What Is so Hard About Keeping Jewish Students Safe?
A lawsuit against a Seattle public school raises the question of how things can go so badly.
A new lawsuit claims that administrators at a Seattle high school failed to keep a Jewish student safe from threats of violence and that they discriminated against her by allowing students to harass her to the point where she had to hide from an angry mob in a locked classroom.
Seattle Litigation Group filed the claim against Nathan Hale High School on June 13th in King County Superior Court on behalf of a 15-year-old student who goes by the initials “MKL.” The claim seeks emotional damages and specifically sues former principal William Jackson for discrimination and failure to provide accommodations and a safe environment.
According the complaint, comments like “Hitler’s plan should have worked” and “I hate the Jews” and “Free Palestine” graffiti paired with a swastika in a bathroom were allegedly not handled, and it’s unclear if an internal investigation occurred. MKL faced unique harassment after taking down a poster promoting an anti-Israel walkout and rally on November 9th, 2023. Another female student allegedly yelled and spat in her face, saying that she’d “do it again” and that MKL “deserved it,” presumably referring to the October 7th massacre of Israelis by Gazan men.
This event appears to be the catalyst for what became months of anti-Semitic bullying, cyber bullying, and threats of assault. The harassment culminated on May 24th, 2024, when a group of 20 students allegedly chased MKL down a hall, forcing her to hide in a locked classroom. In an interview with King 5 in which her face is blurred, MKL says the group banged on the door and yelled for her to come out and “get what you deserve.”
MKL did not return to school after that and switched schools in the fall.
Lara Hruska, who founded of Cedar Law in Seattle to help families resolve disputes in schools, was called in by the parents to help mitigate the situation. Hruska went to Nathan Hale on June 3rd, 2024, for a “fix-it” meeting. But Hruska says that Jackson, the principal, declined to meet in person, preferring to take the meeting on Zoom from his office with counsel from the Seattle Public Schools.
“This principal can’t even give the family the courtesy of saying, ‘I’m so sorry what your family has been through,’” Hruska says. “We asked what steps he was taking. It was a softball question. ‘How are you showing students antisemitism is not OK, Islamophobia is not OK, students are not OK?’ He said, ‘I’m not prepared to answer that question,’ and he went off camera. I have this 14-year-old who is afraid to come back to the building. Just give me something.”
Hruska spent several months trying to get Seattle Public Schools to release video footage from the hallway of the May 24th incident. She believes it was destroyed. The one person who said she had seen the footage, Vice Principal Makela Steward-Monroe, was on leave in fall of 2024 and unable to confirm what she had seen, according to SPS general legal counsel Roxane O’Connor in an email exchange with Hruska.
“I asked them for the footage and they kicked it to the public records office,” she says. “They finally gave us the footage in October, and it was incomplete. They were like, ‘This is what we got.’”
At this point, Hruska handed the case off the Seattle Litigation Group.
“Every time we get a case, we give the school time to fix it,” Hruska says. “Our perspective is assuming good intent until proven otherwise. In this instance — in particular, the footage, the safety transfer — I was met with inaction or paralysis.”
“Principals are always the problem,” says Seth Rosenberg, who took on the case and is now representing the family. “If you’re having problems getting your kid accommodated, it’s because the principal doesn’t care.”
But Jackson wasn’t a checked-out principal. In January of 2024, he had been awarded Washington State Secondary Principal of the Year.
According to a Seattle Times article about the award, “His supporters called him a ‘connector of people’ known for his ‘transformational leadership.’”
Each day, when he walks through the parking lots, hallways and athletic fields of Nathan Hale High, he looks students in the eyes and greets them as individuals, never forgetting how their experiences at a young age can make or break their will to learn.
He says work these days has never been more challenging or exciting. Every day, he leans into his “why,” his mission and purpose in education: advancing equity, access, justice and service through radical love.
Max Patashnik, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, found Jackson and the administration to be receptive to learning and change. The JCRC facilitated a presentation at Nathan Hale by Project Shema, an anti-Semitism education program geared toward progressive spaces.
“This was not a school that was uniquely evil with leadership that was uniquely awful,” she says. “They were doing their best. It goes to show there is a lot more that needs to be done.”
Despite the positive reception to the Project Shema training, however, Patashnik was surprised to later learn that MKL was forced to hide in the classroom from a mob of her peers on the same day as the training.
“Clearly there was at least one student who was failed miserably, based on this lawsuit,” she says. “It’s a slow burn of microaggressions or blind spots or biases. If they are gone unaddressed, they lead to an environment where violence against Jews is permitted.”
The JCRC is now engaged with the new leadership at Nathan Hale. After the 2024 school year, Jackson moved to the Bellevue School District, where he now serves as director of teaching and learning. Patashnik sees this as an opportunity to work with the BSD, which received an 11-page complaint from StandWithUs in April 2024 outlining its own failure to take action against anti-Semitism.
“Based on our work with [Jackson], he has shown a commitment to Jewish safety,” Patashnik says. “Is it enough? He’s helped us build bridges in the Bellevue School District. People are not all one thing or all another, usually.”
Hruska and Rosenberg are more cynical.
“I think he was afraid to engage,” Hruska says. “The presidents of Harvard and Columbia also were somehow paralyzed. Somehow it’s a deep question of how we address swastikas in the bathroom.”
According to stopantisemitism.org, more than 30 incidents have taken place in Seattle Public Schools, from graffiti to biased teaching materials to direct harassment. The website traces the organization of the November 9th walkout and demonstration in downtown Seattle to Nathan Hale’s own Muslim Student Association.
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Rosenberg shies away from questions about identity. “This isn’t about an Arab-Jewish or Islamic-Jewish issue; this is about anybody being protected for their religious beliefs,” he says.
But he does believe Nathan Hale has a culture problem. He even moved five blocks over just to be zoned for Roosevelt High School. “What we are really hoping is that we an put enough pressure on the school to get a culture change there,” he says.
However, the pressure of legal fees and media attention doesn’t seem to move the needle for SPS, he adds. Now other Jewish and Israeli students at Nathan Hale are coming forward with complaints.
“One would think money is the lever,” he says. “I’m not sure Seattle Public Schools cares about that. They keep on going back and doing the same thing over and over again.”
Cover photo: Graffiti in a Nathan Hale bathroom included referenced in the lawsuit.
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'Rosenberg shies away from questions about identity. “This isn’t about an Arab-Jewish or Islamic-Jewish issue; this is about anybody being protected for their religious beliefs,” he says.' No one involved in the events reported here had any interest in MKL's religious beliefs. All they knew was that she is a Jew. Not about identity, indeed.
Max Patashnik speaks of 'microaggressions.' I doubt that informing MKL that she was merely the victim of microaggressions would have made her feel better while she was fleeing from an angry mob. Patashnik also seems to think that the former principal who allowed antisemitism to run unchecked is basically a fine fellow who may have erred for just a moment.
Far too many Jewish organizations ostensibly devoted to fighting antisemitism refuse to call out even blatant patterns of antisemitic behavior. And if they can't call it out, they can't very well fight it.