The Davis School District has settled lawsuits brought on behalf of four Black students in the northern Utah’s Davis County who allege they were punished after reporting they were harassed based on their race.
Three of the students will receive $200,000 from the district after one year of litigation, and the family of one child, who is deceased, will receive $2 million.
In the most severe case, the victim of race-based bullying was a 10-year-old girl name Isabella “Izzy” Tichenor. Izzy died by suicide in 2021 after she was bullied relentlessly in her elementary school, and no adult in the building stepped in to stop.
The district agreed to pay her family $2 million in an effort to end a two-year civil lawsuit that alleged her constitutional rights were violated. But even with the award, Izzy’s family says they are still mourning her loss.
“Just because you win some money, [it] doesn’t compare to the child not being there,” Brittany Tichenor-Cox said at a press conference about the settlement.
In addition to the money, according to Tyler Ayres, the Tichenor family attorney, the district agreed to erect a statue of Izzy inside the library of the elementary school where she attended.
“It’s our hope that the next African-American student in this school and in this state will see someone who looks like them being celebrated in this statue of Izzy,” the lawyer said, before adding the family was pushing for $14 million to send a message to the community but decided to rest with proposals because it was the “right number for right now.”
Three young boys said they tried to talk to the administration at their school about the constant mistreatment and discrimination they received due to their race. However, officials at the predominantly white school — unidentified in court documents but thought to be a junior high school in the district — disregarded their outcry, even after federal investigators warned them to shape up and rework their policy on reporting racism, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
In addition to the three six-figure payouts that will come from taxpayer dollars, the district will release an apology to the parents who filed the complaints on behalf of their children in March 2022.
“I would like to extend my sincerest apologies to you, and most especially, to your three children for the unwelcome experiences they had while attending school in our district,” Davis Superintendent Dan Linford said in a statement released on Tuesday, Aug. 8. “I am grateful to you for bringing your children’s experiences to our attention.”
The district also released an update on its many changes to address systemic racism.
In 2021, the Department of Justice produced a report about the outrageous degree of bigotry toward African-American and Asian students in this particular school district. Their investigation revealed hundreds of anecdotes from Black students, who make up only 1 percent of the district’s 73,000 student body, that said they were called slaves, the N-word, and had been threatened to be lynched.
Students said they were afraid to come to class and felt like teachers and administrators would allow them to be mistreated, turning a blind eye. As a result, students simply became exhausted and stopped reporting incidents of racism that happened to them and believed their white teachers were condoning the behavior.
