Lake Oswego High School Students Walk-Out, Protesting Racism

Hundreds of students at Lake Oswego High School walked out of class Tuesday morning to protest racism. Last week, graffiti with racial epithets was found in several bathrooms.

Students left the building but remained on campus.

Administrators at the school and district supported the walkout, which was planned with their help.

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School administrators have been working hard to educate students on racism and put an end to a series of incidents going back several years.

District Superintendent Heather Beck says the walkout "reflects the gravity with which students have responded to campus incidents this year, and their determination to speak out against racism, reject insensitivity and embrace respect for diversity.

"This rally also underscores our district mission to be an inclusive and safe learning community."

Last week's incident - first reported by the school paper, Lake Views, in an online post - was reported to the school's administration and removed by students.

The graffiti said "n-----" and "kill the n------" (the dashes were not in the graffiti).

Last fall, the school was forced to confront the issue of hatred after a series of incidents involving racist and anti-Semitic images.

The first incident happened in October, on the day before Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar.

"A picture posted in our cafeteria that was horribly Anti-Semitic," Principal Rollin Dickinson said in a letter to parents. "It was a picture of a concentration camp victim being pushed into an oven. This caption was typed beneath the image: 'Easy Bake Oven.'"

Dickinson said that an administrator found a student taking a picture of the image with his phone, not taking the picture down. The administrator took the picture down instead.

Then, a few weeks later, Dickinson was made aware of a series of posts on the Facebook page maintained by the Class of 2017.

A poll of possible senior-prank ideas had been created in which students could ideas and comment on people's suggestions.

"Some of the ideas were in poor taste; some were more or less harmless," Dickinson wrote. "And then there was this: 'We create a club called Ku-Klux-Klub and find every black kid and sacrifice them.'"

Dickinson said that "this deeply disturbing post was present for days, weeks even, and, despite frequent activity on the page, and though no one “liked” the post, nothing was said.

"Finally, fortunately, a student felt compelled to say something about it to a teacher. The teacher told me. Within minutes, we were able to have conversations with students, parents, teachers, counselors, and the principal of another high school."

Dickinson said they figured out the post was written by a student who used to go to Lake Oswego High School and is now at another school.

"One of our students volunteered to take the poll down," Dickinson said.

"In short, we were able to take care of our students and each other," Dickinson said. "But it took a student standing up to allow us to do that. Even though I am thankful a student had the courage to take positive action in response to injustice, still I worry about this kind of racism."

These incidents also prompted a special issue of the school's newspaper dedicated to the issue of racism. It included a timeline of racist incidents that have happened at the school - whose student body is 75 percent white, 12 percent Asian, five percent Hispanic, and 1.2 percent Black - involving both students and staff.

"Going to school at LO was very different and hard," a student who transferred away from Lake Oswego, Rodney Hounshell, is quoted as saying on the front page. "I couldn't even go one full school day without a white person saying nigger or asking me if they can say it."

The paper's editorial board was unwavering.

"Enough is enough," they wrote. "No longer should we ignore this issue. How many incidents need to occur before one goes too far?"

District Superintendent Heather Beck sent a note to the entire Lake Oswego Schools community saying Dickinson's letter should be "required reading for every parent in our school district.

"I do not believe that this behavior is representative of our students or our community, but I am concerned that the students who viewed these postings did not challenge them or immediately report them."

Dickinson said the entire "Lake family" needs to work together.

"We have to be better than this, and I believe we are," Dickinson said. What’s at stake is more fundamentally important to our students than anything else we will teach them.

In this sense, this is, and really must be, a call to action."

After the incidents, the school held a series of "Laker Seminars." The first one took place in January featured a video, "The N-Word" and the second one, last month, focused on Black History Month.

Photo Lake Oswego High School