Benjamin Weiser and Nate Schweber

<h1>For years, Jewish students in the Pine Bush Central School District complained about finding swastikas scrawled on walls, desks and lockers. They said they were subjected to ethnic slurs, shoved and beaten. They said other students even led “white power” chants and made Nazi salutes.</h1>

The harassment and bullying grew so bad in the rural town about 80 miles north of New York City that five Jewish students sued for discrimination in 2012, and a news report about the incidents led to federal and state investigations.

Nearly four years ago, the district paid $4.48 million to settle the lawsuit and agreed to changes in its curriculum and training to combat bias and anti-Semitism, along with student surveys to chart its progress.

But the surveys, made public for the first time in a court filing last Friday, show that despite the district’s efforts, anti-Semitism remains a stubborn problem at Pine Bush, as similar complaints about anti-Jewish bias are on the rise across New York state and elsewhere in the country.

In the court filing, Pine Bush school officials reported that 766 students, or one-third of the middle- and high-school students the district surveyed last fall, said they had seen or heard incidents of anti-Semitism in school the previous year.

Ilann M. Maazel, a lawyer for the Jewish students who had sued, called the number “shockingly high.”

“Both sides agree that results matter and they’re not even close to being there yet,” said Maazel, of the law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff &amp; Abady in New York.

Still, school officials, in the court filing, said that given national trends, Pine Bush had made “great strides in improving the attitudes of its students and school community.”

“At a time when reports of anti-Semitic behavior have dramatically increased throughout the United States, including on K-12 school campuses,” the school district wrote, “the Pine Bush survey results, by contrast, show some positive trends.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported last year that the number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in New York state rose by about 90 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, and the number of such incidents in K-12 schools doubled to 36, from 18.

The Pine Bush district, which is about 18 miles west of Newburgh, New York, serves about 5,000 children from Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties. In the 1970s, Pine Bush was the home of a Ku Klux Klan chapter president.

About a dozen current and former Pine Bush students interviewed off school grounds this week said the climate of harassment and bullying had improved, and programs and other steps taken by the district had helped.

But the students said problems of insensitivity remained, and not all of them thought Pine Bush school officials handled bias complaints satisfactorily. The students spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment from other students or reaction from teachers.

One 18-year-old said he had not seen anything like the racism and harassment described in the lawsuit. He recalled taking the survey and thought it was good because “it helps gauge” what was going on in the school.

He said that teachers’ lessons on anti-Semitism had influenced his behavior. He admitted that he and his friends sometimes made bigoted statements, always in jest, he said. But since teachers have been impressing upon students that their words could cause unintended hurt, he said he had tried to avoid such talk and to police his friends. “I jump in and say, ‘OK this isn’t cool,'” he said.

Another student, who is 17, recalled a history class in which a teacher had discussed the Holocaust and tied the lesson to anti-Semitism at Pine Bush, which the student said had a big impact on his thinking. He said he felt anti-Semitism had largely disappeared from Pine Bush’s schools.

But a 16-year-old sophomore said racial slurs and anti-Semitic graffiti were still widespread, and in his view had become a sort of background noise.

“It really hasn’t changed — all the students are so used to it,” he said.

He recalled seeing swastikas etched on the side of a box of Kleenex, scribbled in a textbook and on a bathroom stall. He also said that he hears a common racial slur for blacks used daily.

He and two other sophomores also recalled taking the survey, but said they had not treated it seriously. “Everyone in class was taking it as a joke,” he said.

A 17-year-old senior said he and his friends still occasionally made anti-Semitic jokes among themselves. But he added school assemblies promoting tolerance had helped him rethink the “potential impacts” of his words. “You might think it’s funny, but someone might kill themselves,” he said.

Some students said that teachers and administrators seemed to be struggling with how to respond to complaints of bias and other problems. Two girls, ages 13 and 15, said they had reported incidents of bullying to school officials but the officials never followed up on the complaints.

The state and federal investigations were opened after The New York Times published an extensive 2013 report on anti-Semitism in Pine Bush’s schools.

The next year, a federal judge in White Plains denied the district’s request to dismiss the suit. While not ruling on the suit’s merits, the judge, Kenneth M. Karas, concluded that a jury could reasonably find that the plaintiffs had “suffered severe and discriminatory harassment, that the district had actual knowledge of the harassment and that the district was deliberately indifferent to the harassment.”

To settle the lawsuit, the district agreed to mandatory training for teachers and staff members on how to recognize and report bias, and it developed an anti-bullying curriculum with the help of the Anti-Defamation League.

Pine Bush officials said about 2,300 students, or about 80 percent of those enrolled in its middle schools and high school, responded to the most recent survey last fall.

Of those, 766 students said that in the previous year they “sometimes,” “often” or “frequently” saw or heard incidents of bias, including swastikas in school, anti-Semitic slurs, Holocaust “jokes,” the word “Jew” used in a pejorative sense, white power chants, Hitler salutes and other such behavior.

Two-thirds of the students said they “rarely” or “never” saw or heard such conduct, the survey showed.

When the same question was asked in 2017, a slightly higher percentage of students had reported incidents of bias. “We are in fact honestly relieved to say, ‘Look, we’ve had an improvement,'” said Tim O. Mains, the Pine Bush superintendent since 2017.

Mains maintained the district did “a very good job” of tracking and following up on reports of anti-Semitism or other forms of bias. He also noted that given the increase in bias incidents around the country, the survey showed movement in the opposite direction.

Evan R. Bernstein, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director for New York and New Jersey, said Pine Bush school officials had been “very responsive” and tried to do everything the ADL had asked of them, but the survey results meant there was still work to be done.

“If I’m the Pine Bush school administration and I’m seeing that number, it means I can’t take my foot off the gas, and I have to keep pushing as many anti-bias programs and initiatives in the school district as possible,” Bernstein said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="feca7a28-8ddd-4594-b92a-ee64028da3f9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/nyregion/pine-bush-ny-schools-anti-semitism.html">The New York Times</a>.

Swastika on a Bathroom Stall: Anti-Semitism Still Plagues Upstate School District

The harassment and bullying grew so bad in the rural town about 80 miles north of New York City that five Jewish students sued for discrimination in 2012, and a news report about the incidents led to federal and state investigations.

Swastika on a bathroom stall: Anti-semitism still plagues upstate school district

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Benjamin Weiser and Nate Schweber

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Swastika on a bathroom stall: Anti-semitism still plagues upstate school district