MINNEAPOLIS -- Some students at a racially diverse Twin Cities high school are getting much too used to seeing swastikas.

Since February, someone at Hopkins Senior High School has scrawled slurs and hateful imagery in restrooms, including those designated as gender-neutral, which by their very nature are intended to be safe spaces.

Administrators discovered messages of a misspelled “hail (sic) Hitler” and racial slurs written on two separate bathrooms on May 21, according to a Minnetonka Police Department report. A photo taken by a student also showed a pair of large red swastikas on the ceiling with a racist and anti-gay message. A previous incident involved a drawing depicting the Ku Klux Klan.

The pattern has alarmed Police Chief Scott Boerboom, prompted a note home to families and left some students resigned to the assumption that nothing will change.

“It’s so desensitized at this point because you see it every single time you’re in the bathroom,” said Ryeley Middleton, who is graduating this spring.

Nestled beside the Edinas and Minnetonkas of the west metro, the second-ring suburban district prides itself on fostering an inclusive culture. It serves families that speak 70 languages, and about half of its students are kids of color.

It’s an ostensibly progressive school setting where students like Middleton, who is Black, Latina and bisexual, say they feel physically safe and supported by staff.

But she thinks the seemingly intractable problem of the bathroom graffiti amounts to a casual shrug.

“Because there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s like you’re not supposed to have those feelings of pain or hurt,” she said.

Hopkins is far from the only school to invest in gender-neutral bathrooms, only to have them defaced by vandals. Anti-LGBTQ graffiti have been reported in places ranging from a high school in Portland, Oregon, to Harvard University. By design, gender-neutral bathrooms are private, with locking doors, which also means there are less likely to be witnesses to potential crimes.

Since February, the district has made four calls for service to police reporting hate graffiti from the district, including swastikas and names of individuals on an exterior door at the nearby Hopkins North Middle School. But the district knows of a total of nine incidents, which also occurred in a men’s bathroom and a classroom. On a couple of occasions, two acts of graffiti at the high school were discovered in separate locations on the same day, according to superintendent Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed.

“It’s absolutely despicable. It bothers me at the highest level,” she said.

School officials are reviewing security cameras in the building and have stepped up monitoring near bathrooms in a “non-creepy way,” she added. They’ve also been in talks with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas about how to further educate students about Jewish identity and antisemitism.

Anti-Jewish sentiment has spiked since Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Younger voters are more likely to harbor antisemitic beliefs than older Americans, a Yale poll found last year. About 18% of 18- to 22-year-olds said Jewish people have had a negative impact on the country.

I told Mhiripiri-Reed that I grasp the challenges of tracking down the bathroom culprits. In no way do I think the hate speech is representative of most Hopkins kids, including my own. But nine times in four months is insane. These students deserve better.

“Something on this level is unheard of,” said Boerboom, the police chief. “When you see repeated offenses, it needs to be taken very seriously. It needs to be all hands on deck.”

Boerboom would like more coordination from the district and said his department is largely deferring to school officials to investigate. Without a search warrant, the police lack jurisdiction to access the school’s camera footage, he added. Mhiripiri-Reed signaled to me she’s open to providing the video to police through a new data-sharing agreement.

Now is the time for more collaboration and creativity.

No one is suggesting we go back to the 1990s, when administrators at my suburban high school deemed smoking in the boys’ room to be such a nuisance that they removed the doors from the stalls. That is frankly inhumane.

But in Hopkins, the adults in the room must be able to outsmart a teenager. If that means much more oversight outside the bathrooms until the hate speech ends, so be it. The district needs to be more transparent, rather than waiting for four months of swastikas or slurs to communicate with families and the school board. And parents need to confront and educate their kids about how deeply violating these actions are.

Eric Mandel, a frequent critic of the district who ran unsuccessfully for the school board last year, is pained. As a Jewish man with two gender-nonconforming children at the high school, he said the spate of graffiti “deeply wounds me.”

“Here, we are in a place where everyone seems to agree, at least openly, that this is wrong,” he said. “Then why can’t we address this?”

Sadly, the graffiti isn’t the only troubling example of extreme bigotry and racial bullying in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the high school investigated social media posts that included fabricated imagery of actual students. One picture was titled “Slaves for Sale,” according to the mother of one of the Black students depicted in the image, who testified at a recent school board meeting.

Those with knowledge of the situation say a small group of students were disciplined, including suspensions. Mhiripiri-Reed said she couldn’t go into specifics, citing student privacy rules.

The lack of resolution stemming from the bathroom graffiti will fuel parental anxiety about whether their kids are safe. In the email sent to families, administrators said all the right things, acknowledging that the graffiti was affecting people’s sense of belonging, safety and dignity.

But it was too vague of a response for Abby Garrett, co-president of the school’s Jewish Student Union. Even the email’s title, “Bias-Related Incidents,” seemed to downplay the harm.

“I understand the school wants to protect its student body and its reputation,” she said, “but what’s best for Hopkins as a whole is for everyone to be welcome and for there not to be hate speech.”

Every time a new swastika appears on a bathroom wall, hate gets normalized and the message to students gets reinforced: The adults can’t do anything to stop it.

_____

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC