In less than three weeks, the first day of school arrives for Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, which has about 2,600 students and is so academically ambitious that the 10 heaviest backpacks worn by students exceeded 20 pounds each, The Yorktown Sentry student newspaper reported in April. Yorktown’s mission statement says that it will “support students by name, strength, and need.”
But an investigation by the Virginia attorney general’s office into how the high school responded to complaints of antisemitism both before and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel concluded that Yorktown failed to live up to its words or to protect Jewish students. The findings have not been released to the public, but The Free Press exclusively reviewed a 39-page summary of evidence gathered by the Virginia attorney general’s office and its conclusions, issued in October.
One male Jewish student reported being repeatedly targeted because he wore a kippah, which a female classmate tried to pull off his head. After a male student called him an antisemitic slur, he began covering his kippah with a baseball cap. A female Jewish student said that she was chased because she was Jewish, and other Jewish students described seeing Nazi salutes, hearing Holocaust jokes, and being told that they belonged in a gas chamber or that “Hitler should have finished the job.”
In detail after detail, the document paints not only a damning and dispiriting picture of surging antisemitism but also the indifference with which the incidents were met by school officials. Even though they warned that harassment of Jewish students would not be tolerated, Yorktown’s principal and other school leadership almost never followed through with any punishment. The result was a systemic failure to rectify the overarching issue of antisemitism affecting Jewish students, according to the report. It concludes that Arlington County Public Schools (APS), which includes Yorktown, was “deliberately indifferent to a discriminatory hostile environment against Jewish students at Yorktown High School.”
Investigators in the attorney general’s Office of Civil Rights also concluded that there was “reasonable cause” to believe that APS violated state and federal antidiscrimination laws by failing to adequately respond to the hostile environment at Yorktown.
