Before the pandemic, some of the most serious violent and disruptive incident categories in schools (assault, sexual offenses and weapons possession) experienced gradually declining rates over three academic years spanning 2017-2020, although rates for New York City schools were notably higher. After in-person learning resumed, the incident rates remained much lower than in the pre-pandemic years. The categories of assault, sexual offense and weapons possession cases each declined to under 1% per thousand students.
A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your support for the National Front. Jew was an everyday insult and the N-word was in regular circulation. There were no more than four or five non-white kids in the whole school: I can recall one Asian girl finding her art folder had been covered in racist abuse,
Recently, I had reason to dust off a very interesting memory from secondary school. It was in the locker room before gym - always a moment of compromise, given the element of partial undress - when a girl, let's call her Gemma, rounded on me. What Gemma lacked in physical stature, she more than made up for with haughty imperiousness. And this time, she had a pack of other girls with her.
[Farage] would sidle up to me and growl: Hitler was right' or gas them', sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers [] I'd never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage's mouth was deeply shocking. But I wasn't his only target. I'd hear him calling other students Paki' or Wog', and urging them to go home'.
The Spokane School District of Washington State recently paid $60,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had failed to protect a transgender student attacked by another student on school grounds. The October 2021 attack involved Ian Ring. At the time, Ring was a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Dr. Jonas E. Salk Middle School. His bully allegedly taunted him with transphobic slurs in the past and then attacked him while he waited for the school bus.
According to the family's lawsuit, early this year the boy inadvertently uploaded an image or video of himself exposing himself to his Snapchat connections, one of whom saved it. The next day Gabriel told his parents, Felipe and Orsolya Palacios, who called the school and the police. A criminal investigation ensued, and the bullying escalated, the lawsuit says. Palacios' mother met with the vice principal, and the lawsuit alleges that the vice principal met with the students suspected of possession and distribution of the upload.
