year-old SRS student, followed Nelms’s lead. In a letter to Palmer, she pleaded with the superintendent to understand that “every day black lives are lost and threatened because of white supremacy and racist systems of which you and I still reap the benefits and privileges.”
Fenton asked Palmer to show more leadership and be “willing to take a stand on addressing the issues below the surface that lead to the incidents.”
“When your policies hurt some white feelings, have the courage to stand by them,” Fenton wrote.
Nelms called Palmer’s commitment to organize the committee “a good start.” But she thinks the superintendent could have done more.
“It was a missed opportunity to not place that video into a larger story, a larger context of what is happening in our country right now,” Nelms said. ”What’s happening in this country is not separate from what happened in our school district this past week.”
Nelms pointed to a similar incident a year ago, expressing frustration that the administration had not acted more decisively then. “When we allow hateful, violent speech and actions to happen in our community with no consequence, we are setting up the future,” she said. “We are setting up situations like Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. We are setting it up for these kids to one day kill kids that look like mine.”
What Happened Last Time
The incident Nelms referred to occurred in late 2018. Five SHHS students wrote letters threatening minority families and urging them to leave town. The letters, which were left at four houses in Swarthmore, were signed “Donald and his crew, specifically Mike Pence.” The students said their intent was satirical. Images of the letters circulated on social media in conjunction with a photograph of people wearing white hoods.
The incident rocked the WSSD community. But little changed.
Margaret Betz of Swarthmore has two sons at SHHS. “There were all these grand promises made with the last incident,” she said. “Nothing happened.”
In the wake of the uproar about the letters, Mira Patel, now an SHHS junior, worked with Palmer and then-SHHS principal Kristopher Brown to rewrite parts of the ninth and tenth grade health curricula. They developed a diversity and anti-bias unit, some components of which have been implemented, Patel said. But she added, “I think what’s truly necessary at this point is structural change.”
Many of Patel’s fellow students share her frustration.
“Maybe they believed there wouldn’t or shouldn’t be any consequences because they claimed it was a joke,” junior Elia Brooks-Sims said of the girls who wrote the letters. “Whatever the reason, their words made me feel numb and unsafe.”
“This district is no stranger to these acts,” said senior Alex Melly. “To anyone who thinks we are better than this, or that this isn’t us, I say, ‘This is us.’”
What Happens Next
Nelms hopes a diversity and inclusion committee will be just the start of the school district’s work. She calls the committee “the very least” the district can do.
Nelms wants district policy changed to make it easier to address student hate speech. “Just because something happens off school grounds doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect on the community,” she said. She believes a lack of consequences sends the message that what was said doesn’t matter.
Betz agrees. “For African American students in our school district, responding with strong measures reassures them that the district takes it seriously.”
Nelms and others called for an overhaul of school curricula so that all children see themselves represented in stories and history.
“I don’t think first grade is too young to start learning about issues of race,” SHHS student body president Anya Hooper said. “And February,” which is Black History Month, “is definitely not the only time it should be taught.”
For Nelms, the issue goes beyond the schools. She hopes community members will educate themselves about how deeply white privilege is woven into the fabric of the United States, including the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District.
Nelms concludes, “We get into this state of mind where we believe we are different, that things like this don’t happen where we live. That our community is, if not better, then somehow immune from the racism and white supremacy that plagues the rest of the country. And that’s not true.”
