Dear County and District Superintendents and Charter School Administrators:

Our Shared Obligation to Protect All Students from Hate and Extremism

After last week’s election, racist text messages were sent to Black youth and adults in our school communities and in many states across the nation. These text messages, which addressed the recipients by name and threatened them with enslavement, are vile and insidious efforts to intimidate our fellow Americans on the basis of their race. These messages of hatred must be condemned, and I thank the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our law enforcement partners for taking these messages seriously and ensuring that they are fully investigated.

Simultaneously, many girls and young women have been the targets of online harassment, receiving messages from boys and young men that state “your body, my choice.”

These threatening messages and any other hateful language have no place in a learning community. Our schools must be places where students learn the values of empathy and civility and how to stand up for each other and themselves.

The California Department of Education urges all schools and districts to take any reports of hate and harassment very seriously, in keeping with state and federal law, as well as any relevant local policies and regulations. Anyone who has been impacted by acts of hate can report these incidents to the CA vs Hate hotline by going to http://cavshate.org/ or by calling 211 or 833-8-NO-HATE.

As educators, we must clearly and directly teach our young people that hate is never acceptable. Whenever we see online harassment having real-world ripple effects at school, it is our duty to interrupt it.

The American University Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center have developed Building Networks & Addressing Harm: A Community Guide to Online Youth Radicalization at https://www.splcenter.org/peril-community-guide. It’s a guide for parents and caregivers to address online radicalization.

This report includes research-based recommendations for supporting students who report experiencing online hate, as well as recommendations for engaging with students who may be perpetuating hateful language.

Responding to Online Hate:

• Take it seriously. Children who experience bias or harassment are more likely to experience feelings of isolation, depression, or anxiety.
• Create a record of the incident, including investigating or reporting the incident as appropriate.
• Discuss online safety and privacy practices. Ensure that parental controls and content moderation are active. Empower children to understand and use online safety tools.
• Remind children that extremists are relatively few in number; when amplified online, they seem more numerous and powerful than they really are.

Talking with Children Who Are Engaging with Extremist Content:

• Ask children questions about what they are learning online and what kinds of platforms or websites they spend time on.
• Encourage reflection through open-ended questions: “What values do you stand for?” “What kind of person do you want to be?”
• Educate children about how propaganda is used to manipulate people, including that propaganda can often disguise itself as humor.
• Encourage children to critically examine the messages that they receive as persuasive devices.

In addition, recommendations recently published by the United States Department of Education at https://www.ed.gov/media/document/recommendations-educational-institutions-preventing-and-responding-sexual-and-dating-violence regarding the prevention of sexual and dating violence may be useful for local educational agencies that are responding to an increase in sexual harassment.

Thank you for your vigilance on behalf of all students in California. Together, we will ensure that our students’ access to education is protected and uninterrupted.

Sincerely,

Tony Thurmond
State Superintendent of Public Instruction