Racist incident helps awaken district
Quakertown students take steps to live up to dream with day of service
Quakertown High School junior Jolly Ekpe was angry when he learned district middle schoolers hurled racial slurs at an opposing football team’s cheerleaders and threw rocks at their buses after a game.
The students’ actions that fall 2017 night against Cheltenham High School, where more than 50 percent of students are black, made national news.
Suddenly Quakertown, a predominately white Bucks County school district nestled between the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia, saw itself simultaneously apologizing for students using the N-word while also asserting that those middle school students didn’t represent the beliefs of its student body.
“It’s just not right for any school district to have to come to another school district and have your bus hit by rocks and be verbally abused by middle schoolers,” said Ekpe, who’s now an 11th-grader and one of the few students of color at Quakertown. “It’s hurtful.”
The situation escalated when Quakertown last year held classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader. The holiday was built into the district calendar as a makeup for snow days, but holding classes drew criticism after the racist episode.
Troubled as he was by the 2017 football game, Ekpe, 17, didn’t want it to be forgotten or ignored.
“I was upset that this was in our district,” he said. “But I took
it as a challenge. As: ‘What can we do about this?’ ”
He wasn’t alone. Fifteen months after the football game incident, Quakertown will hold its first MLK Day of Service on Monday. Students will have the day off from school, but are encouraged to volunteer in racially diverse areas of the Lehigh Valley or Philadelphia.
Ekpe, who typically spent the holiday reading about King with his family, will volunteer at Phoebe Richland retirement community. Others will spend their time helping at food pantries, Sixth Street Shelter in Allentown, and a nonprofit aimed at reducing heroin deaths.
Quakertown is not the only school district in the region to have racial tension in recent years. Saucon Valley, East Penn and Southern Lehigh school districts have all had incidents.
Quakertown Superintendent Bill Harner believes the district needed to first own up to its racist incident to begin to heal from it. He sees the MLK Day of Service as a teachable moment that can expose students to communities outside Quakertown.
After the football game, Harner, a Cheltenham native, apologized profusely, and Quakertown soccer players showed respect toward and unity with Cheltenham soccer players before a match held shortly after the football game. Quakertown began cultural sensitivity training, and Harner hosted a dinner for parents of black students to hear their concerns.
It wasn’t the first time Harner heard of racism in the Quakertown School District. One black student told him a Confederate flag was waved at him in the student parking lot, Harner said. A parent once told a black administrator that she didn’t “belong here.”
Still, the football game was the catalyst for discussion.
“We do have a problem,” Harner said. “But this was so public. It was a learning moment for the entire community.”
In 1994 a law by U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., reconsecrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a day of service, and people were encouraged to spend it remembering King with activities such as volunteering.
Over the years, schools and colleges have used it as a “day on” rather than a “day off.”
Quakertown High School teacher Rachel Girman participated in an MLK Day of Service at Penn State as a student. After the football game incident, Girman saw an opportunity to encourage students to help others.
“The incident was horrifying,” she said. “But it gave us the space to use this day the way we should have always used it — as a day of service.”
As Girman was brainstorming the idea, Ekpe and other students were also thinking of organizing a day of service after seeing other Bucks County schools volunteer in their communities.
Monday morning, more than 100 Quakertown students will gather at the high school to hear from state Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Last spring, Shapiro brought together Quakertown and Cheltenham students to honor King’s legacy.
Allentown pastor Greg Edwards, considered an MLK scholar who was inducted into Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers, will be the keynote speaker Monday morning before students head out to volunteer. He plans on speaking about King’s legacy and work.
Edwards sees Quakertown’s MLK Day of Service as a way to teach students about King’s legacy and show them not all communities look like Quakertown.
“We have to widen our lens by having the courage to seek out new and different experiences,” Edwards said. “I find many of our students in wellprivileged districts often have poverty of experience when being exposed to others who may be different culturally or racially.”
That was the purpose of volunteering outside Quakertown, Girman said. She wanted to expose teenagers to areas with a different racial makeup and income level than Quakertown. In the Quakertown School District, more than 80 percent of students are white, and fewer than 30 percent are economically disadvantaged.
Quakertown senior Alex Brandis was shocked when she heard about the football game incident.
“I was initially blown away that this happened,” she said. “Being white, I hadn’t experienced any type of racism.”
Brandis, 18, had trouble believing that the students in a school district she so loved could be hurtful. But the more she heard about what happened, the more she realized Quakertown had an issue.
“It’s important for us to show that we’re going to come back from this,” Brandis said. “And really, hate has no home here. That incident is not who we are.”
Quakertown senior Adeniyi Onanuga, 17, knows Monday’s activities won’t cure racism. But it’s a start, he said.
“The idea of tackling racism isn’t a simple one,” he said. “But the idea of a day of service opens people’s eyes to others. You can see what life is like for other people.”
Onanuga, who has spent previous MLK Days volunteering at a local food pantry with his church, said since the Cheltenham incident, race has been discussed in Quakertown. After the football game, Onanuga and others wore white T-shirts one day that said #itsonlycolor on the front and #gobeyondcolor on the back to encourage their peers to look beyond race.
If it weren’t for the football incident, Quakertown might not have an MLK Day of Service on Monday, Onanuga said.
“It almost felt like a necessary evil,” he said. “It was an issue beforehand and is still an issue. But there wasn’t any light shed on it until it happened.”
“The idea of tackling racism isn’t a simple one. But the idea of a day of service opens people’s eyes to others.” — Quakertown senior Adeniyi Onanuga, 17