The term “teachable moment” is overused. If there is any place where those words should land with intention, it’s our schools. Yet again and again, instead of demonstrating the courage to confront hatred and stanch ignorance, they flinch.
The most recent example is described in a lawsuit filed against Seattle Public Schools by the parents of a freshman at Nathan Hale High. They accuse its leaders of allowing antisemitic bullying to escalate until it corroded the entire 2023-24 school year and forced their daughter to disenroll.
There were swastikas scrawled around campus — on a desk, a bathroom stall, a bench in the softball dugout. Students made hideous remarks during a classroom discussion of the Holocaust novel “Night.” “The bad thing about this book is that Hitler didn’t finish,” one said, according to the legal complaint. Another stared menacingly and drew a swastika on the ninth grader’s folder.
In April of 2024, after this behavior had persisted for six months, Principal William Jackson sent a letter to Nathan Hale families, denouncing the antisemitic graffiti. He said the school would respond by holding “restorative circles” for kids who felt targeted so they could “share their experience” with “caring adults.”
He promised to “make this a teachable moment,” with a schoolwide discussion about “the importance of building up our community as a place of inclusivity, respect, and equity.”
That’s a nice gesture. But true restorative justice involves the aggressor hearing directly from the person they’ve harmed, and vice versa, a face-to-face conversation guided by a trained moderator to bring both parties to a place of new understanding. It takes time and focus — in other words, real work.
The toxicity at Hale sprouted as students were attempting to make sense of the conflict in Gaza. They would have benefited from having a teacher help them understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism. The school could have worked to build bridges between Hale’s Muslim and Jewish students, to turn this into an opportunity for learning and healing.
Whatever his intentions, Jackson’s efforts missed the mark. A month after his email to parents, a mob of students chased the girl through Hale’s hallways, gathering outside her classroom in a manner so threatening that the teacher locked the door and called security.
The terrified 15-year-old did not return to school for the rest of the year and is now enrolled in another district. Principal Jackson is gone, too. He now directs teaching and learning in the Bellevue schools.
Failure to respond effectively to bigotry is not unique to Nathan Hale High, nor to SPS. The Jewish Federation reports that antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in Washington’s K-12 system doubled from 2023 to 2024. This month Attorney General Nick Brown launched a new hate crimes and bias incidents hotline in King, Clark and Spokane counties.
In his note to Nathan Hale parents, Principal Jackson rightly pointed out that high school students are at “a critical point” in their development as people. Precisely. This should have been an occasion for deepened understanding on everyone’s part. Instead, the response feels more like a dodge.
But problems start at the top, and it’s not as if leaders at Nathan Hale had strong direction from headquarters. In Seattle Public Schools’ four-page document detailing its policies on harassment, intimidation and bullying, one word is glaringly absent: consequences.
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