The only thing surprising about this story is that almost no one has heard about it before now. Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia is a large school with more than 2,500 students. Those students come from different backgrounds, but at Yorktown a group made up of mostly Muslim students targeted and harassed Jewish students while the school mostly did nothing at all.
The Virginia attorney general’s office eventually investigated the claims but none of the findings have been released to the public. But the Free Press got a look at a lengthy summary of the evidence.
One male Jewish student reported being repeatedly targeted because he wore a kippah, which a female classmate tried to pull off his head. After a male student called him an antisemitic slur, he began covering his kippah with a baseball cap. A female Jewish student said that she was chased because she was Jewish, and other Jewish students described seeing Nazi salutes, hearing Holocaust jokes, and being told that they belonged in a gas chamber or that “Hitler should have finished the job.”...
After Hamas attacked Israel, Jewish students at Yorktown were mocked for their faith and blamed for the resulting war, according to the report and my own reporting. They were targeted mostly by Muslim boys, the affected students said. Child B told The Free Press that she did what students are supposed to do if they experience harassment: She reported the incidents. But nothing changed. Trying to stop antisemitism at Yorktown eventually felt almost pointless. “There was no follow-up,” she said. “Nobody came to see me.”...
At school, the same student and several of his friends began staring at Child A when she walked by in the hallways, shining phone flashlights at her, and repeatedly shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” investigators said. The Jewish student reported the harassment to a school counselor on October 12, 2023.
But reporting the behavior didn't seem to matter. Nothing was ever done to punish the Muslim boys targeting Jewish students. By 2024, a group of Jewish students went to the principal as a group.
About 15 Jewish students met with school principal Kevin Clark and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) coordinator Ackesha Patrick to describe what the students saw as a growing climate of antisemitism.
Investigators said that the descriptions were so disturbing that Patrick cried during the meeting. She wrote, “Antisemitism runs rampant across APS” in her notes, according to a student who saw the notes.
But those words led to little action...
State investigators who reviewed emails, complaints, witness interviews, and internal communications concluded that the problem extended beyond any one student or incident. Their findings described the school system’s methods as a “ ‘whack-a-mole’ approach that remedied nothing.”
Lucretia Kebreau was a special-education teacher at Yorktown High. She was one of the people who Child B turned to when she felt targeted at school.
“If a black student told me something was racist, I wouldn’t sit there and explain why it wasn’t,” Kebreau said. “But when Jewish students told us something was antisemitic, suddenly everybody wanted to debate it.”
So what happens now? The answer seems to be not much of anything. The students involved, both those targeted and those harassing them have all graduated. (I'm wondering which Ivy League school snapped up the Muslim kid harassing Jews. Was it Columbia? He'd fit right in on that campus.) With those students all gone, everyone agrees it would be difficult to make a case since there is no ongoing harassment any more.
Yorktown High recently announced a new principal was taking over for the old one. It's not clear if that had anything to do with the investigation because the school system won't say.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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