Hate Language Appears On Online School Document: Report

PRINCETON, NJ — The principal of a school in the Princeton Public School District is asking parents to be more vigilant of their children’s online activity after offensive images and language appeared online.

A swastika and racist and sexist language appeared as part of an eighth grade science document available to John Witherspoon Middle School students online, Planet Princeton reports. All 261 eighth grade students had access to a Google spreadsheet that was being used as part of a class science experiment.

The lab was conducted on Oct. 30, but during the evening hours of Nov. 3, “racially and sexually charged language,” a Swastika and references to an online sub-culture group were added to the document, according to the report. Principal Jason Burr then sent a letter to parents apologizing for the incident and asking them to monitor online activities on Monday.

Burr was not immediately available for comment Tuesday morning.

Racially-charged issues were a recurring problem in the Princeton Public School District last year.
It began when Jamaica Ponder — who was a senior at Princeton High School at the time — exposed a game of "Jews vs. Nazis" beer pong being played by high school students.

She then shed light on a Snapchat post in which a white student used a racial slur in reference to the black students she was with on a school bus.

There was also an incident in which a student blamed a black student at the school for giving them a brownie laced with marijuana, specifically because that student was black.

Ponder herself was suspended after she included a photo depicting the use of the N word in the background of a collage she submitted for the yearbook. She said the word’s inclusion was an accident.

In response to these incidents, the school district has made diversifying its staff a focus of recruitment. High school students also participated in a panel on diversity in the spring.

Patch file photo