Light one Community stands in solidarity against

number of students have told me that they are afraid to go to school, or parents have told me their kids are afraid to go to school,” Winkelman says.

Restorative justice

After the debate team incident, Whitman principal Robert Dodd and county specialists implemented restorative justice circles—student meetings designed for conflict resolution that are guided by county-employed restorative justice experts. Though Montgomery County employs nine specialists this school year—triple last year’s count—parents and students have been questioning the effectiveness of restorative justice circles, as the process often requires the victims and perpetrators to share responsibility, which can be particularly harmful with incidents of hate bias.

Blair Jewish Culture Club sponsor Marc Grossman raises several concerns with its implementation in MCPS. “I suspect there are significant issues with the way we administer restorative justice,” Grossman says. “The person who speaks first should not have to be the victim—the person who speaks first should be the victimizer, and that first thing they say should be an apology. And if there’s no apology there, that meeting should not be happening.”

County officials, however, are limited in alternatives to restorative justice. Constitutional expert Peter Smith, a professor at George Washington University Law School, explains that punishing students for any speech, even hate speech, can be deemed unconstitutional.

“The [Supreme] Court has never said that hate speech is an unprotected category [under the First Amendment], and that’s in large part because hate speech tends to involve expressions of opinion,” Smith, who also worked for the Department of Justice where a number of his cases went up to the Supreme Court, says. “We’re tomorrow?” colleges, as well as person-on-person assaults and vandalism, have all increased in recent years. In fact, the annual numbers of such incidents in the U.S. have reached an all time high since the ADL began tracking them in 1979.

Whitman suspended restorative justice circles for the debate team incident after students complained they were not permitted to correct inaccuracies in other students’ statements or bring up issues that did not follow the specific set of questions their restorative justice specialist had written out. All 210 MCPS schools are now formally reviewing whether the current restorative justice approach is effective inside MCPS.

Prominence among public figures

Celebrities, athletes, and politicians have promoted antisemitic tropes and sentiments, bringing harmful ideologies into mainstream consciousness. One example of this is Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who recently shared numerous antisemitic statements on social me -

Winkelman believes the issues are broader than the county. “I know that restorative justice isn’t just an MCPS thing. It’s a Maryland state thing if you look it up. I have seen restorative justice done effectively. I have more recently heard of three or four incidents of circles that were done very poorly, not just at Whitman,” Winkelman says. “Whitman owned up to their disaster. I’m not sure other schools are owning up to the problems that [poorly executed restorative justice] causes.”

School administrators sent an email that debate team members must attend all restorative justice sessions. Administrators made lifting the debate team suspension contingent on the circles. After they stopped, however, the students returned to the debate team, as well as their other extracurricular activities.

Anti-semitism quantified

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that nationwide belief