Racial harassment in the Davis School District in Utah is so severe that the U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene, but that has not stopped the blatant racism Black students deal with daily, according to a new lawsuit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
Nicole Sieger says her son has faced numerous racist encounters since the DOJ found out the district consistently ignored hundreds of reports of racial harassment for years. Sieger said her son has been called a “cotton picker” and the N-word by students and racially stereotyped by teachers and administrators over the past several months.
“Over this last school year, my son has been the target of certain faculty and administrators in his school,” Sieger said in a statement. “Though I have tried to deal with the school and school district directly to stop the targeting of my son, I found that the end result was an attitude of ‘What has happened to your son has happened and there is nothing we can do to fix it now.’”
Sieger said a white student slapped her son in the face after he told the student to be quiet during a school assembly. Sieger and her attorneys allege Cassie Grether, a white teacher who saw the incident, did not punish the other student.
Instead, she gave Seiger’s son, identified in the lawsuit as S.S., an unsatisfactory grade in conduct because he tapped the white student on the shoulder, thereby instigating the fracas. The white student, on the other hand, was never spoken to nor received any punishment, according to the complaint.
The ninth grader was also falsely accused by administrators and school staff, according to Seiger’s lawsuit. In February, he was asked to locate classmates missing from class. S.S. found the other students in the bathroom using illegal drugs.
When he reported it to a teacher, he was accused of selling the drugs to the students. The school secretary, Tracy Nolan, searched his bag, and she did not find anything, but school officials did not search the students he saw using the drugs, the suit claims.
