Parents say Black students were beaten and spit on by white classmates


A group of parents is suing a Minnesota school system alleging that their Black children faced racist bullying and discrimination from students and staff, including racist slurs and physical attacks. One teacher allegedly cut off a student’s dreadlock and threw it in the trash, the parents say.

Kali Proctor, Katelyn Hansen, Roynetter Birgans and Desmond Gilbert are seeking monetary compensation and demanding systemic changes at Duluth Edison Charter Schools for the experiences their elementary and middle school-age children endured. The suit, filed in April 2019, details a culture of racism at the school’s Raleigh and North Star Academy campuses and school officials’ refusal to address it.


The lawsuit said that white students bit, punched, kicked, pinched and spit on Black students and repeatedly called them the N-word. The white classmates also taunted them, calling them “negro” or “monkey” and telling them they “look like what’s inside a toilet.”


In 2017, a white student at North Star Academy threatened to stab a Black kindergartner in the eye with a screwdriver because she looked “different,” the lawsuit said. White students allegedly pinched and kicked the girl, who is biracial, on several occasions. And, during one bus ride to school, an older white student punched the girl so hard, she had a bruise on her rib, the suit states.


According to the lawsuit, one Black student “was spit on so profusely by a white student that she had to change her clothes.”
“The white harassers received little to no punishment,” according to a statement from Public Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy firm also representing the plaintiffs “And black and biracial students are punished more harshly and more regularly than their white peers.”

In Minnesota, Black students are disparately punished and suspended eight times as often as white students, according to the state’s Department of Human Rights.
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