A Delaware school district will reimburse the family of a Jewish student for counseling and issue an anti-harassment statement after a federal probe found the girl was targeted and bullied over her religious identity.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced Monday the resolution of a Title VI complaint filed against the Red Clay Consolidated School District in Wilmington, saying that the student was subjected to “harassment that created a hostile environment based on her national origin (shared Jewish ancestry).”

The office’s investigation concluded that the girl, whose name was redacted in the settlement agreement and letter to the district, was targeted by other students “because she is Jewish.”

Last year, her classmates threw a paper airplane at her with the message “Blood of the Jews” in red ink and multiple swastikas as well as “bloody imagery,” the office said in a letter to Superintendent Dorrell Green.

“Approximately ten minutes later, in the same area of the school, classmates raised their arms in a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute apparently towards the student,” said the Monday letter. “One week later, the student discovered a swastika drawn on her desk. During the same school year, swastikas were drawn on a desk that the student used in a classroom on two separate occasions.”

The incidents were reported in June, before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, which resulted in widespread pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and a surge of federal complaints about antisemitism at universities and K-12 schools.

The offending students were disciplined — one received a three-day out-of-school suspension — but the investigation found that the school’s responses were “often haphazard” and “inconsistently enforced.”

In the resolution, the district agreed to take several steps, including offering to reimburse the girl’s parents for counseling; publishing an anti-harassment statement; reviewing its policies on combating Title VI discrimination, which includes race, color and national origin; improving its record-keeping on harassment complaints, and conducting annual anti-discrimination training for staff.

“This important agreement requires the Red Clay Consolidated District to fulfill its federal civil rights obligation to ensure that all of its students, including Jewish students, can learn safely and without discriminatory harassment in its schools,” said Catherine Lhamon, DOE assistant secretary for civil rights. “We look forward to active work with this district going forward to protect Jewish students, and all students, from targeted discrimination that impedes their equal access to education.”

The district, the largest in Delaware, enrolls about 15,000 students. The racial breakdown is 39.3% White, 29.3% Hispanic, and 22.5% Black, according to the U.S. News and World Report education database, which does not list the percentage of Jewish students.

The Education Department’s civil-rights office has opened 55 Title VI “shared ancestry” investigations at universities and K-12 schools since the Oct. 7 attack.

An Anti-Defamation League survey released Nov. 29 found that 73% of Jewish students had “experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism” since the start of the 2023-24 academic year, versus 43.9% of non-Jewish students.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.