A Utah school district is under fire after a federal civil rights investigation found that the complaints on racial harassment were deliberately ignored.
The Justice Department called out the Davis School District, which is located in Farmington, Utah, for their disturbing pattern. There was a settlement agreement reached over the issue.
Apparently, the DOJ has been investigating the district since July 2019, CNN reported.
The complaints included reports of Black students being called the n-word, told “you are my slave” by other students, and that their skin was dirty or “looked like feces.”
Asian students were also called racial slurs and told to “go back to China.”
The school district admitted that it had received 212 complaints in which Black students were called the n-word across 27 of its schools between 2015-2020. However, officials frequently ignored the complaints or dismissed them.
Other times the school would tell Black and Asian students “not to be so sensitive or made excuses for harassing students by explaining that they were ‘not trying to be racist,” the DOJ report states.
Chris Williams, a spokesman for the Davis School District, says the district feels “sorry for any student who felt this is not the place to be.”
“We have a lot of work to do. We are not happy with what we read. We’d like to think that it is not us, but it is us. We really have to work hard,” Williams told KSTU.
The Davis School District signed a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice and has agreed to make numerous changes, including the creation of more training for staff to investigate and respond to racial harassment, creating a new equal opportunity department, and developing an electronic system to receive and manage reports of racial harassment and discrimination.
“Pervasive racial harassment and other forms of racial discrimination in public schools violate the Constitution’s most basic promise of equal protection,” said Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the agency’s civil rights division. “This agreement will help generate the institutional change necessary to keep Black and Asian-American students safe. We look forward to Davis demonstrating to its students and school community that it will no longer tolerate racial discrimination in its schools.”
