Feds fault Albany schools in race-bullying response
The Albany school district inappropriately handled a race-bullying incident by removing the victim from the school instead of her harassers, the U.S. Department of Education has found.
The eighth-grade honors student, who is biracial, was repeatedly harassed by white classmates at Hackett Middle School in March 2012, according to a federal complaint filed by her parents. The students who bullied the girl mockingly donned Ku Klux Klan hoods, asked how much her parents had paid to adopt her and compared her skin color to theirs in Spanish class comparison exercises, the document also states.
After a group of students threatened her for being a "snitch," the girl was so scared she would be beaten that she hid in a bathroom and used a cellphone to call her parents, who rushed to pick her up, according to the complaint. School officials offered to solve the problem by promoting the girl into ninth grade, three months before the end of the school year. The girl, whom the Times Union is not naming because of her age and because she was a victim of bullying, is now finishing her sophomore year at Albany High School, a year ahead of her peers.
In a response sent earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights concluded that race-based harassment had occurred and that district officials should have recognized that. The department also found that the district did not appropriately discipline the harassers or provide a viable remedy.
Read more at http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Feds-fault-Albany-schools-in-race-bullying-4555321.php