According to a former teacher and two parents, Frederick County Public Schools has an antisemitism problem.
Longtime teacher Leslie Williamson, who is Jewish, said she quit her post at New Market Middle School in 2025 after nine years entirely because of antisemitic actions in the community, and the school and school district’s disinterest in stopping it.
“I had meetings with the principal, I had meetings with the director of middle schools, I had meetings with the representative for the superintendent’s office. The director of middle schools told me that he couldn’t understand my concerns, because he’s not Jewish. The representative for the superintendent told me that I needed to learn forgiveness,” Williamson said.
So, at the end of last year, Williamson ended her 23-year tenure with FCPS early.
“At the end of April, I had conversations with my family, husband and my kids, and decided that retirement was the best option,” she said.
She described it as an “utterly intolerable situation.”
Ashley Wilder graduated from FCPS schools in 2004. She’s a Frederick native who moved back home with her own family largely because she had such a good experience growing up in what she said was colloquially known then as “Fredneck.”
Despite what people outside of the area thought about Frederick, Wilder never experienced antisemitism there. Her daughter’s experience was different, and led to Wilder pulling her children out of the school district two years ago.
“Earlier that year, parents got together to talk about bullying, hate speech and what their children had experienced. A lot of us got together, went to administration and had this sort of town hall and were basically told that it’s not as bad as we were making it out to be,” Wilder said.
Wilder’s own child was called a “greedy Jew” in class. Another Jewish student was told to “go to the showers.” Black students were met with “whipping noises” made in their direction, with some being asked by white students for permission to say the “N-word.”
There was homophobia, as well.
One Jewish parent of a former FCPS student who was pulled out of the school district and wants to remain anonymous said that their daughter was called a “dirty Jew,” told she was responsible for the death of Jesus and more. Their daughter is also Latina, and was accosted for that, as well.
That anonymous parent complained to the school, and said nothing was done.
“[The complaints] didn’t do anything until I took it all the way up to the Board of Education. I ended up having to file a Title IX complaint,” they said.
Eventually, one student who targeted their daughter was suspended, but that wasn’t even because of his antisemitism — it was because he touched her inappropriately without her consent, they said.
In an email to Baltimore Jewish Times, FCPS Communications Manager Brandon Oland said that Williamson’s claims and the eventual legal complaints based on them that she filed with the government were not pursued by any federal agency.
“We can share the former employee referenced in the inquiry filed complaints with both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission related to allegations of antisemitism and discrimination within FCPS. Both agencies reviewed the matters independently and closed them without findings against FCPS,” he said.
He added that FCPS is “committed to providing students, staff and the community with a safe and supportive environment that fosters mutual respect, equity, inclusion and acceptance of the rich diversity that makes up our community.”
This comes just weeks after antisemitic graffiti, which included swastikas and the word “Hitler,” was found spray-painted at New Market Middle School.
Williamson also reached out to a number of national Jewish organziations, and has since begun working with StandWithUs, although she is not privy to sharing specifics as to what that work looks like at this point.
Two years ago, Wilder met with former New Market Principal Trese “TC” Suter, who is now principal at Walkersville Middle School, after her daughter was called a “greedy Jew” in her art class. She said that Suter’s response demonstrated to her that the school was not as, at least at that time, committed to eradicating the problem as they may say.
“She literally laughed and said ‘with everything that’s on TV right now in the news, these kids just don’t know any better,” Wilder said.
Williamson said that she thinks the discrimination stems in part from a lack of education around racial issues. In the case of increased antisemitism, she said that can be traced back to the school removing some dedicated Holocaust education.
“There used to be more about the Holocaust in previous years,” Williamson said. “[Students] used to read the diary of Anne Frank, and they had a whole unit on the Holocaust, but they’ve taken that out of the curriculum over the past few years. The only discussion I’m aware of [at New Market] is connected to the ADL — a program called ‘No Place for Hate’ — that is more generalized about hate and discrimination across all walks of life.”
While that may seem like a move that leads things in the right direction, that Anti-Defamation League program actually came on the same day as the event last school year that ultimately spurred Williamson to quit. She had seen swastikas drawn in the school before, but until one day in December last year, Williamson had never had a student hand her a piece of paper with that symbol of the Nazi Party drawn on it.
“I saw the principal after school and showed it to her and said ‘I just want to make sure that I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing,’ and she said ‘you know what you’re seeing,’ and told me to give it to the assistant principal. That was the extent of that conversation,” Williamson said.
Williamson followed up that interaction with an immediate email requesting that the student not be allowed back in her classroom until there was a discussion. That student was back for the next class session.
“I kind of flipped out a little bit,” Williamson said.
The student was suspended, although Williamson emphasized that the swastika note was one of many issues with that child, which she said all combined to result in one suspension.
Williamson added that Suter’s analysis of the situation prevented further disciplinary action.
“She refused to call it a hate crime, so there was no elevated level of punishment,” she said.
The anonymous parent described the environment her daughter has faced in FCPS simply.
“She hated going to school last year,” they said.
Next year, that parent’s daughter is going to a Jewish day school. At first, she was reluctant to leave her friends at her current school, but on her visit to the day school, she was swayed by something her parent couldn’t have seen coming.
“When they got to the lunchroom, it was Taco Tuesday. That just made her day, that she could get tacos in school,” the parent said with a laugh.
While Wilder emphasized that she doesn’t think discrimination or antisemitism are problems unique to New Market Middle School, FCPS or Frederick, she did say that the way it is treated and handled at the same district she attended as a kid has left her disheartened.
“When I spoke to the director of middle schools, I felt like they were very kind and appalled by my daughter’s experiences,” she said. “This was their own admission — this is something that they know is a problem, and at least at that point, when we were still in the system, there wasn’t really much being done about it.”
Williamson loved her career, and has been left saddened by how her more than two-decade tenure with the school district ended.
“I absolutely never would have thought that I would end my career this way,” she said. “I wasn’t ready to stop teaching.”
For Wilder, the whole situation has also left a stain on her otherwise positive view of the community she grew up in and the schools she attended.
“It just blows my mind. I grew up in Frederick, I brought my kids back here, and I never in a million years would have thought that this would be happening. I don’t think that it’s just a Frederick thing, just a New Market thing, but it’s distressing. It’s beyond distressing,” she said.
