Reading sentence opens one’s eyes

A year has passed since the youths spray-painted their hateful messages on the side of the Ashburn Colored School, a one-room, 19thcentury classroom that had been used by black children during segregation in northern Virginia. The teenagers have read their books and written their reports.

The charges, destruction of private property and unlawful entry, were dismissed in January, said Alejandra Rueda, a deputy commonwealth attorney who suggested the reading sentence.

‘‘I hope that they learned the lesson that I hoped that they would learn, which was tolerance,’’ Rueda said.

The juveniles who vandalized the old schoolhouse in Ashburn, a community of about 43,000 people northwest of Washington, could not be identified because of their ages. But the commonwealth attorney’s office has said they were public school students ages 16 and 17. Two were white, and three were nonwhite.

One of the teenagers agreed for this article to share the list of books that he chose. Among them were ‘‘The Kite Runner,’’ by Khaled Hosseini, set in Afghanistan; ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’’ by Harper Lee; ‘‘The Tortilla Curtain,’’ by T.C. Boyle, about a Mexican couple trying to make a life in California, and ‘‘Things Fall Apart,’’ a tale of Nigeria by Chinua Achebe.

He wrote that two books affected him deeply: ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ a memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, and ‘‘Night.’’

An excerpt from one of his court-ordered essays describes not fully knowing what a swastika meant, and that he thought it ‘‘didn’t really mean much.’’

‘‘Not anymore,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I was wrong, it means a lot to people who were affected by them. It reminds them of the worst things, losing family members and friends. Of the pain of torture, psychological and physical. Among that it reminds them how hateful people can be and how the world can be cruel and unfair.’’

Now, he wrote, he sees the swastika as a symbol of ‘‘oppression’’ and ‘‘white power, that their race is above all else, which is not the case.’’

‘‘I had no idea about how in depth the darkest parts of human history go,’’ he wrote.

He wrote that he feels ‘‘especially awful’’ that he made anyone feel bad.

‘‘Everybody should be treated with equality, no matter the race, religion, sex or orientation,’’ he wrote in his essay. ‘‘I will do my best to see to it that I never am this ignorant again.’’

But some criticized the reading sentence. For example, an English teacher at Loudoun balked at the idea of associating reading with punishment, said Deep Sran, the school’s founder.