Nazi flyers left at California high school already reeling from Swastika photos
A Southern California high school that has sought to quell outrage after photographs surfaced of students giving a Nazi salute at a party is reeling again after officials say flyers with Nazi swastikas were found on campus over the weekend.
Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, “Nazi posters” were placed on the campus of the school, Newport Harbor High, a spokeswoman for the school district, Adriana Angulo, said Wednesday. School officials immediately called the Newport Beach Police Department to report them, Angulo said. She described the act as “vandalism.”
Officers responded to the school Sunday morning and discovered about 10 flyers, some with Nazi symbols on them,said Heather Rangel, a spokeswoman for the Police Department.
“Nobody is claiming responsibility,” Rangel said Wednesday. There was no photo or video evidence for police to review, she added. It was not clear whether the appearance of the flyers was connected to the previous episode, she said, which involved students at a party giving a Nazi salute in front of dozens of red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika.
Police created an incident report regarding the flyers, but no arrests have been made, Rangel said. Given the lack of physical damage, she said, police would need to know more about a motive to assess whether a crime had been committed. School and district officials were working closely with police, Angulo said.
The situation left school officials denouncing anti-Semitism for at least the second time in recent weeks.
“Again we condemn all acts of anti-Semitism and hate in all their forms,” Sean Boulton, the high school’s principal, said in a statement Wednesday. “We will continue to be vigilant with our stance, and the care of our students and staff.”
Newport Harbor students placed messages on campus Monday encouraging kindness, according to City News Service and The Los Angeles Times. “Show kindness toward unkind people. Forgive people who don’t deserve it,” one message reportedly read.
Then, Tuesday night, during the school district’s board meeting, the school board approved the creation of a “human relations task force,” Angulo said. It will be focused on developing a districtwide plan “to determine how we can best create a more positive school culture and provide improved curriculum in our schools that will assure that the past is understood and never repeated,” she said.
The Nazi flyers episode is the latest to unnerve the high school and the wealthy Orange County beach cities that surround it.
Officials from the school and school district were forced to hold an emergency meeting March 3 to address the outrage over the photographs of students giving a Nazi salute that were shared widely on social media.
The school has interviewed dozens of students in its investigation of the party. Officials have said they were weighing disciplinary action.
The school district has also held two community meetings, and late last week, Eva Schloss — a Holocaust survivor and Anne Frank’s stepsister — visited the high school to speak with students about her experiences.
Leaders on campus and in the community have appeared optimistic that the students involved had learned their lesson and that the situation offered a teachable moment of sorts. Newport Harbor student leaders united in a call to end hate; some students reportedly wrote open letters of apology; and even Schloss, 89, told reporters that after meeting with students, she thought they had “learned a lesson for life."
“I think this school has got the message,” she said last week.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.