Copyright The Boston Globe
On Oct. 22, Jewish organizations said the five football players involved in the Sept. 30 incident were back on the team despite reports from the victim and others that five senior football players had locked a Jewish freshman football player in the bathroom and sprayed Lysol through a door grate while yelling antisemitic slurs at him. After emerging from the executive session, School Committee Chairman Richard Iannitelli told the crowd that Smithfield High School Principal Kristin Ward and Athletic Director Glenn Castiglia led an investigation into the incident. And he said players appealed to Bartz after she imposed the original plan of discipline. “Whether you want to call it hazing or whether you want to call it bullying or a prank or a tradition, it makes no difference,” Iannitelli said. “What happened to the young adult in that room should not have happened. So we take that seriously, and we are going to be looking at things to try to prevent this.” The School Committee voted to have the law firm Brennan Scungio & Kresge conduct the review. That firm includes Sean Clough, an attorney who represents the school department and who is a former Smithfield School Committee chairman. Meanwhile, Attorney General Peter F. Neronha’s office has received a complaint from a parent of a Smithfield High School student alleging that on Sept. 30, “several other students assaulted and harassed the [freshman targeted in the hazing incident] based on his Jewish ancestry/ethnicity and religion, in the locker room before football team practice.” During Monday’s public comment period, Rabbi Jeffrey Gladstone noted Iannitelli had not used the word “antisemitism” in describing the incident. “That concerns me because, from what I understand, there was a lot of corroborating evidence that supports the fact that there was involvement of antisemitism,” Gladstone said. “And if you can’t say the word ‘antisemitism’ in addressing this crowd, under these circumstances, then I would suggest we still have a problem.” Wendy L. Joering, executive director of the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center, said that when she met with school officials on Oct. 16, the principal told her that players who observed the incident reported it to their parents and their parents called her. She said Ward told her that she interviewed each student involved and they all corroborated the same story. She said Bartz was removing the players from the team for the season although they had appealed that decision, and school officials agreed to an education plan aimed at a “cultural change” that Bartz acknowledged was needed. Joering urged the Smithfield School Committee to stick to that education plan. " Smithfield, the nation is watching," she said. “Do the right thing. Lead with integrity.” A flier titled “Stick to the Facts” was distributed during Monday’s hearing. The authors were not named but described as “many parents of past and present athletes with firsthand knowledge of the locker room environment, both on that day (of the incident) and prior.” “Locker room behavior has persisted for over a decade and is present across multiple sports,” the flier states. “Past and present athletes report being blocked in the bathroom for all four years of their attendance, regardless of their athletic ability, race, religion, or perceived popularity.” The flier said, “Locker room behavior has frequently included blocking the main door to the communal restroom, spraying with whatever aerosol is available and throwing items into the room such as water, ice, and sports equipment.” “None of the individuals involved in the reported locker room behavior were aware of the student athlete’s religious affiliation,” the flier states. “All the athletes near the bathroom deny that any antisemitic comments were made or heard during the event.” The flier concluded by saying, “The Smithfield football community is united in the belief that all prejudice, including antisemitism, is intolerable and unacceptable.” Gary Rabinowitz, who described himself as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, called that flier an “abomination,” saying it amounts to an “admission of guilt” that “eviscerates anyone associated with Smithfield schools for over a decade.” And he said it was difficult to hear Iannitelli “dance around” the word antisemitism. “That was an embarrassment,” he said. Rabinowitz charged that school officials have “decided to ignore one of the only basic tenets of education — to paraphrase Hyman Roth in Godfather Part II, ‘This is the business you have chosen’ — and the business you have chosen dictates that you assure the safety of all the students." But Dr. Andrew Bostom, who described himself as a Jew and a retired Brown University academic physician, said he is “concerned that we be completely accurate before leveling charges of ‘targeted antisemitic slurs’ at 17-year-old man-children football players.” “After a month after the alleged incident, not a shred of hard evidence video audio, in this age of ubiquitous recording devices has been produced to prove the claim that ‘antisemitic slurs’ were hurled during the stupid locker room antics,” Bostom said. “It is unacceptable to make serious public allegations in the absence of such hard evidence.” Bostom, a critic of Islam, accused the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and other groups of hypocrisy for not criticizing antisemitic sermons by local Islamic leaders. At the end of Monday’s meeting, Bartz said she welcomes the School Committee’s review of the matter “to ensure that every action taken has been appropriate and aligned with policies and a commitment to student safety and accountability.” “As superintendent, I care deeply about our students, our families, our community,” she said. “There is no place for antisemitism, for hatred, for discrimination in our schools, in our sports, in any of our programming.” “Unfortunately,” Bartz said, “there has been some information and facts and details around this incident that we have not been able to share due to privacy.” After the meeting, when the Globe asked her to explain why she backtracked on the discipline for the football players, Bartz said, “I’m sorry, I can’t speak about this while the investigation is going.”
