A Colorado school district is facing a lawsuit filed by three families alleging that district officials and administrators failed to protect their Black and biracial children from numerous racial harassment and discrimination.
The lawsuit, obtained by Atlanta Black Star, names the Douglas County School District, its Board of Education, and Castle Rock Middle School principal John Veit as defendants.
In the complaint are details from several cases where these students were “regularly called the N-word, threatened with violence like lynchings and shootings, subjected to various racial and ethnic cleansing jokes, repeatedly called ‘monkey’ and similar degrading epithets, exposed to ridicule and other forms of harassment by their peers, and made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws.”
There was also the mention of a Snapchat group filled with more than 100 students who exchanged racist and discriminatory messages about minorities and marginalized groups.
That chat was the center of a complaint launched by former Castle Rock middle schooler Jeramiah Ganzy after he was added to it. School administrators never responded to the complaint. The suit alleges that Principal John Veit also neglected or refused to put a stop to the harassment even after it was reported to him.
After learning that Ganzy revealed the nature of this chat to the school, some students started threatening to lynch him, the complaint claims. Jeramiah’s family went before the school board, but no protections were established to shield Jeramiah or other minority students from the harassment.
Without any response from the school officials, the threats and harassment against Jeramiah became relentless, according to his mother, Lacey Ganzy. It got to the point where Ganzy withdrew Jeramiah from the school and moved away from Castle Rock.
Ganzy’s mother filed this suit alongside the parents of two other students who experienced discrimination within the district’s schools.
