About 300 community members attended a March 25 town hall to hear from Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor about his plans to combat school-based antisemitism and other issues of concern to Jewish students and families.
During the meeting, Taylor emphasized the importance of improved Holocaust education in schools, robust partnerships with Jewish institutions and the possibility of implementing mandatory antisemitism awareness training for MCPS staff and faculty.
The March 25 event was the third MCPS town hall meeting with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, and the first since Taylor assumed office in July 2024.
“It’s important for the superintendent to be exposed in a concentrated way to the experiences and challenges and worries and concerns [of] Jewish stakeholders in the school district that he runs,” Guila Franklin Siegel, JCRC’s chief operating officer, told Washington Jewish Week.
She said these meetings are even more pressing as school-based antisemitism has risen nationwide, including within MCPS, where the county has seen hateful vandalism and anti-Jewish bullying and harassment.
“MCPS has really struggled with antisemitism,” Franklin Siegel said at the event. “Even before Oct. 7, [2023], the incidents of antisemitism in the public schools were skyrocketing.”
She expressed gratitude to Taylor for his responsiveness in the immediate aftermath of such incidents, citing the anti-Israel phrases spray-painted at Bethesda Elementary School in August 2024. As Franklin Siegel prepared to visit the school in solidarity, her phone rang, and the caller was Taylor, wanting to check in.
“That had never happened before,” Franklin Siegel recalled, adding that she felt especially grateful given that she “really didn’t have partners within [MCPS]” in previous years.
“So much has improved in terms of the collaboration, the level of awareness and understanding among top administrators and principals as to why antisemitism is a real problem, and that when it occurs, it needs to be responded to forcefully,” Franklin Siegel said.
Jewish students shared their personal experiences with antisemitic incidents to the town hall, addressing Taylor.
A student at Wootton High School, who has seen swastikas drawn and heard antisemitic and anti-Zionist phrases in the hallways and classrooms, shared that she feels unable to share the fact that she’s Jewish and Israeli at school.
In response, Taylor distributed a sheet depicting the county’s hate bias protocol, which ranks incidents in terms of severity. Students can use this rating to provide context to administrators and more precisely report hate bias incidents.
A MCPS middle school student shared that she regularly speaks up when her peers laugh at “antisemitic content” online, but that nothing has changed, to which Taylor spoke to the importance of strong county partnerships with the JCRC and the Anti-Defamation League.
A parent said her daughter’s friend asked if she would join the Muslim student organization at their school. When the daughter declined and said she’s Jewish, the friend posted on TikTok that the girl was a “genocide supporter,” a move that cost her all of her school friendships. Before transferring her daughter to another middle school, the parent brought this issue to an unsupportive assistant principal, she said.
“I met with [the assistant principal] several more times,” the parent said. “I begged. I pleaded. I wanted to talk to the parents of the student. I wanted to know, what happened? What were the consequences for this student? I wasn’t allowed to know. I do know that she was never suspended.”
Because of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the school system can’t disclose what ends up happening after an incident, Taylor said: “If a kid gets suspended from school because of something that they did in school, we don’t broadcast that.”
He acknowledged that this confidentiality could be frustrating for parents who are left in the dark about what consequences — if any — occurred for the perpetrating student. It’s an issue that the JCRC has spoken up about on multiple occasions, according to Franklin Siegel.
“School systems must find a way to balance its legal obligations and the need to restore and improve trust among Jewish families in the school system,” she told Washington Jewish Week. “There has to be a way to let victims know that meaningful action has been taken against perpetrators when there’s a bias incident, and that silence erodes trust in the school system, and frankly, does a disservice to all of the administrators and educators who actually are responding incredibly to these incidents, but no one would know that.”
Another issue arose around the implementation of a mandatory antisemitism awareness training for MCPS staff and students. While Taylor spoke in favor of such trainings — “I think that they translate into helping people say fewer careless things” — he did not immediately agree to take the next concrete steps.
Franklin Siegel said she was “very disappointed” that Taylor did not commit on March 25 to providing MCPS teachers with a comprehensive antisemitism awareness training that the JCRC has provided to educators in neighboring districts.
At the town hall, Taylor said he aims to “revisit” that training to ensure that it helps foster genuine understanding, rather than merely “checking a box.” Franklin Siegel said MCPS is not acting fast enough.
“Sometimes, you just need to do something — sometimes you just need to take a step forward,” she said. “Right now, I think the school system is not moving forward on this front.”
She acknowledged that Taylor is operating under many constraints, including the Montgomery County Education Association and the need to work with multiple diverse stakeholder groups.
“There are constantly a ton of pressure points within the school system,” Franklin Siegel said. “But in the end, the school system has an obligation to make sure that every child has the opportunity to realize their full potential, and that every child can feel safe and seen and comfortable sharing their full identities when they go to school every morning. And Jewish parents have the right to feel their children are safe when they’re sending them to school.”
