A report released by the FBI this week shows a 17 percent increase nationally in hate crimes from 2016 to 2017 and a nine percent increase in Massachusetts. The growing rate of hate crimes in the country has been exemplified by the recent incidents of hate speech and graffiti at Reading Memorial High and Hemenway Elementary in Framingham.

Thirty drawings of swastikas have been reported since May 2017 by Reading school officials, along with multiple incidents of anti-LGBT slurs and other anti-semitic epithets. At Hemenway Elementary, a 10-year-old Muslim girl found notes in locker that said “YOU’RE A TERRORIST” and “I WILL KILL YOU.” How do families and school officials keep students feeling safe in a country where the rate of hate crimes keeps going up?

Former State Secretary of Education Paul Reville told Boston Public Radio Thursday that it is time for the state to become more involved and for teachers and parents to use these incidents as teaching opportunities.

“I think it is time for the State Board of Education to begin taking a sharper more public stance on this,” Reville said. "This is a societal issue that’s showing up in schools, but the society as a whole has to join hands and come together for a solve here."

Reville worries that these incidents and other visible hate crimes could impact impressionable young kids, producing copycat offenders. He believes the best way to avoid this is by talking openly about hate speech and the effect it has on individuals and the community.

“This is a teachable moment,” Reville said. "It is a negative moment, but it is a moment that clever teachers will turn to their advantage, in terms of having children step back and think about certain historical issues, think about relationships between different groups and what identities mean, the role of race in our society, and beginning to have some difficult conversations that are typically avoided in American schools.

“I think this now gives cause for some of these conversations to happen earlier than they might otherwise have happened,” he continued.