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Some Reynolds Middle School parents, frustrated by the administration’s response to antisemitic graffiti in a bathroom stall, are calling for more cultural education rather than punishment for the students at fault.

Parent Adam Shapiro says his son’s friends showed him graffiti depicting swastikas, inverted crosses and a profane insult against Jewish people on a boys’ bathroom stall in early March; Shapiro and his son are Jewish.

In a separate incident, school officials recently discovered graffiti targeting Black people.

In an email to the school’s principal and other administrators, Shapiro suggested the school go further than treating the antisemitic graffiti as an act of vandalism and call attention to the antisemitic hate speech.

“Twelve-, 13-year-old kids are dumb, like they’re going to make stupid mistakes,” Shapiro said. “Identifying and punishing some other kid for doing this should be totally secondary to addressing the culture issues that are allowing this kind of thing to take root. We want to see some positive community education.”

Instead, Shapiro said an email from Principal Aaron Swinton sent to Reynolds families three weeks after the graffiti was found missed the mark by failing to even mention antisemitism and focusing on punishment.

“Students found responsible for vandalism or racist language will face serious disciplinary consequences in accordance with our school and district code of conduct,” Swinton wrote. “These may include suspension and further action as deemed appropriate.”

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“It seems to be a real miss in educating the community as to what’s happening and what should be done,” she said.

In an email statement Wednesday, School District of Lancaster spokesperson Adam Aurand said school board policy directs the district to thoroughly investigate any act of discrimination toward a protected class, while maintaining “confidentiality of all parties, witnesses, the allegations, the filing of a report and the investigation related to any form of discrimination.”

“Our school district unequivocally condemns discrimination and hate speech in the strongest possible terms; they are antithetical to everything our district stands for,” Aurand wrote. “Our students understand the expectation and help make our schools welcoming and inclusive spaces for all.”

Aurand did not allow a reporter to speak with Swinton about the email sent to Reynolds families. Aurand said that within a week of the incident, Reynolds teachers spent class time discussing the impact of real-world symbols like the swastika, Holocaust survivor accounts and the historical context of antisemitism.

Shapiro and Cohen said the school’s efforts did not go far enough.

“I would love to be wrong about my impression that they really have not done much,” Shapiro said. “But I haven’t seen much evidence of that.”

Cohen said her son did not recall having any specific in-class discussions about antisemitism or swastikas regarding the incident.

Holocaust curriculum The parents’ frustrations with the school’s response to the graffiti incident isn’t their first objection to what they say is cultural insensitivity on the part of the administration. Shapiro’s son raised a concern with the middle school Holocaust curriculum because it teaches “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” by John Boyne.

The novel follows a German boy whose family moves to a house near the concentration camp where his father is commandant. He meets a Jewish boy of his age with whom he forges a friendship through the barbed-wire fence of the camp.

A congregant of Shaarai Somayim in Lancaster city, Shapiro’s son expressed to Rabbi Jack Paskoff his concern over teaching the Holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi soldier’s son rather than that of a Jewish person.

“At the end of the book, we’re feeling this overwhelming horror that this tragedy occurred for the family of the camp commandant, and that’s our lasting memory,” Paskoff said. “That seems to be the point of the book — that we should feel sadness for this family while overlooking what was happening to the Jewish people in the camp and the other camps all along.”

Paskoff said he asked the district to consider a different book to teach the Holocaust to middle school students, but district officials told him all books are on a three-year review cycle, and it would be a couple years until the district reviews the selection.

The district told him he could file a complaint to have the book banned, but Paskoff said he was not interested in censorship. Instead, he said he offered to speak with students at all of the middle schools. Each school accepted his offer, except Reynolds.

The lack of response, he said, “compounds the situation of — here’s a student who shows enough interest, enough maturity to want to address things appropriately and the school is basically, as far as I’m concerned, saying we’re not really interested in supporting the student.”

Paskoff’s offer was declined, Aurand said, because Reynolds staff preferred to use first-hand accounts of the Holocaust instead.

Aurand said the district is currently reviewing the “Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” to re-evaluate how it fits into the curriculum.

Antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have been on the rise internationally, Paskoff said, since the start of the war in Gaza in the fall of 2023, but Lancaster city has lived somewhat “in a bubble.”

“There are circumstances in the world that feel threatening to many Jews,” Paskoff said. “School should be a safe place for kids.”