Franklin Matters: "focus on engaging students in conversations about how unchecked hate can proliferate"

Sunday, December 29, 2019

"focus on engaging students in conversations about how unchecked hate can proliferate"

From the Milford Daily News, articles of interest for Franklin:

Massachusetts recorded the fourth-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents of any state in 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, prompting lawmakers to propose that all schools teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides.

Jewish students throughout the commonwealth have repeatedly encountered anti-Semitic slurs, been told their families should have died in the Holocaust and discovered swastikas scrawled on the bathroom walls of their schools, the ADL reports.

In just the last two months, a middle school student in Great Barrington threatened Jewish students with an alleged kill list and two students at Framingham’s Christa McAuliffe Charter School circulated a “Kill the Jews” Snapchat group.

Recognizing schools as hotbeds for anti-Semitism, state Rep. Jeffrey Roy, D-Franklin, and Senate Ways and Means Chairman Michael Rodrigues, D-Westport, filed the Genocide Education Act, which would require every school district to adopt genocide curriculum that addresses “the notion that national, ethnic, racial or religious hatred can overtake any nation or society, leading to calamitous consequences.”