Four civil rights groups requested the Department of Justice to send federal agents to a Texas school district accused of rampant discrimination and negligence toward Black students and students with disabilities.
The federal complaint filed by Texas Appleseed, Disability Rights Texas, National Center for Youth Law, and Texas Civil Rights Project alleges that the Bonham Independent School District (BISD) fostered a hostile environment toward Black students and students with disabilities that subjected them to ongoing disciplinary measures, including removing them from their traditional school environment and placing them in a disciplinary alternative program for students who commit specific disciplinary or criminal offenses.
According to a joint statement, the northern Texas district was deliberately indifferent toward the racial harassment Black students were subjected to and constantly refused students with disabilities access to accommodations necessary for their education.
The complaint was filed on behalf of two students identified as “C.J.” and “B.E.” whose experiences at Bonham High School were thoroughly documented in the filing.
The student referred to as “C.J.” in the complaint is a Black student with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dyslexia who qualified for special education. After he enrolled at Bonham High School, he was mostly referred to the disciplinary program the complaint described as a “one-size-fits-all program” that never provided him with the proper educational modifications to accommodate his disabilities.
He missed school 26 times from October 2022 to April 2023, sometimes due to mental health crises and illnesses, but he was only excused four times by the district.
The district ultimately sent C.J. to truancy court, where his school principal said he had “hundreds of absences, was not making progress in any of his classes, and would probably not graduate.”
A judge ordered him to drop out of BISD and enroll in a GED program, despite a probation order from an unrelated criminal charge that ordered C.J. to obtain his high school diploma and follow BISD rules. His grandmother told a judge about that probation order, but the judge merely dismissed them and told them to lawyer up, according to the complaint.
C.J. followed the judge’s order and dropped out of BISD. Two days later, he was arrested for violating his probation order.
He was allowed to sign a new probation order allowing him to re-enroll with BISD on several conditions, including that he must attend the disciplinary alternative program. The district graduated him last May, but during his time finishing school, he was still missing accommodations and transition services to help him move to secondary education.
As for the unchecked racial harassment within the district, the complaint notes several incidents that revealed how BISD ignored the racism toward several Black students.
The complainant, B.E. — a 14-year-old biracial student at Bonham High School since 2022 — attested that white students called him and other Black students the n-word, “cotton picker,” and “black monkey” numerous times. There were also several instances in which white administrators and teachers heard students using these slurs but simply ignored them.
B.E. was also reportedly subjected to harassment by the school resource officer who arrested him twice within two weeks in December 2023. The first time he was charged with felony indecency, which was dropped.
Then, 10 days later, that same SRO handcuffed and arrested B.E. in front of his peers for horseplaying on the bus with a white friend. His white friend spent only four weeks in the alternative program before returning to school.
However, the district charged B.E. with felony injury to a minor, detained him for four weeks, subjected him to a psychological evaluation, and sent him to the same disciplinary program C.J. was sent. He’s been there for more than a year.
Local news station KXII-TV spoke with the student, identified as B.E., who said he couldn’t get other students to stop using slurs against him.
“A bunch of people were saying the N-word. I got tired of it, to the point where everyone kept saying it and I said stop, and they just keep doing it,” he explained.
His mother also shared how she attempted to talk to her son about the discrimination from his white peers.
“No matter what they call you, no matter what they say to you, no matter all the hurtful things whether it an adult or child, anybody, you just have to take it, I’m sorry, son,” she said.
The complaint cites several civil rights violations based on how BISD treated C.J. and B.E. and requests the Justice Department to investigate the district and overhaul its policies and practices. It also seeks compensatory damages for C.J. and B.E. and for the district to return B.E. to his regular education program.
The Justice Department hasn’t commented on the complaint at this time, and Bonham ISD officials have yet to release a statement.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Bonham Independent School District, which is made up of five schools, had nearly 1,900 students enrolled in the 2022-2023 school year. The district doesn’t include racial demographic data on its website, but Census data for the town of Bonham revealed that nearly 79 percent of the town’s 10,746 residents in 2022 were white, and close to 13 percent were Black.
