While the recent expulsion had students debating the fairness of the incident, it seemed that one thing most students agreed on was the general presence of racist or other hate speech on campus. However, Lakeside’s not alone in this — according to the New York Times, the number of reported hate crimes doubled between 2018 and 2022 across U.S high schools and colleges. Now, the school must take action to reflect on Lakeside’s approach to racial education — both its historical practices and the steps being taken to foster a more inclusive environment moving forward.

As a private school, Lakeside has a lot more freedom than most schools when it comes to designing its courses and curriculums. According to Upper School Director Mr. Boccuzzi, Lakeside’s racial education curricula is structured off of their community expectations, as well as the belief that racially diverse communities are richer when all participants respect and honor each other’s values. This work has been ongoing from as far back as the early 2000s, but the model used today has been in place for the last five or six years, which emphasizes values such as coordination and discussion between members of the community.

“Our [racial] education component has to be explaining to people and educating them on one, how to interact with perspectives that aren’t their own, and two, giving information about different backgrounds and different experiences, ” Mr. Boccuzi says, before going on to explain how the school coordinates its lesson plans between departments. Curriculum leaders from various subjects will reach out to other department heads and work to establish concordance with terminology and background information so as to not confuse students. These conversations occur from HD to English to Science departments — coordinated language and approach is a staple of racial education at Lakeside. However, in consideration of the expulsion, more conversations have been taking place to assess the gap in students’ understanding: Was the hate speech an isolated incident or rather is it indicative of a more widespread, systemic issue?

Mr. Boccuzi’s answer is somewhat of both. “I think like most things, this can fall in a continuum. When a student is asked to leave the community and gets expelled, it means they did something so egregious that violates community expectations in a way we expect that they should have known better. However, while looking into that, we also realized there is some lower level racist behavior that seems to be happening more frequently than we were aware of and that people weren’t telling the school about.”

With the increase of awareness however, the school is planning on addressing the rising levels of racism in various ways. One idea is to modify the education being done currently, either by supplementing it with more advisory programming, or by creating a larger program altogether.

“It wasn’t that many years ago that students came to us and said, ‘Hey, this campus has a problem with sexual violence’, and we said, okay, we’re going to build a whole curriculum around that and we did.” Mr. Boccuzzi points out that although those programs can take away free time from students, most appreciate the additional knowledge they are provided with, and perhaps a similar programdelving into racial justice might be developed if needed.

The school is also considering more programming for adults, such as Lakeside parents. This is admittedly trickier, because as Mr. Boccuzzi puts it, “Unlike [students], parents don’t have to show up at all.” There are also challenges involving the extended Lakeside community in terms of general exposure to incidents; simply put, parents may not have access to the same information students do, in both information about events like the expulsion and the materials students are being exposed to on a daily basis. Going forward, however, the school is considering implementing a program that discusses school values with new parents, harnessing the enthusiasm of families of recent admits to set the stage for conversations going forward. This could look like a day of orientation, similar to the ones ninth graders have before the first day of school, or a series of classes for parents, or even something as simple as a discussion with leaders of the school like Mr. Boccuzzi. That way, when events like the recent expulsion occur, families are better equipped to participate in discussions as well as understand the school’s position.

While minor changes to the system like these are important, the school’s main focus is on the student body itself. According to Mr. Boccuzzi, this spotlight is placed on students for one key reason: most often, transgressions involving racist language occur when adults aren’t present.

“We’re really trying to think about how we can empower students to help stand up for themselves, their friends and their community […] I think it’s much more likely that students will police each other versus come running to administrators” he says. Because of this, it’s much more effective to rely on students, especially older members and leaders of the community going forward to curb inappropriate speech at school.

Unlike the other initiatives, the school has already begun this one. An example of this is the joint inter-grade advisory sessions that students had around a month ago. Each freshman and sophomore advisory paired off with senior and junior advisories respectively for about 30 minutes, in which students of different grades got to interact with each other. The hope is that by providing more chances for inter-grade interactions, Lakeside students can cultivate a sort of informal mentoring relationship between themselves. Mr. Boccuzzi also mentions the school starting work with student leaders on campus, such as affinity groups, student government, and senior leaders, to name a few. All those students would be equipped with tools to protect their spaces from harmful speech. These student-led initiatives aim to not only empower individuals in the community, but to also promote ties between the student body to stand as a unified collective.

Regardless of whatever initiatives may be proposed to address the issue, the ultimate goal of racial education is to promote understanding and to inspire action. And while Lakesiders may have the former down, tackling the latter is the key to moving forward. As Mr. Boccuzzi notes, “I think a lot of students have the moral compass to know when something is wrong […] We’re not just hoping students will be on their own best behavior, but that they will step in when they know something isn’t okay.”