Here is a link to the full interview with Superintendent Jill Gildea. It was added to the online version of this article after Heidi Matthews, the community relations member of Park City School District’s community engagement team, called The Park Record and said the article did not provide proper context in its quotations. The inclusion of the interview is to provide more context for interested members of the public.

Scott van Hartesvelt was surprised when he learned about the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigation into the Park City School District that documented commonplace racism, nazism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism and even possible sexual assault, much of it inadequately handled and recorded by district staff members.

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But his 13-year-old daughter was not surprised at all. She told her dad that the harassment the report found had taken place among students during 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years still happens right in front of her every day in the only public school district she’s ever attended, the only school atmosphere she has ever known.

Like what?

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“I can’t wait for Trump to win so that he can build a wall and throw you back over,” he recalled her telling him. Two Asian girls were asked, “Is your mom serving you dog for dinner?”

These instances came after the report was released last month, he said.

She said she felt lucky to not be pestered by bullies of her own. “I kind of keep my head down and I don’t upset anybody,” she told him.

“We have lots of conversations about right and wrong and her role in being on the right side of situations and behavior,” he said.

The report showed that the school district has not kept adequate records of harassment reports as required under federal law, so no one can be sure exactly how many cases of reported harassment there have been. But in the 180 documented cases the investigators were able to find from Park City High School, Treasure Mountain Junior High School and Ecker Hill Middle School, they found a number of the district’s responses insufficient to address and stop the offending behavior. The figures are also likely incomplete, as school administrators filed harassment records inconsistently, according to the report, with one principal shredding witness statements at the end of each year.

The report stated that a survey sent to staff members of the three schools found that 60.3% of the employees were aware of race or national-origin-based discrimination, 31.4% were aware of sexual harassment or harassment toward LGBTQ+ students, and 24% were aware of harassment toward students with disabilities. 

Students said speaking out against or reporting harassment only results in retribution from their peers.

The description van Hartesvelt’s daughter gave him about the punishment offenders face didn’t seem like much of a deterrent to him: in-school suspension in which students sit with their phones.

Most high school students asked about incidences at school declined even when offered anonymity.

Sharing with a reporter could cost a student their reputation, several teachers explained, and land them on the wrong side of student-to-student abuse.

Van Hartesvelt said he wants to tell his daughter to stand up against the harassment and report it, but he recognizes how the district’s inaction has made that more difficult for her and others.

If students can’t trust the district to appropriately address targeted harassment, and if his daughter’s reports go nowhere, he’s not sure what he’s supposed to tell her, he said.

“I don’t think this is an overtly racist community,” van Hartesvelt said. “So where’s the disconnect between what I believe Park City to be and then what is being experienced in the schools? And I still don’t feel like I have a clear answer.”

To him, the message from the investigation is about leadership, and the district hasn’t shown appropriate accountability.

Abuse ‘normalized’

Spencer Randall, a senior at Park City High School and the president of its Gay-Straight Alliance organization, has had an up-close view of what happens when students feel comfortable and undeterred in harassing one another.

He also stood out as the lone student contacted for this article who was willing to speak and identify himself.

“We get a lot of direct homophobia to the club,” Randall said. “Just for an example, we have sign-ups every year, and every single year, all three years, we’ve had at least five people sign up as a joke. Some people have put a slur as their pronouns. … You can see them walking away, laughing with their friends.”

He said anyone who visited a school for the day could leave with first-hand accounts of racism and antisemitism, as well as harassment targeted toward Latino students.

“It’s just so normalized, especially at the high school and at Treasure, that I think people don’t even report it,” he said. 

When Randall moved to Park City from the Chicago suburbs, he noticed a strong sense of antisemitism, and soon found another kind of widely propagated harassment targeted toward him.

He said he started presenting more masculine, and his peers had a lot of horrible things to say about it. 

“In ninth grade, I was still kind of experimenting,” he said. “And in October of my ninth grade year, I just completely stopped going to school for the rest of the year because the looks and the comments. … I did not have a single friend. I did not have anyone who was very nice to me or supportive.”

In his sophomore year, he heard slurs daily. Most of his teachers wouldn’t use his preferred pronouns. Through his involvement in the organization, he’s known other students who have been the targets of violence, and he almost became subject to it himself before the situation de-escalated.

A few years ago, when he saw some of the cruel comments wrote on the Gay-Straight Alliance’s sign-up sheet, he said he emailed a principal trying to inform them of his concerns. As far as he knows, nothing came of the report, and the issue was never addressed.

More recently, he’s reached out to the administration with concerns that the high school’s two gender-neutral restrooms are doubling as photography rooms during current renovations.

“I was saying to administration, I was like, the photography room cannot use the gender neutral bathrooms as a dark room or anything for photography,” he said. “It’s not safe, especially given what happened in Oklahoma with the student dying. If trans students are not allowed to use the normal bathrooms, they need to have the gender-neutral bathrooms available.”

The responses were less than helpful, he said.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll get on that next year,'” he said. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a current issue.’ … Something could happen.”

Randall said he’s learned to ignore the harsh comments, and he’s had years to learn how, but that doesn’t make it any easier for other students who find themselves in his footsteps.

One thing he said could help is enacting and making students aware of harsh consequences when they engage in harassing behaviors.

“I feel like if they really push that idea of anti-bullying and anti-harassment, anti-discrimination, I think it would start to make more of a difference and encourage students to report other students,” he said. “I’ve really never seen that.”

Another senior and leading member of the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance provided written answers about their experience, but asked to remain anonymous.

“I have been called slurs in the hallways — never to my face, but always loud enough for me to hear,” they said. “Sometimes I’m targeted for being openly queer, other times for being neurodivergent or physically disabled. I have been told to kill myself because ‘the world would be better with one less faggot.'” 

The student said they feel the district is, overall, handling the investigation well, though the student is “not confident in their ability to actually enforce rules or follow steps to fight bigotry.”

The district has had a “no tolerance” policy toward harassment since they were little, the student said, but they’ve seen little execution.

They said they’d like to see that change, and that the school’s administrators need to show they care about students through their actions, not just talk of a zero-tolerance policy.

“When a Jewish teacher had to raise hell for anyone to do anything after a student drew a swastika on the bottom of one of his desks, that said much more than any of the anti-bullying posters did,” the student said. “When you turn a deaf ear to the slurs and bigoted remarks being thrown around in your hallways, that says much more than the safe space stickers do.”

The student continued: “When your response to your marginalized students’ complaints is diplomacy instead of action, over and over again until it necessitates a federal investigation, that says infinitely more than the emails reiterating that you will not tolerate harassment.”

“Almost every person I know who has reported being bullied admitted that the district did very little, if anything, that actually helped their situations,” the student said. “I’m a little worried this will all disappear without anything happening, and in five years, someone will say, ‘Hey, remember that time the OCR was investigating our school district because of the amount of unacknowledged harassment going on?’ and the response will be ‘Oh, that happened? I didn’t notice.'” 

Silver linings

District Superintendent Jill Gildea emphasized that the report did mention that the district had done some things to address student harrassment.

“In the report, believe it or not, there are also acknowledgements of the things the district has stepped forward and worked on,” she said.

The report acknowledges the district “timely investigated some specific incidents of harassment based on race, national origin, sex, and disability at the three schools and took some measures (most often disciplining harassers) to end and prevent recurrence of the harassment.”

But the district didn’t provide adequate evidence that it had investigated other instances at all or “took effective steps to eliminate hostile environments” in other instances, several of which the report explored in detail.

One Black student was the target of racial harassment 17 times between the two school years. Students called them the n-word, “monkey” and “negrito.” 

Most of the harassment was investigated. Most of the students faced consequences. Still, the report found the response lacking because “the hostile environment based on race persisted.”

Many of the examples followed a similar pattern, though the consequences offending students faced were often redacted from the report. In many cases, the district acted, but not sufficiently according to the Department of Education, and not to federally mandated standards.

Gildea said punishments for targeted harassment often vary depending on the students’ ages, the severity of the offense, and other situation-specific details. Currently, she said, the district is in the process of clarifying its policies to be more accessible and easy to find for the community.

“There can be restorative practice. There can be a module of education on the topic. There can be an in-school suspension with time spent with a counselor or social worker or wellness coordinator,” she said. “There are going to be different things.”

To make sure reports of harassment are taken seriously and escalated to the appropriate level, she talked about standard reporting forms now available on the district and schools’ websites. If students want, they can report incidents anonymously or they can ask for a follow-up.

“I think what we’re learning from our OCR review is that sometimes if something was just one email or a teacher might have mentioned something to an assistant principal, it may have seemed like it was just a for-your-information,” Gildea said.

She said the district is hopeful people will use the new report format.

There are several anti-bullying campaigns within the district’s schools, including a “There’s No Place for Hate” program, which the civil rights report said consisted of posters, the ability for students to sign a banner to pledge against hate, and asking teachers to hold 15- to 30-minute class discussions about creating an inclusive culture.

“Our challenge in a zero tolerance mindset is sometimes, you know, if you simply say, ‘Well, that’s it. You made a mistake. You’re expelled. You’re out of here.’ That just leads to more hatred and more misunderstanding,” she said.

Not enough

After the report was released, Gildea sent a letter to students’ families outlining steps the district would take.

One Jewish parent of a middle schooler at Treasure Hill told The Park Record the letter didn’t feel sufficient.

“This is a serious situation with the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights weighing in,” he said. “That’s not to be taken lightly. … For me, the letter wasn’t explicit enough.”

It didn’t show accountability or ownership, he said.

“You’ve got to identify a problem, own that problem, and then you can set about being serious about fixing the problem,” he said. “If you go short on any of those first steps, then you’re messaging that it’s not really that big a problem.”

In the days following the release of the report, his daughter saw several boys in his class passing around a swastika. 

“A boy uttered, ‘We need to kill all of the Jews,’ or something to that effect,” the man said. 

His daughter immediately left class, and an investigation was immediately opened.

“The next day, my daughter felt uncomfortable at school, getting some looks,” he said. “To the credit of her friends, they wrapped themselves around her, so she was never alone throughout that day.”

The school, he said, isn’t sharing the consequences for the boy who said those hateful statements.

“Is it too much? Is it too little? For things that define the safety in the schools, you’d want to know what the consequences are,” he said. “I don’t need to know the person’s name. I don’t need to know any specific information.”

As for the district as a whole, he said he’d like to see more transparency, overt communication and responsibility. 

“Who’s responsible for wars between countries? Who’s responsible for a lot of the conflicts that happen?” Gildea said. “I wish it were as easy as a who or what to blame … but is that fair?”

Everyone does their best, she said, and they do more as they learn more.