Thomas Taylor, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, admitted that the district erred when it failed to identify a Nazi swastika found at a school as antisemitic when it communicated with the community and pledged to meet with Jewish clergy, who demanded action against Jew-hatred in the district.
“The message to the school community should have explicitly identified the swastika as an antisemitic symbol and named the nature of the harm more directly,” Taylor wrote in an email to Rabbi Adam Raskin of Congregation Har Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Potomac, Md., and other Jewish clergy about the incident at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda.
In the email, which JNS viewed, Taylor called the failure a “misstep” and said that “we can and will do better more consistently in this regard.”
The heavily Jewish county contains about 45% of Jews in the state.
The email followed a Sept. 28 letter that dozens of rabbis and cantors signed, warning that Jewish families were withdrawing children from district schools. The clergy cited 600 reported hate bias incidents of all kinds during the 2025-26 school year, compared with 253 the previous year, a more than 135% increase.
“More must be done, and on that we agree,” Taylor wrote. “At the same time, there are no easy answers.”
He asked the clergy for “public support” of the district’s efforts, which include “mandatory compliance training for all staff” and “experiential learning, including peer-to-peer programs and speakers that help students understand and confront antisemitism.” He also said that the district is grappling with “the very real impact of social media on students and school climate.”
Taylor proposed a “conversation” and “collaborative dialogue” with the clergy to implement actions to address the issues. He asked Nyah Hamlett, the district’s chief equity and organizational development officer, to lead the discussions.
Hamlett is the former superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in North Carolina, where she met with parents about antisemitic incidents in the district in 2023. Parents said at the time that they thought that the school district was “covering up antisemitic incidents, hoping that they’ll go away.”
In 2025, Hamlett reportedly stepped down from her position to move to Maryland to be closer to family.
Raskin wrote back to Taylor and said that clergy would like to meet soon, “so that there are no unnecessary delays in identifying and implementing corrective actions.”
He asked the superintendent to be at the first meeting.
Guila Franklin Siegel, chief operating officer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, stated on Thursday that she appreciates the superintendent’s reply, but “the urgency of this problem demands a swift response.”
“Jewish families do not have the luxury of waiting for an entire school year or even a semester,” Franklin Siegel said. “School leaders should be implementing the specific recommendations that JCRC has been communicating to MCPS for years.”
