A Colorado school district is facing a lawsuit filed by three families alleging that district officials and administrators failed to protect their Black and biracial children from numerous racial harassment and discrimination.
The lawsuit, obtained by Atlanta Black Star, names the Douglas County School District, its Board of Education, and Castle Rock Middle School principal John Veit as defendants.
In the complaint are details from several cases where these students were “regularly called the N-word, threatened with violence like lynchings and shootings, subjected to various racial and ethnic cleansing jokes, repeatedly called ‘monkey’ and similar degrading epithets, exposed to ridicule and other forms of harassment by their peers, and made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws.”
There was also the mention of a Snapchat group filled with more than 100 students who exchanged racist and discriminatory messages about minorities and marginalized groups.
That chat was the center of a complaint launched by former Castle Rock middle schooler Jeramiah Ganzy after he was added to it. School administrators never responded to the complaint. The suit alleges that Principal John Veit also neglected or refused to put a stop to the harassment even after it was reported to him.
After learning that Ganzy revealed the nature of this chat to the school, some students started threatening to lynch him, the complaint claims. Jeramiah’s family went before the school board, but no protections were established to shield Jeramiah or other minority students from the harassment.
Without any response from the school officials, the threats and harassment against Jeramiah became relentless, according to his mother, Lacey Ganzy. It got to the point where Ganzy withdrew Jeramiah from the school and moved away from Castle Rock.
Ganzy’s mother filed this suit alongside the parents of two other students who experienced discrimination within the district’s schools.
“They need to admit where they went wrong,” Ganzy told CBS News after filing the suit. “Tell me how they’re going to fix the issue and what are they going to do for the students coming behind him.”
Alexis Clark, another plaintiff in the suit, told local news outlet KUSA that learning of her son’s treatment at school was disheartening.
“And just to know…that his life could be threatened at any point in time because someone just doesn’t like him because of his skin color,” Clark said.
The Douglas County School District serves more than 64,000 students. Nearly 72 percent of the district’s students are white while only 1.3 percent are Black despite a district report that shows that in the 2021-2022 school year, 41 percent of the Black students were disciplined compared to 16% of the white students.
The suit claims the district denied equal educational opportunities to the students involved, violating the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. The families who filed the complaint not only want compensatory damages that will be determined by a jury but also seek an overhaul in the school district’s policies and institute procedures to expedite investigations into allegations of racism and hate crimes.
