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Updated Aug. 22 at 10:54 a.m.

Dan Shalev, a Sunnyvale teen, spent the last few weeks of his summer break finishing the most difficult coding assignment he’d ever attempted: designing an online reporting platform for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate in K-12 schools in the Bay Area.

The platform, ActNowK12.org, developed in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, is aimed at simplifying what many Jewish and Israeli parents have called a confusing and frustrating process of reporting antisemitic invective, bias and discrimination.

Shalev, 15, coded in collaboration with the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, a grassroots group of Jewish and Israeli volunteers that formed last fall to combat such hate in local schools and governments after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and spike in antisemitism globally. 

When someone submits a report through the new online form, their responses are shared with a specific advocate in their region who can provide assistance, as well as with the Anti-Defamation League.

The website launched Monday and currently accepts reports for all public, private and charter schools in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco and Marin counties. Alameda County schools will be included in the form in the coming days.

“I think the best way to fix our world and do tikkun olam is just to respect others,” Shalev, an Israeli American, told J. after his first week of school as a sophomore at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara. 

“That’s why I think the form is so important. Because if you have been disrespected, if somebody did wrong you, it’s important to first of all take note of it so that we can contact somebody that can help,” he added.

Aftermath of Oct. 7

Reports of antisemitism inside and outside of the classroom have surged across K-12 schools nationwide since Oct. 7, according to data collected by the ADL. 

The Deborah Project, a national public-interest law firm that specializes in defending the rights of Jews and Israel supporters in schools, has filed eight lawsuits since fall alleging antisemitism in California schools, including the Berkeley Unified School District. The Deborah Project sued BUSD in Alameda County Superior Court in April for allegedly allowing biased and harmful lessons about Israelis and Palestinians to be taught in the classroom.

“In addition to those lawsuits, I’ve personally counseled many, many dozens, maybe hundreds of Jewish parents and teachers regarding antisemitic incidents in California since Oct. 7,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director for the Deborah Project, said in an email to J.

Amy Morris, a San Francisco Unified School District parent, told J. that her son, a sophomore at Ruth Asawa San Francisco High School of the Arts, was socially outcast by his peers last year and labeled a “racist” due to baseless assumptions about his Jewish identity and views on Israel.

“He just got put in this box that was not at all accurate to his perspective,” Morris said.

After winter break, the attacks subsided, she said, and her son chose to “let it go” rather than file a report to school administrators or the ADL. But at the end of the school year when yearbooks came out, Morris and parents in other school districts did reach out to a grassroots network of Jewish volunteer advocates, disturbed by what they saw as misleading and one-sided information about the Israel-Hamas war.

Shalev, who was an officer in Wilcox High’s Jewish Culture Club last year, hasn’t personally faced anti-Jewish or anti-Israel incidents at school but said the club has.

In February, the culture club arranged to bring attorney and Israel Defense Forces combat reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat to speak to its members, but an online campaign protesting his visit ultimately led administrators to cancel it. The next day, protests against Bar-Yoshafat speaking at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse turned violent.

Then in March, Shalev and a Jewish classmate attended a town hall in Sunnyvale hosted by the Bay Area Jewish Coalition where Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Santa Clara) met with constituents. Shalev spoke during public comments at the event, expressing concerns that his school’s ethnic studies classes were providing one-sided perspectives about Israel’s history.

“I’m seeing some of my friends sharing anti-Israeli misinformation and antisemitic comments on social media. When this misinformation is affirmed and spread by teachers it becomes very difficult to challenge,” Shalev said at the event, addressing Khanna.

At the town hall, attended predominantly by Israeli Americans, Shalev said he was deeply moved by the testimony of Ella Hassner, then a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, who said she and her siblings had been cyberbullied and harassed at school for being Jewish and Israeli American.

People don’t like to complain. We specifically see that in high school, where students are really concerned because what they need is those college recommendation letters.

Maya Bronicki, Bay Area Jewish Coalition

“I thought that I knew real racism when friends made jokes comparing me to Jews in the Holocaust while standing at the cafeteria line,” Hassner said during public comments at the town hall. “I thought I knew what real antisemitism was when my brother came home and told me that the boys on the football team had thrown pennies at him and told him to pick it up, ‘Jew boy.’ And I was wrong. I have never seen as much blatant racism as I do today.”

Those words stuck with Shalev and motivated him to volunteer his coding skills to BAJC.

“I remember hearing those stories, and I was like, that’s just not OK. There should be something where kids can go and tell people that they need help,” he said. 

Jewish moms step up

The problem is that many students, high school students in particular, are often uncomfortable with reporting an incident, especially when it involves a teacher, according to Maya Bronicki, a BAJC volunteer who spent the past school year helping dozens of Jewish and Israeli families and educators in Santa Clara County schools navigate the process of reporting incidents of discrimination. She also serves as the coalition’s K-12 lead, providing support across Santa Clara County.

“People don’t like to complain. They don’t want to draw attention. We specifically see that in high school, where students are really concerned because what they need is those college recommendation letters,” Bronicki said. She said she’s learned of more than 200 incidents across Santa Clara County K-12 schools over the past year — 60% from high schools.

Bronicki is part of a growing network of Bay Area volunteers, mostly moms, who became the designated regional contacts that Jewish and Israeli families and educators turned to for help during the last school year. 

Viviane Safrin, an SFUSD parent, began volunteering to support the same type of work as Bronicki shortly after Oct. 7, assisting other Jewish parents in the district with reporting incidents. SFUSD came under a federal antisemitism investigation by the U.S. Department of Education in January following a pro-Palestinian school walkout last fall organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, an S.F.-based anti-Zionist organization.

Safrin explained that when anyone reports an experience they had at school involving anti-Jewish or anti-Israel hate, she helps the family get in touch with the appropriate school or district staff to address their complaints and seek long-term resolutions. She often finds herself educating administrators about how antisemitism shows up at school.

“They don’t understand necessarily the discrimination that we face and why something is antisemitic,” Safrin said. “A really big component of this is being a thought partner with the district in how to educate the adults in the building, how to build sensitivity between peers. And I feel confident in saying that SFUSD wants Jewish students, educators and families to feel like they belong.”

Bronicki has helped dozens of Bay Area families over the past academic year navigate their school district’s Uniform Complaint Procedures (UCP), file appeals with the California Department of Education and file complaints through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. She said parents often struggle to navigate these procedures on their own due to lack of clarity and consistency across districts.

“Even though the name is Uniform Complaint Procedures, there is nothing uniform about it. It’s a whole mess,” Bronicki said.

For example, some school districts require families to submit a complaint through an online form, some require a hard copy be submitted in person, and some recommend emailing a specific person. If the subject line doesn’t state “This is a UCP complaint,” the school district may not even recognize the email as a UCP, Bronicki said. Some districts allow people to report anonymously, while others require them to identify themselves.

After a UCP filing is submitted, districts typically have between 30 to 60 days to resolve it. But in Bronicki’s experience, the process can drag on for months.

Over a period of eight months, “we had multiple UCP complaints submitted to different school districts, and only one was resolved,” Bronicki said, and ultimately resulted in no consequences.

“The response was that they did find that the teacher violated a board policy, but they did not specify any remedial action or any consequences,” Bronicki said.

Once a UCP is resolved, Bronicki and the other volunteer advocates can file an appeal and escalate the complaint to the California Department of Education, which Bronicki is currently pursuing.

Streamlining the process

With students coming back to school for the fall term, the grassroots team of volunteers worked throughout July and August to launch a user-friendly website for students, parents or educators to report, anonymously or not, the details of any anti-Jewish or anti-Israel incident or bias in curriculum. From there, a regional contact will reach out and recommend steps toward remediation based on the situation — from helping them arrange a meeting with a teacher or principal, to filing a formal complaint with their district or the California Department of Education.

One section of the form asks the person to check all applicable boxes that describe the type of incident. The list includes harassment, physical assault, vandalism, discrimination, classroom discussion, course materials, political posters or clothes at school, cyberbullying, school newspaper or social media accounts, exclusion from activities or groups, possible violation of district policies and retaliation against a protected group. 

The grassroots volunteers and the ADL will use the data collected from the form to track incidents and analyze patterns, such as which type of incident is occurring most frequently and where.

Last school year, it became apparent that some families were reporting incidents directly to the ADL, while others were reporting them to regional advocates, leaving both groups without a “complete picture of what was happening in their schools,” said Marc Levine, director of the ADL’s San Francisco-based regional office.

“We all know each other so much better now by working together through this. So when there are extreme incidents that require extraordinary intervention, we are able to bring the full might and muscle of the community to bear,” Levine said.

In February, the ADL opened a web-based helpline for Californians in partnership with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs and four major law firms. The helpline is another resource that K-12 parents can use to connect with pro bono attorneys who can evaluate incidents and determine whether legal action can be taken. Levine said the helpline is for the whole state, while BAJC’s efforts are regional. He considers the projects complementary.

​​Shalev noted there’s room for the platform to grow, change and potentially include school districts beyond the Bay Area. He said his father, Ori Shalev, and ChatGPT helped him with coding the online form.

In his first week back at Wilcox High, the teen said there’s been noticeably fewer mentions of the ongoing war, including on his Instagram feed, compared with the volume of rhetoric as the last school year ended. 

Now vice president of his school’s Jewish Culture Club, Shalev wears a Magen David necklace to school, even though his parents have concerns.

“I’m proud to be Jewish and proud to be Israeli,” Shalev said. “I’m proud to be a Zionist. I’m proud of my identity.”