North Carolina school district tracked dozens of incidents in one year involving threats, violence and disputes between students over racism and President Donald Trump.
Orange County school officials recorded 70 incidents at the district’s middle schools and high schools during the 2016-2017 school year that involved racially or politically charged disturbances between students, reported WRAL-TV.
The school board reviewed a report on the incidents in May in closed session, and the TV station requested the document after learning of its existence.
The district released the five-page report with numerous redactions — including 16 incidents that are completely redacted — intended to protect student privacy
An assistant principal found graffiti in May threatening to “kill all n*ggers,” as well as swastikas, scrawled on the walls inside a boys’ bathroom at Cedar Ridge High School.
A teacher at the same school heard a student yell “white power” a few months earlier as students boarded a school bus, but she was unable to see which student — and she went inside and found a swastika scratched into a desk in her classroom.
A student at C.W. Stanford Middle School announced in the cafeteria that Trump “was going to deport all blacks back to Africa since he was president.”
“You are going to get deported,” a student told a classmate, who was so upset that student went home early.
Four students chanted “build a wall” within earshot of Hispanic classmates the day after the 2016 election at Gravelly Hill Middle School, and the report also noted an Orange High School student drove to school with a Trump flag on his truck, which he carried around the parking lot while wearing a Trump mask.
A parent complained to Orange High School officials a few days later that a teacher made a negative comment about Trump voters, and a student on a C.W. Stanford Middle School bus called Trump voters “white crackers.”
Other incidents involved disputes over the Confederate flag, which was banned last August, along with swastikas and Ku Klux Klan imagery, before the 2017-2018 school year began.
The school board asked for an accurate count of issues related to the Confederate flag, racism and the 2016 election, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence, and the district’s executive director of schools was assigned to collect the data.
“This wasn’t about the district hiding this information,” said superintendent Todd Wirt . “It was about protecting the students that were on the particular document and providing our board with accurate information to help them make a really difficult decision.”
Image by Brett Levin via Flickr and a CC license