By: centraljersey.com
MONTGOMERY – Racial bias crimes in Montgomery Township are fairly rare, but last weekend someone spray-painted a racially offensive epithet on the high school wall at the bus entrance.
"Coincidentally, some anti-Christian graffiti was sprayed onto St. Charles Borromeo during that same time frame," said Earl Kim, superintendent of schools for Montgomery Township. "We think it’s the same person, the same black paint, but we can’t prove that."
The vandalism at the high school was discovered Saturday, March 5, morning by a custodian, Mr. Kim said. The Montgomery police and school officials are investigating.
"A number of students have been spoken with, but we have nothing yet," Mr. Kim said. "Needless to say, this is extremely troubling to the school and I can say that, on behalf of the students and the staff who met this afternoon with Principal Paul Popaduik, they are equally outraged by what’s happened."
"They’ve planned a number of activities to let people know where they stand on it," said Mr. Kim of the activities that began Wednesday morning. "This was largely a student-led response."
"On behalf of the faculty and staff, and I think I also speak for our community, we’re extremely sorry to those people who were picked out by this act of vandalism, bias, and I can say that this does not represent our students, our staff or our community. We intend to make a positive out of a negative. We intend to use this opportunity to raise people’s awareness, to give our students a chance to speak on this matter and to make known what they value as a community."
Mr. Popadiuk outlined a two-pronged approach in dealing with the matter. One is to work with the police to investigate the incident, and the other is to look at the matter as an unfortunate circumstance but one that presents the opportunity to educate our children.
One of the outcomes of the discussions that Mr. Popadiuk convened was an idea generated by the students to paint the word "community" over the location where the graffiti was. The last five letters spelling "unity" will be painted a different color. And students will put their handprints there as well.
They also created a space for students to discuss not just this incident, but how they go about treating one another, during the day Wednesday, focusing on tolerance, diversity and community.
"I think we all feel this is an opportunity for us to educate on a higher level," said Mr. Popadiuk.
"I don’t want to in any way diminish the intensity of a racial bias crime," said Capt. Robert Palmer of the Montgomery Township police.
Since 1990, there has been a central repository for reporting racial bias crimes. There have been 63 cases of this nature in Montgomery, 12 of which were related to public schools.
"It carries a toll, it has a tendency to perpetrate and casts a paw of fear over an entire community, and that’s something that we really want to avoid at all costs, since this is a community that has a very low violent crime rate," said Capt. Palmer."Each one of these crimes is significant."
A representative from St. Charles Borromeo declined to comment on the incident at this point.

