On February 7th, several Roosevelt students were wandering the halls during class and decided to attack the piano lab room, where Christine Gero teaches, with homophobic and misogynistic vandalism. Mrs. Gero is a beloved teacher at our school who has served our community with invaluable generosity over many years. She runs our incredibly successful orchestra, teaches students to play piano, and serves as a pillar of support, strength, and leadership to everyone that knows her. Following the incident, Tami Brewer and the Roosevelt administration decided to make absolutely no acknowledgment of the hate crime that occurred in our school. Staff and students who were not personally informed of the incident by Mrs. Gero only found out that it had even happened through an email sent to all staff by Mrs. Gero describing the incident, and calling for greater unity among the staff and a better acknowledgment of the hate that truly does exist in the RHS community. The choice to share about the vandalism was left up to individual teachers, and MANY students still report having ZERO discussions about the incident in ANY of their classes. 

We as Roosevelt students are APPALLED and DISGUSTED by Tami Brewer and the administration's absolute neglect and lack of accountability in this situation. Ultimately, the actions of these students are a reflection of the culture set at this school, a culture set in part by the response of the administration to situations such as these (such as the "white student union" of last year). Ms. Brewer is actively solidifying the type of school environment she expects and condones every moment that she refuses to even acknowledge that the incident occurred, let alone act appropriately. We believe in the importance of restorative justice, justice that addresses wrongdoings and seeks for the perpetrator(s) to resolve them as best as possible. We also believe in transformative justice, justice that seeks to educate, meet needs, and create community to prevent wrongdoings from happening at the root before they even occur. Admin has made ZERO moves toward helping the community heal or to educate students. The students responsible are suspended, and set to return to campus at some point. Restorative justice must prioritize the safety and needs of the victims of a situation and those at risk because of it. The best thing to do to make Roosevelt safe is to remove the hateful students responsible, who clearly believe that LGBTQ+ people and women are inferior to themselves and those like them, from the school. We MUST prioritize the needs of LGBTQ+ students, who may live in fear of being attacked or harassed on a daily basis. LGBTQ+ students cannot feel truly safe walking through the halls if they know they might brush shoulders with people who think they deserve to be burned alive (live burning of gay people is the origin of the "f-slur", which originally meant a bundle of tinder). If Tami Brewer, the Roosevelt administration, and Seattle Public Schools fail to expel these students, no matter what policy or excuse they may use to justify their complacency, they are enabling these students and those who will take similar actions in the future (because once they see how easy it is to get away with it, they will). They are telling their LGBTQ+ students, "your safety and lives matter less to us than district politics and making hard decisions." We as a Roosevelt community MUST call for the IMMEDIATE EXPULSION of these DISGUSTING students, and hold our leaders accountable for their failure to protect Mrs. Gero and the queer people at RHS.