PINE BUSH – Last week the Pine Bush School District kicked off its No Place For Hate campaign, a concerted effort to increase awareness among youngsters, and their families, of the harm done everyone by bullying, social/racial bias and discrimination. At their November 12 meeting, all the board members and administrators wore new T-shirts announcing the campaign and heard a presentation from assistant superintendent for instruction Donna Geidel.

It's all part of the work of the Anti-Defamation League's World of Difference Institute, Geidel explained, noting that the campaign would operate in all seven of the district's schools, with different plans for each level. On the elementary level, children will be taught the No Place For Hate Promise — "I promise to do my best to treat everyone fairly. I promise to do my best to be kind to everyone, even if they are not like me. If I see someone being hurt or bullied, I will tell a teacher. Everyone should be able to feel safe and happy in school. I want our school to be No Place For Hate."

Pine Bush is in the midst of an ongoing legal case brought against the district for allegations of anti-Semitism, and inadequate responses to the same. Although known about for at least two years, the district became synonymous, statewide, for such bias after the New York Times ran a front page story on the lawsuit, local residents protested the story and characterization of anti-Semitism with a series of nighttime rallies, and then Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised the issue again in his State of the State speech last January.

Teachers are a major part of the current effort, and Geidel pointed out staff training from the ADL on ways to promote healthy discourse about diversity. Each school is also required to come up with three activities that will highlight critical issues involved in bullying and discrimination.

Geidel showed a "Pyramid of Hate" graphic which attempts to show how extreme expressions of hatred for groups other than one's own are built on foundations of bias and acts of bigotry and discrimination. The bottom layer of the pyramid is where acts of bias occur, including stereotyping, jokes, rumors, and accepting negative information about a group while screening out the positive. Above that lies a layer made up of Acts of Prejudice and Bigotry where scapegoating and name calling turn bias into behavior. Then come Acts of Discrimination, including everything from harassment to employment discrimination, and from that come Acts of Violence. At the top of the pyramid lies Genocide, the deliberate mass murder of a minority group.

Geidel noted that there had already been a lot of discussion in the schools about exclusion and social isolation, and she explained that at this stage, elementary students are dealing just with the bottom tier of the pyramid. However, each building is discussing the basis of bullying, and she made the point that bullying goes especially deep when you are young.

Board member, Gretchen Meier, who has been working with the district on launching the campaign, said that the T-shirts could be ordered in blocks of 25 at $15 each. It is hoped that many students and parents will buy them and wear them to show that the campaign is working.

There, as well as at a Crawford town board meeting several days later, members of the audience noted how things like the ongoing lawsuit, ordered to continue by the courts in recent weeks, and bullying in general, "happens in every school district."

"It comes and goes, that kind of thing," said one resident. "I was bullied when I was a kid."

Someone else noted how their daughter was bullied at the high school, "but she got through it... it was just mean girls who didn't like her;" while someone else pointed out how they "really think this was overblown, though I agree that swastikas aren't okay."

Meanwhile, a local realtor mentioned at a recent business mixer how word was spreading about Jewish couples being afraid of moving into the school district.