It didn’t come as a surprise to junior Thomas O’Grady that freshman Noah Adler is lobbying the New York Senators for bill 6871.

According to O’Grady, who participates in Model United Nations (MUN) with Adler, “He’s super hardworking, [MUN] is his forte — he’s relentless. In MUN he’s very proactive, he’s a great delegate.”

The bill would specifically require the education of hate crimes and how it can be combated in school districts. The bill explicitly references religious intolerance, but it would apply to all forms of discrimination. Such instruction would not need to be its own class, or uniform throughout schools and grades.

Adler recently took a trip to Albany to continue pushing the bill, a project he’s advocated for almost a year. The bill was formed last May by Adler with the purpose of incorporating hate crime education into the public school curriculum.

Adler said he was motivated to create this bill after witnessing and experiencing hate speech at his previous school, Rye Middle School.

“I experienced some really bad anti-Semitism and I had students saying things like ‘I wish your family was killed in the Holocaust, I wish Hitler killed all the Jews,’ doing the Nazi salute,” Adler said. He continued, “I also witnessed them say the n-word and really terrible slurs.”

The hate speech was not just anti-Semitic, as Adler described in what he said was one of the worst things he witnessed.

“Rye, where I live, is a very white town. There was a student who was one of the few African American kids in our grade, [who] got sexually touched and harassed and then the kid who did that put a bottle in his hood pretending to be the KKK and said, ‘Your kind is not welcome here.’”

Adler said that these acts were what led him to realize that many kids spreading hate don’t realize how damaging it is.

“Our country is built on an education system that fails to address the core issues of America and the core issues of racism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that are built into this country,”

Initially, Adler met with Senator Shelly Mayer, who represents District 37, and Peter Harckham, who represents District 40, but support grew as he met with 15 senators, eight of whom agreed to co-sponsor the bill.

Adler explained his lobbying strategy. He said, “It took a lot of emailing. I would send an email, if they didn’t respond I would send another email, if they didn’t respond to that email I’d call their office.”

He emphasized an important point raised by Senator Joseph Addabbo, who represents District 15.

“We need to strike while the iron is hot,” he said in reference to the laws in Florida reducing hate crime awareness in schools. “This is a civil rights issue as much as it is an education issue.”

The next step is raising awareness. Adler spoke of a social media initiative, as well as the importance of sharing around his petition, but he also stressed the need for people to reach out to their local senators.

Adler predicted a long battle ahead of him. He said, “It’s not gonna be an easy process. It’s going to be a long process, it might take multiple years. But right now we have to keep

This story was originally published on Tower on March 1, 2024.