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Middleton Schools Strengthen Stance on Confederate Flag

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Ciara Smith via Facebook

Middleton school officials are strengthening their condemnation of a racially-charged incident earlier this week after the district’s spokesman came under pressure for seeming not to take the incident seriously enough.

“Really when things like this happen, I need to be more forceful,” Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District Communications Director Perry Hibner told Madison365 in an interview Friday, two days after a video of a student’s car brandishing a Confederate flag outside Middleton High School appeared on social media. “I’ll tell you right now, we don’t condone racism.”

He stopped short of saying flying the Confederate flag on its own is necessarily a racist act, but, he said, “we’re certainly aware of the feeling it evokes in a lot of people. There’s a history and heritage that goes with that flag. It’s important for someone who argues otherwise to understand how people feel about that flag.”

A video of the flag being driven around the parking lot with nearby students laughing appeared on Snapchat late Tuesday. Later a screen capture from that video was posted on Facebook by student Ciara Smith, who wrote, “There was a white kid driving around and waving the confederate flag knowing that black people go to that school. It was on a snapchat and it said ‘That’s Middleton for ya.’ That’s not how it should be. I cried when I saw this earlier because I go to school with this person and this school doesn’t take racism serious. I’ve been told ‘It’s just kids being kids.’ RACISM IS NOT KIDS BEING KIDS. We are teenagers we are no longer kids we know right from wrong. The school will probably just brush it off but I won’t. If Middleton won’t do anything about it I WILL.”

Hibner said the district did not “brush it off” but rather took a firm restorative justice approach.

“When things like this occur, as an educational institution, our goal is to educate,” Hibner said. “Our goal is to help the student who did this understand why it was so offensive to all students, and particularly minority students. But not just that student, if we can help students who have maybe thought or done the same thing why people are so upset, we think that’s a good learning opportunity.”

He declined to offer specifics but said administrators had met with several students Wednesday and the message had been received.

“I think the student recognizes the harm that was done and the anger that some people felt about what has happened,” Hibner said.

Hibner also sought to clarify comments he made to a Wisconsin State Journal reporter regarding social media, in which he seemed to indicate students shouldn’t post these kinds of incidents on social media.

“I certainly understand how people use social media to create awareness of things,” he said. “We’ve had students who have used social media too often to not have thoughtful conversations but to make remarks that are derogatory, that are one-sided, that are spiteful. It’s ok to have tough conversations, it’s ok to say, ‘Look, I don’t get where you’re coming from.’ I just don’t think those things work very well in a social media environment.”

It wasn’t the first social media flare-up regarding Middleton this year; a basketball player posted to Instagram a complaint about the playing style of the mostly-black Madison East girls basketball team with the hashtag “#youregonnaworkforusanyways.”

Hibner also said it was a teachable moment not only for the student involved but the district as well.

“We certainly hope we learn something from it,” he said — “One thing, that I needed to be more forceful to begin with in our outrage over it. And if we can get our students to understand respect and support for one another, and we need to keep teaching them that. We can’t just assume because we’ve said it a couple of times that they’ve learned it. That’s important.”

Hibner said incidents like this one are uncomfortable but the work to end them is ongoing.

“We’ve made inroads, but there’s a lot more to be done,” he said. “I come from a small town an hour north of Madison. They don’t have these conversations. There are large parts of the state that still don’t have these conversations. That’s not an excuse or to give us a pass or anything, but we are learning as we go along.”