“Who has the notorious Nazi death camp located in Poland?”
“I have Auschwitz.”
“Who has the neighborhoods where Jews were forced to live before being sent to concentration camps?”
“I have ghettos.”
This social studies vocabulary review game caused concern for one Chantilly parent, who deemed it an inappropriate way of learning about the Holocaust.
Stephanie Taraday was previewing her seventh grade daughter’s classroom materials on the learning management system Schoology when she came across the “zip around” game, scheduled for mid-May. Shocked, she emailed her daughter’s social studies teacher on April 30 — Taraday has gotten no response as of the time of publication — and took up her concerns with Peter Kownacki, the principal of Rocky Run Middle School.
“There’s no place for any game or where students are competing against each other when it comes to the Holocaust,” Taraday said. “Classes are competing against each other… — there’s no respect [or] solemnity.”
“‘This is simply a review activity; it’s not how the material is introduced,’” Taraday said Kownacki told her.
Taraday said she felt that Kownacki’s use of the word “simply” was dismissive of her concerns: “He was saying the activity was OK because it was only a review activity.”
The zip around game has been “used throughout the year as a review method at the end of instructional units and was planned for [the World War II] unit as well,” a spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools wrote in a statement to Washington Jewish Week.
Although the game wasn’t used in the classroom this year, students at Rocky Run Middle School have played the game to review Holocaust material in years past, the FCPS spokesperson confirmed.
Shayna Meisel, the regional education director of the Anti-Defamation League, said even in a review format, “any sort of game approach to a really difficult history” is not appropriate: “Having students focus on winning instead of understanding the content is not the best.”
She added that classroom material should foster empathy for the human beings who perished in the Holocaust. Instead of playing a review game to study the Holocaust, Taraday, a social studies teacher, said students should study primary documents and interact with the material in a manner that reflects the gravity of the event. The same goes for curricula covering slavery or the struggles faced by Indigenous peoples, she said.
“The Holocaust is a really solemn subject,” Taraday said. “It should be depressing; it should be upsetting. If the kids leave that classroom and no one is bothered by what they just heard, then the teacher hasn’t done their job.”
Taraday said she is especially upset about this situation given that in September she offered to assist her daughter’s social studies teacher during the spring World War II unit. The teacher allegedly declined her offer to help plan a class trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and to show Taraday’s grandparents’ Shoah testimony to the students.
Kownacki said he would remove “Auschwitz” from the vocabulary game that students would have soon played, in an April 30 email to Taraday. She wasn’t pleased.
“It didn’t really solve the situation because there’s other Holocaust-related terminology that’s not appropriate,” Taraday said, adding that students shouldn’t engage in a “fun activity” involving words such as “ghettos,” “Auschwitz” and “antisemitism.” “I couldn’t believe the lack of sensitivity.”
“When a parent shared concerns about the use of this familiar activity due to the sensitive nature of the vocabulary in this particular unit, school administrators listened carefully,” wrote the FCPS spokesperson. “In response, the team reflected on the feedback and developed alternative strategies to ensure the approach is appropriate and respectful.”
On May 1, RRMS’ social studies team met with colleagues from the Office of Equity and Cultural Responsiveness and the Instructional Services Department for three hours to rework the classroom materials.
The teachers consulted with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington to “ensure the [World War II] unit was thoughtfully designed,” according to the FCPS spokesperson. “Everyone involved in the review process affirmed that the finalized unit reflects the seriousness of the content and is appropriate to use.”
Guila Franklin Siegel, JCRC’s chief operating officer, said she’s grateful for the FCPS administration’s “thorough and sensitive response.”
“It’s a good thing that the parent, in this case, flagged this and shared her concerns with the school system very quickly,” Siegel told Washington Jewish Week.
Siegel also had a quarterly meeting with FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid on May 1, during which Reid mentioned “an issue that had come up” at RRMS and added that the administration was working on addressing it.
Siegel has been in communication with Reid and other high-level administrators who are directly involved in the process, as well as Kownacki, the principal.
“It’s kind of an ‘all’s well that ends well,’” Siegel said.
There’s still room for improvement, according to Taraday, who expressed concern that a game of this nature was present in the classroom for an unknown number of years.
She spotted errors in classroom instructional materials including the fact that “antisemitism” is written as “anti-Semitism” and that a provided definition is inaccurate. A slide made available to students this spring states that the Final Solution was the Nazi plan to exterminate Adolf Hitler’s “undesirable groups,” when it specifically targeted Europe’s Jewish population — the entire euphemism was “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Taraday said.
A May 19 executive order about rising antisemitism in Virginia’s education system references FCPS and states that “historical inaccuracies about Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Israel are taught often unchallenged.”
Taraday said these inaccuracies were still there after JCRC staff members reviewed the material.
“[FCPS] didn’t bring in the right people,” Taraday said.
She added that she would only consider the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, to be credible Holocaust educational resources.
At a May 14 meeting with Taraday and Taraday’s husband, Reid expressed the need for someone to vet Holocaust-related educational material before it’s used in the classroom, and didn’t yet know how to implement that, Taraday said.
Taraday said she wants the county to establish a task force on antisemitism consisting of informed Holocaust education experts who will prevent a situation such as this one from happening again. She also urges FCPS teachers to undergo Holocaust awareness training.
“Every social studies teacher who is going to teach about the Holocaust should be attending required professional development, not only [about] the content but how to deliver the content,” she said.
