Students at a Virginia high school walked out recently to show support for Palestinians and call for aid to be sent to Gaza. (Karina Elwood/The Washington Post)
The Arizona state superintendent wants to close student clubs after high school members presented what he called “propaganda” about the war in Gaza. A Florida first-grade teacher faces an investigation after she emailed school leaders seeking more recognition for Palestine and Palestinian students in public statements.
And in Virginia’s Loudoun school district, officials recently told a teacher to take down a blended Israeli-American flag after it drew complaints, according to parent Kathy Moritz, whose daughter observed the removals. Moritz said the teacher also chose to remove Jewish holiday decorations, including a menorah. Moritz complained to the principal and said she was allowed to place a menorah in the counseling office, where it joined a Christmas tree already on display. A Loudoun spokeswoman said the district cannot comment on “personnel matters,” but noted that policy forbids employees from making “statements that further a political cause” during school hours.
The ferocious debate over how American students can and should speak about the war in Gaza — a conflict that burst into national view this month after three university presidents testified before Congress about how they respond to antisemitism, spurring outrage — is filtering into the nation’s public schools. Students and teachers at the K-12 level, like their counterparts in college, want to talk or advocate about the war in Gaza. School districts are struggling to figure out how to respond. In some cases, critics charge, they are censoring speech in the name of comity.
“They’re jumpy and afraid,” Moritz said of district officials. “We had a school board meeting where Muslim families said they don’t feel protected; Jewish families don’t feel protected. … The school is in a position where everybody is unhappy.”
The issue is especially difficult to navigate in elementary and secondary classrooms, said Gladys Cruz, president of the School Superintendents Association. It is a raw topic, as the ongoing war costs lives, including some family members of students in the United States. And it is tied to complex history and long-standing divisions between faith groups, which are difficult to grasp but important to teach.
“What we need to be doing is providing a safe environment for civic discourse so students can … learn to disagree respectfully,” Cruz said. “It’s a hard situation, but we need to ensure that, as adults, we model for our children.”
Recent events have made that task harder.
In early December, a Republican House committee summoned the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to testify about how they handled antisemitic harassment since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. When the presidents would not say calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus codes of conduct, it sparked condemnation and a bitter national discourse about antisemitism, racism and the limits of free speech. Penn’s president resigned under pressure, and Harvard’s president faces ongoing calls for her ouster.
In K-12 schools, the outlines of the battle are different because speech is more circumscribed, especially for teachers, said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who studies education law. Teachers do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom and must stick to teaching the curriculum their district mandates, she said.
Things are more nuanced for students. A series of Supreme Court rulings have established that children in elementary and secondary school can speak out in school, including on political topics, so long as their words do not cause a “material and substantial campus disruption,” Eckes said.
But schools can take an expansive view of what causes such a disruption. Many blanch at chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a decades-old rallying cry for Palestinian nationalist aspirations that is also used by Hamas supporters. Some, especially Jews, see it as a call for the annihilation of Israel. But activists defend it as a call for Palestinian self-determination or a secular, binational Jewish-and-Arab state, not a demand for violence against Jews.
In the K-12 context, “Jewish students could say, ‘We don’t feel safe — that clearly creates a material and substantial disruption,’ ” Eckes said. “On the other hand, pro-Palestinian students might argue we have a right to political speech.”
She added, “That is a really difficult one to judge.”
Edina High School in Minnesota confronted this quandary in October, when students held a “Walkout for Palestine” during which some protesters chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Two Somali American girls received a three-day suspension for repeating the slogan - and in late November filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the Star Tribune reported.
The attorney representing the students did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Edina school district said she “cannot comment on allegations or discipline related to students,” but noted students’ “rights are not unfettered while on school property.” She said the district does not “tolerate speech or behavior that is substantially disruptive” or that violates school policies against discrimination, Islamophobia or antisemitism.
An Education Department spokesman said he could not “confirm complaints” but shared a list of open investigations, which did not include the Edina district. The department’s civil rights office is already investigating at least one Georgia school district and a Kansas school district for Islamophobia and antisemitism.
Teachers are also drawing scrutiny for their statements around the war in Gaza, spurring calls for crackdowns from parents and politicians and forcing school districts to navigate tricky issues of how and when to curb speech coming from inside the classroom.
In Maryland, a middle-school teacher alleges district officials placed her on administrative leave after she added the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” to her school email signature. Her principal wrote in a message to families that the teacher’s signature “may be in violation” of school policy, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
At a news conference and in a later federal complaint, the teacher charged that colleagues inserted messages such as “Black Lives Matter” or discussions of pronouns in their email signatures — but received no reprimands.
In Florida, a Palm Beach first-grade teacher wrote an email to her superintendent and school board in November asking that the district “publicly recognize the Palestinian community” in statements about the conflict - and was placed on leave, the Palm Beach Post reported. She was responding in part to an Oct. 10 superintendent’s message about the war in Gaza which condemned antisemitism but did not mention Islamophobia. The district and the teachers’ union both said they could not comment on an open investigation; the teacher could not be reached for comment.
Samir Kakli, president of the South Florida Muslim Federation, said there is a “double standard” for what counts as acceptable speech, not only in Palm Beach but throughout the nation. He said elected and school officials regularly condemn pro-Palestinian speech but take no such steps to stop pro-Israeli actions; he thinks neither should be shut down.
“It’s extremely disappointing [when] some voices are getting silenced,” Kakli said. “School districts need to humanize all sides of this conflict. We’re all human.”
The Post examined more than 100 news articles from across the country published since Oct. 7 and found no reported instances in which pro-Israel activism on K-12 campuses led to suspensions or other discipline, apart from the one episode in Loudoun.
A director with the American Jewish Committee, Laura Shaw Frank, also said she is unaware of any recent episodes of students or teachers being punished for pro-Israel activism. She posited that’s because “pro-Israel students and faculty are often afraid to speak up or show their identities publicly in the current atmosphere.”
Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area, noted that his organization is seeing a blizzard of reports from Jewish students who say they were targeted at school for their religion or their support of Israel. He said the council is currently taking eight to 10 calls a day from parents in public and private schools dotted throughout the Bay Area who share stories of antisemitic bullying - for example, tossing pennies at Jewish children.
“We’ve also heard reports of kids facing litmus tests,” he said. “Saying, ‘You can’t join our after-school club or our sports team unless you disavow Israel.’ ”
In other places, attempts to discuss the war in Gaza or related issues of faith-based persecution have administrators scrambling.
At Jackson-Reed High School in the nation’s capital, officials rescheduled class readings of “Night” and “Maus,” two memoirs that recount the Holocaust, not long after the Oct. 7. attacks, according to student journalists. Teachers were unsure how to teach the content, and school leaders decided to delay it “until tensions decreased,” the student paper reported.
The district did not confirm the high school postponed the readings because of the conflict overseas, but a spokeswoman said school officials will support Jackson-Reed teachers “in ensuring that they are covering sensitive topics responsibly.” Students will read the books, although it is unclear when.
Still, the ordeal has frustrated parents like Edna Friedberg, senior program curator and historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. News of the lessons’ delay was “startling and painful” for her son, a freshman, who has family in Israel and two grandparents who survived the Holocaust.
“To me, it is at moments of anxiety and fear that we most need to study Holocaust history because it shows the way that all of us … can be vulnerable to hateful ideologies and to let those bleed over into violence,” Friedberg said. “I think the school administration wants to do the right thing, but they have been underprepared for the way this is unfolding.”
In Montgomery County, Md., which neighbors Washington, D.C., at least four educators have now been placed on administrative leave for pro-Palestinian advocacy, either on their personal social media accounts or on school email systems.
In Arizona around the same time, student chapters of UNICEF and Amnesty International at Desert Mountain High School earned the displeasure of state superintendent Tom Horne after they gave a lunchtime presentation on the war in Gaza. Horne said in an interview that Jewish parents in the Scottsdale Unified School District reached out to him after the presentation, sharing they felt targeted and that their children were afraid to go to school. He said someone slipped him the presentation slides - and he was shocked by their contents.
It was “totally one-sided,” Horne said, because it did not mention the Oct. 7 attack and discussed Israel as an apartheid state, among other issues. Horne is now urging all Arizona schools to kick UNICEF and Amnesty International off their campuses.
The superintendent of Scottsdale Unified, Scott A. Menzel, said in an interview he is not willing to follow the state’s leader and ban those groups; his legal advisers say it would amount to discriminating based on viewpoint. He noted that his schools host student chapters of the conservative group Turning Point USA, organizations he likewise will never nix, even if they are objectionable to some.
And Menzel defended the student presenters’ motives.
“The intent was to focus on the innocent victims, children and families in particular, as a result of the war in Gaza,” Menzel said. “What was included in the slides made some of our Jewish students feel like they were being targeted, but that was not the intention.”
He said the students who gave the presentation were not disciplined. They later apologized to members of the Jewish Student Union for causing any offense, he said. Overall, Menzel said, he believes the high-schoolers learned from the experience.
“There was an opportunity to look and carefully examine, ‘What information are you sharing?’ ‘What about that information is supported factually, and what might be partial or misrepresentation?’” he said. “’How does this information impact other people?’”
Elsewhere, educators are under fire for what has been called lopsided teaching.
In Oakland on Dec. 6, teachers held a teach-in about the war in Gaza meant to boost Palestinian perspectives. One of the organizers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation and harassment, said the teach-in was necessary because the Oakland Unified School District curriculum leaves out “the Palestinian experience.”
Some of the teach-in activities, posted online and designed for all ages, included reading aloud an alphabet book titled “P is for Palestine” and studying “Life Under Blockade,” a collection of essays written by Palestinians aged 18 to 24 living in the Gaza Strip. The organizer said between 70 and 100 teachers participated, no one has faced punishment and the day inspired “thoughtful and curious and compassionate” conversations.
Oakland Unified did not answer questions about the teach-in. Spokesman John Sasaki shared a message superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell sent to parents declaring the district had not authorized the teach-in. “I am deeply disappointed by the harmful and divisive materials being circulated and promoted as factual,” Johnson-Trammell wrote.
A Jewish mother in Oakland, Shira Avoth, wrote in an email that the teach-in exposed children in the district to harmful propaganda. She said she reviewed every page of the teach-in materials, even though no teacher on her son’s campus actually taught it.
“The ‘curriculum’ was a one-sided, hate-filled take on Israel and its history,” she wrote. “No teacher worth their salt would feel good about teaching this.”
Gregory, of the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council, said many Jewish parents kept their children home the day of the teach-in. He said at least a dozen Jewish families are now looking to transfer out of the school district.
Asked about the criticism, the anonymous organizer noted she herself is Jewish: “I’m not new to the trauma that Jews carry. I carry it myself. But that’s not an excuse to not teach our students about a group of people that are being systemically oppressed.”
Across the country, faith-based differences are also fissuring a New Jersey district.
In late October, a Jewish parent in Wayne Township Public Schools learned a fifth-grader in her son’s class had adopted a school profile picture reading “Free Gaza - Free Palestine,” alongside an image of an upraised fist. The parent, Kim Woodhour, said someone sent her an image of the avatar, and she checked it by logging into a school platform.
Woodhour was horrified. She said that, to her, the raised fist signaled “’We are angry, and we want to fight’ - and I just don’t know why that’s allowed in school.”
Woodhour contacted her principal and the superintendent and decided to speak at the next board meeting. She implored school officials to take action to keep politics out of school, leading the board to consider a new policy that would limit the kinds of avatars students can adopt on their school profiles by standardizing all images to students’ initials.
But at the meeting where board members were slated to vote on the policy, hundreds of Palestinian and Muslim parents showed up to speak against it. One of the speakers that night was Maimoon Mustafa, a lawyer living in the area who called Woodhour’s complaints ridiculous and an infringement on free speech.
“I was appalled by the very notion that kids would be intimidated by the words ‘Free Palestine’ or an avatar with a flag or a fist,” he said in an interview. “What is so threatening about that?”
The board ultimately tabled the proposal. Asked about the situation, Superintendent Mark Toback wrote in a statement that he “cannot comment on student matters.”
Woodhour is unhappy with the outcome, she said; it leaves Jewish families, like her own, feeling unsafe. She attended the most recent board meeting and asked district leaders to take up the issue again, but they gave no sign they would.
Mustafa was there, too, listening - and grew worried by what he heard. “They may be revisiting this,” he said. “So I am not comfortable yet.”+
Lauren Lumpkin and Nicole Asbury contributed to this report.
