Reply to Severna Park High School viral racist/ableist incident

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Disgusting. I am looking to move and just wrote off all of AA County... I do not think the schools response is adequate.[/quote]

This isn’t representative of all of Anne Arundel County, just Severna Park. Even the other areas of AA County are rolling their eyes and saying “FSP” (f**k Severna Park).

Crofton and Arundel High Schools are a lot more diverse and inclusive, and the staff at those schools are far more serious about incidents like this. Even Broadneck HS wouldn’t let something like this slide. [/quote]

But really, how bad is this school culture that has allowed this to happen??[/quote]

The school culture is very bad in regards to how minorities and students with disabilities are treated, and it has been that way for decades. Most of the administrate staff at the school (especially the former principal) have been complicit in protecting the status quo at SPHS and the community around it. I was hoping that the recent change in principals would improve things, but it hasn’t. The former principal behaved like a man-child, trying too hard to be the “cool guy” by being all friendly with the athletic and popular rich kids (and also enabling their toxic parents) while ignoring everyone who wasn’t apart of those groups. He was also arrogant. Before SPHS got its new building, he implied that SP wasn’t getting a new building because the school is the “best” in the county and gets overlooked compared to underachieving schools that also needed upgrades. They wanted to move the SP project ahead of Northeast’s renovation, which was in worse condition than the old SPHS.

To this day, every time there’s a racist incident, a suicide, a cheating scandal, or a major bullying incident, some members of the community and school will come out and “condemn” it, but essentially nothing changes. SP just isn’t a community that is motivated to change things, especially because a lot of the residents there live there specifically because it is 80% white, affluent, and competitive. Many of these residents moved to SP or choose to stay there for generations bc they like the toxic culture and lack of diversity, so it’s not surprise that they’re not driven to change that culture. Change is coming to SP, but it’s a lot slower than it is in the rest of the county because the resistance to change in SP is a lot stronger than the motivation to change.

A few years ago when a racist incident happened at Arundel High School, the principal informed the community, gathered them together and gave them opportunities to air their grievances, and a new community citizenship class was piloted to help students learn about and respect differences. That class was such a huge hit at Arundel that it was replicated at all the county’s high schools and is now a graduation requirement for all students.

At Crofton and Broadneck High Schools, there are equity student councils where ethnic and religious minority students can advocate for their needs and help educate the rest of the schools about their cultures, and teachers are encouraged to write referrals whenever they hear biased motivated language, let alone flat out bullying like what was seen in this video.

SP just doesn’t do any of that. SP avoids these conversations and likes to think that unlike everyone else in the county, they’re exempt from change. [/quote]

I remember the cheating scandal (link for those curious: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2007-05-22-0705220074-story.html). They were barely disciplined because they were top student athletes. I would not be surprised if this perpetrator was too hence the lack of expulsion.

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