A Black woman is taking legal action against a school district in northern Utah that hired her to investigate racial harassment at their schools, which district officials made impossible after they began discriminating against her, according to a fresh lawsuit.
Joscelin Thomas once served as a coordinator for the Davis School District. Her position was created in 2022 as part of a settlement agreement between the district and the Justice Department that mandated the district adopt a means to address racial harassment in their schools.
So, in the district’s newly-created Office of Equal Opportunity, Thomas was hired as a district coordinator to investigate and respond to complaints of racial harassment.
This followed a full probe in 2021 that discovered that Black and Asian American students in the district were overwhelmingly targeted and mistreated by white students. There was an inordinate number of instances documented over a five-year period that revealed that students were called the N-word and other racial slurs.
While Black students only make up about 1 percent of the district’s student population, which is composed of 74,000 students, reports show they were disciplined more harshly than their white counterparts. Even after years of data showed this to be true, the school district had done nothing to address the trend, according to investigators.
It was only until a 10-year-old Black student on the autism spectrum died by suicide after being mercilessly bullied by her classmates at Foxboro Elementary School that the district finally took action. That student, Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor, was the only Black student in her class. Her family filed a lawsuit against the district in which they asserted that kids regularly called Tichenor the N-word and teased her for being autistic.
The district awarded the family $2 million and confessed that district officials mistreated the girl after they were accused of responding poorly to…
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