FALL FORECAST: Catlin Gabel is not alone in Portland in responding to an “undercurrent of racism.” IMAGE: Jonathan Hill

Amid the rituals accompanying a new school year, many students, parents and faculty members at Catlin Gabel are hoping to leave one unfortunate ordeal behind.

Specifically, they’re hoping to put to rest the eight-month saga over bullying that upended the high school last year.

“The school stood for equity and justice for many, many years,” says Lark Palma, a top administrator at the 52-year-old private school in suburban Portland where annual tuition ranges from $16,500 to $22,000. “I sense from [students] they’re not going to let this happen again.”

What happened at the school best known for its strong liberal arts curriculum started last fall. That’s when one student, the mixed-race son of a trustee, allegedly made numerous derogatory comments aimed at about a dozen female high-school students of African-American and Asian descent.

The controversy then spiraled through the winter and spring after administrators told parents, teachers and students about the events but withheld details about the harassing phone calls, the discovery of a racial slur etched into a desk and the “series of hurtful and horrid messages anonymously posted in several students’ Facebook Honesty Boxes,” according to a letter Palma mailed to the entire school on Jan. 14. (An “honesty box” lets users anonymously post messages on their “friends’” Facebook accounts.)

“This is something that doesn’t happen here,” says Palma.

By the time the 720 students and their parents learned the full extent of the allegations, the school had to acknowledge what its student newspaper, CatlinSpeak, called an “undercurrent of racism” that had been allowed to gain force.

The school, in a move befitting its progressive brand of education, eventually hired an outside consultant to lead students in discussions on diversity in the spring. But because administrators had been slow to disclose the content of the allegedly racist and sexist remarks, some students accused their principals and teachers of “dancing around the issue.” The student at the center of the controversy was expelled and two others were put on probation. No one ever admitted to scratching the n-word on the desk.

It’s clear that when school starts Sept. 3, some Catlin Gabel students will not have forgotten the tumult that unfolded last year, even though others may be ready to move on.

“If the powers that be remain faithful to their current outlook, it would appear as though our discussion of racial tolerance at Catlin Gabel will not fade anytime in the near future,” Lucy Feldman wrote in the May issue of CatlinSpeak. “Much of the faculty, along with numerous students and parents, recognize the racist etching in the library, phone calls, and Facebook messages of the fall as critical events that would be wrong to ignore,” added Feldman, now a senior.

Classmate Ian Maier and several other students criticized the administration’s response, which was to address the harassment privately at first and then require upper-school students to attend several hours of sensitivity training.

“They are making a criminal activity sound like high-school banter, and I cannot stand for that,” Maier wrote in CatlinSpeak. “For the sake of sympathy with the victims, there needs to be transparency.”

Duncan Hay, also now a senior, took a different tack in the student newspaper. He felt a few students’ inappropriate actions led to unfair punishment of all students, since everyone in the high school had to participate in sensitivity training. “The claim is that we have not delved deep enough into ourselves to notice our own prejudices,” Hay wrote. “These isolated incidents don’t involve the entire [student] body ...I didn’t know about them, I didn’t say them, and I didn’t perpetuate them.”

But Palma, who as “head of school” is essentially Catlin Gabel’s superintendent, defends the school’s actions. “We acted very quickly when we knew how all the pieces came together,” says Palma, who invited WW to visit campus in response to this newspaper’s questions.

One student targeted by the harassment has decided not to return, but school administrators don’t believe her decision is the result of what transpired on campus, Palma says. “We spent eight months making it right,” she says.