One of AJC San Diego’s priorities is to ensure educational institutions protect students, staff, and faculty from antisemitism and harassment, and promote inclusive learning environments. Lay leaders in our community, alarmed by rising antisemitism, recognized that false narratives, negative stereotypes, and misinformation about Jews and Israel in our public schools unfairly targeted Jewish students and made them feel unsafe. This ranks as such a high priority that Sara Brown, AJC San Diego Regional Director's second full day in the office featured the first Education Committee meeting! Thanks to the tireless leadership of its co-chairs, Naomi and Wayne Harris, we quickly got to work.
One of our first priorities was assessing the scope of our work. San Diego county includes 42 school districts and more than 150 charter schools. Initiatives at the state level also directly impact our community. AJC San Diego has made inroads with key stakeholders, thought partners, and leaders at the state, county, and district levels. This is already producing results: we are proud to sponsor a key administrator’s participation in an educators' trip to Israel and to play a formative role supporting Jewish American Heritage Month initiatives in San Diego schools, including sending lay leaders and staff to speak at a San Diego Unified School District Board meeting where the board, for the first time in its history, declared May Jewish American Heritage Month.
We are also a resource for our community. We worked with educators and administrators to develop teaching materials talking about Jewish American narratives and were proud to see many of our resources used as materials shared across the county. Sara was unanimously elected to join the San Diego State University Presidential Task force on Addressing Antisemitism. And we are supporting parents in our community. Recently, a parent reached out due to troubling content on display at a school library. We worked with the parent to take a constructive approach that resulted in a prominent display of literature for Jewish American Heritage Month.
While happy to share this good news, we have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us due to efforts in San Diego to promote curricular content that omits Jewish narratives or portrays Jews in a negative light. So, stay tuned as we continue to grow our footprint of impact and work with the community to strengthen, advocate, and educate.
