“Peers taunted Black students by making monkey noises at them, touching and pulling their hair without permission, repeatedly referencing slavery and lynching and telling Black students ‘go pick cotton’ and ‘you are my slave,’” the department said. It found that the district had records of at least 212 reports of Black students being called a racial slur across 27 of its schools. The Justice Department began investigating the district in 2019. “The district pledges to correct these practices.” “They do not reflect the values of this community and the expectations of the district,” it said. In a statement, it said that it “takes these findings very seriously.” The Davis School District, Utah’s second largest, has more than 72,000 students, only about 1 percent of whom are Black or Asian American. “This agreement will help generate the institutional change necessary to keep Black and Asian American students safe.”
“Pervasive racial harassment and other forms of racial discrimination in public schools violate the Constitution’s most basic promise of equal protection,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. Under the terms of the settlement, the district agreed to create a new department to handle complaints of racial discrimination to train its staff members to identify and respond to complaints to teach students how to report harassment and to offer training to students, employees and parents to help them identify and prevent racial discrimination in its schools. The report was published last week as the Justice Department announced that it had reached a settlement with the district. Complaints about such treatment were frequently ignored or brushed off, leading the Justice Department to conclude that the district “was deliberately indifferent to the racially hostile climate in many of its schools.” The investigation, which focused on reports from 2015 to 2020, found more than 200 examples of racial harassment in the predominantly white Davis School District north of Salt Lake City, the Justice Department said.īlack students were disciplined more harshly and frequently than white students, the investigation found, and Black students were denied opportunities to form student groups. A school district in Utah ignored “serious and widespread” racial harassment for years, failing to respond to complaints from Black and Asian American students who were called racial slurs and physically assaulted by their peers, according to an investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
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