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School District Agrees To Pay $450K Settlement Over Racial Discrimination Against 3 Former Students
Racist school districts should be on high alert — it doesn’t pay to be shady.
The families of Jamal Welch, Elijah West and Tyrell Wells are all several hundred thousand dollars richer after University Place School District has opted to settle a lawsuit by young men and their parents that included allegations of racial discrimination.
According to the News Tribune reports the school district will pay the families a total of $450,000 to settle a lawsuit the young men and their parents filed in 2015. Legal documents filed by the plaintiffs, who are African-American, claim the three young men faced racial name-calling, discriminatory grading practices and other forms of harassment while they were students at Curtis High School in Washington State. The boys’ parents say when they complained to school officials about how their children were mistreated they were either ignored or rebuffed.
Documents filed in the lawsuit describe Curtis High as a toxic environment where the plaintiffs were regularly caled the “n-word” by other students and the boys had to focus on “surviving each and every school day without having a mental or emotional reaction.”
According to state education stats, under 10 percent of the more than 1,400 students at Curtis High are black.
One incident describes how Wells told a teacher that a racial slur had been written on his desk, “As time went on, he would erase the slur, then someone would re-write it,” documents claim.
In a written declaration to the court Welch spoke about the effects of what he experienced at Curtis:
“To this day, I have lingering stress and anxiety from my Curtis experience. While before I was easygoing and trusting of people, now I find that I hang back and analyze people before trusting them. I also am more defensive than I used to be, and feel like I need to justify or explain who I am since I learned at Curtis that people have stereotypes and biases against me.”
The legal documents also describe how West’s mom tried to help her son, who was being marked down for missing assignments that he’d turned in, by electronically scanning his assignments and emailing them to the teacher before they were due, only to have the assignments still be marked as missing, according to court documents.
Another disturbing incident described in the legal documents recounts how a teacher, Karen Macy, wrote her address on the board during a lesson on giving directions in sign language. When students teased her, joking that they might egg her house if they knew her home address, she responded with words to the effect that “no one would do that, except for (Wells,) because he’s black,” according to court documents.
Macy resigned from her position in 2014.
While the settlement speaks volumes to US, the school district will walk away from the lawsuit without admitting any wrongdoing because the legal agreement states that it’s a settlement of disputed claims, not an admission of liability by the school district. The settlement agreement also bars either side from commenting about the case to the media.
Welch, Wells and West are all over 18 now and have left the school district.
Do you think $450,000 is enough? Too much? How many of you experienced things like this at your schools?
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