Racist Graffiti at School

Imagine that you are the principal of a public high school with a student body that is 44% Caucasian, 30% African-American, 14% Hispanic, 12% Asian. You are a forty-five year old African-American man–who started his teaching career as a high school history teacherand one morning at 6 am, you get a phone call from the school custodian who has found racist graffiti spray-painted at a dozen locations on the school building, sports fields, and teachers parking lot. When the school resource officer studies the campus surveillance video, the images reveal four young men in jeans and dark hoodies doing the spray-painting. Although the video doesnt clearly reveal their identities, after discussing the situation with the school resource officer and several teachers, you pull together a list of ten likely suspects. Now, you have to figure out how to proceed.

Your goals are:

1) to punish the offenders

2) to protect the physical safety and emotional well being of the other students

3) to make the school community understand how wrong the racist graffiti is

4) to unify the entire school community

What will you do? Write a minimum of 250 words to explain your actions as school principal for that day, the next day, the next week, and the following weeks until the situation is resolved. Write from the first person perspective, as though you are the principal. Make up a name for the school, the principal, the community if you wish.

Come up with a plan of action and be very specific about what you will do and what you ask others to do in order to achieve your four goals.