CHESTERFIELD — Four or five Parkway West Middle School students will be disciplined after administrators found out this week that they designated a “Hit A Jew Day” at the 850-student school (there is about 30 Jewish students).
Principal Linda Lelonek learned Monday evening that her sixth-graders had started an unofficial “spirit week” last week.
The students started with “Hug A Friend Day,” moved to “High Five Day,” “Hit A Tall Person Day,” and then, finally, this Monday, to “Hit A Jew Day,” representatives of the Parkway School District said.
The students generally were not being violent, Lelonek said, but instead “tapping” their peers.
“It was almost like a tag thing,” Lelonek said. “But then it changed.”
She now knows of three or four students who were slapped; none told school officials about being hit. “They said, ‘We were just playing,’” she said.
After school Monday, Lelonek heard from the mother of one of the school’s roughly 35 Jewish students.
Lelonek called an all-sixth-grade assembly first thing Tuesday morning. She said she asked the students if they had heard of each designated “day.” Nearly all raised their hands. Then she asked, “What’s tomorrow going to be? ‘Hit A Principal Day?’”
“You could have heard a pin drop,” she said. “One started saying, ‘Oh, no, Ms. Lelonek.’”
“I said, ‘Don’t say a word.’”
Lelonek said discipline will range from parent conferences to suspensions.
She said the sixth-graders will be studying the Holocaust later this year. “It’s going to be a little more meaningful this year than it’s ever been before,” she said.
